[ad_1]
- Tesla has postponed its semi-truck production to 2022 because the availability of battery cells is limited.
- The company’s new 4680 cells are nearing production but are not finished at the moment as several projects depend on the issue.
- The completion of the Berlin-Brandenburg and Austin plants and the readiness for 4680 cells are slowing down Tesla’s short-term projects.
It’s been a while since we last heard of the Tesla Semi, which is said to be the automaker’s first non-home-owner model and certainly one of the first to be announced battery-electric models in its weight class. In fact, the Semi was first shown in late 2017 – a different era in the EV industry, you might say – powered by four electric motors that were carried over from the Model 3. The truck promised 0 to 60 start times in five seconds and a range of 500 miles, later than 621 miles. The Semi also promised charging speeds that would allow the truck to be juiced in just 30 minutes via a megacharger with a range of 400 miles in just 30 minutes. The upright but sleek cab with a drag coefficient of just 0.36 also offers a central seating position for the driver and no exterior mirrors – two things that made real truckers more than a little skeptical at the time.
Updates to the semi were rarer than usual from Tesla, which is perhaps understandable as the Model S owners weren’t exactly saving for one as prototype trucks continued to pop up in Fremont when Tesla built a separate facility in Nevada to house the trucks themselves to produce .
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the timeline of Tesla’s semi-truck, it was originally planned to start production in 2019 but has been delayed several times, the last mention being in an email to Elon Musk staff in June 2020, in which it was claimed that it was “previously in limited production”. He did not provide any evidence to support this claim. The main topic of the email, however, was that it was time to get the model ready for series production, but it did not offer a specific target date. An additional company application in 2020 aimed to start deliveries in 2021, which have now been postponed to 2022 from this week onwards.
The Semi finally got an official update this week.
“We believe we will stay on track to build our first Model Y vehicles in Berlin and Austin in 2021,” the automaker said in an SEC filing this week. “The pace of each production ramp-up is influenced by the successful introduction of many new product and manufacturing technologies, ongoing challenges related to the supply chain, and regional approvals. With a better focus on these factories and global challenges in the supply chain due to the limited availability of battery cells and cells, we have postponed the start of the semi-truck program to 2022. We’re also making progress on the industrialization of Cybertruck, which is currently slated for Austin production after the Model Y. “
With the announcement of the semi-truck’s delay, Tesla also highlighted a related issue that applies to its passenger car models, which should receive the more advanced 4680 cells. First shown during the company’s battery day last September, the cells were for the Tesla Model S Plaid Plus until that version of the sedan was abruptly canceled earlier this summer. The new table design, conceived as part of a structural battery pack, should offer a serious improvement in range while being half the cost to manufacture and overall lighter.
The 4680 cells are perhaps more important for the start of semi-truck production than for Model S production, which can stay on the line without them. But the 4680 cells also go to the Model Y.
“We have successfully validated the performance and lifespan of our 4680 cells manufactured at our Kato, California facility,” the company said in the same statement. “We are nearing the end of manufacturing validation at Kato: field quality and yield are at a sustainable level and our focus is now on improving the 10% of manufacturing processes that are currently hampering production performance. Although we have made significant progress, we still have work to do before we can reach mass production. Internal crash tests of our structural package architecture with a one-piece front casting were successful. “
Tesla had been expected to announce that some progress had been made with the 4680 cells without giving a more precise schedule for their mass production, so this week’s statement may not change expectations about the cells too much. But Tesla doesn’t quite have the lead it once had in class 8 battery-electric trucks, and the 4680 cell issue has become an odd, high-priority topic for stock market analysts.
If Tesla currently has an even bigger bottleneck problem, it is the completion of the Berlin-Brandenburg and Austin plants. Without these facilities, one of which was entangled in admitting issues that Tesla pointed out earlier this summer, the 4680 cell readiness issue may be secondary.
When do you think the Tesla semitrailer will actually hit the road? let us know in the comments.
This content is created and maintained by a third party and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may find more information on this and similar content at piano.io
[ad_2]
