Tesla Semi Performance Results Revealed!

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
On today's episode, Tesla Semi embarrassesits electric competition, China prepares their roads
for self driving cars, and Teslais looking to hire a pre production manager
for their Tesla Bot. The TeslaSemi has finished a massive real world testing
phase in the Run on Less Event, and the results show off the vehicle's

(00:20):
capabilities better than any advertisement could.Organized by the North American Council for Freight
Efficiency, the Run on Less Eventis a challenge intended to gather data on
the current efficacy of electric Class eighttransport trucks and compare them to each other
and of course, more traditional dieselpowered tractors. PepsiCo entered three of their

(00:42):
new Tesla Semis from their fleet inCalifornia, and over the last couple of
weeks we've been seeing the results ofsmaller parts of the challenge, but even
those snapshots of the test have greatlyimpressed industry observers, and now that the
course is finished, the results arestaggering. During the most grueling day of
the competition, a Pepsi COO TeslasSemi started with a full charge and moved

(01:07):
a total of one thousand, seventysix miles, stopping for only three quick
seven hundred and fifty kilowat fast chargingsessions. The first and last sessions were
very short, only able to bringthe Semi up to forty seven percent and
fifty two percent charge, respectively,but the charge at midday corresponded with the
driver's half hour break and so wasable to charge the vehicle up to eighty

(01:30):
nine percent of its total capacity,and all of this with a full load
of about seventy thousand pounds more onthat in a minute. The Semi was
able to keep up this marathon duelargely to its regenerative braking capability. When
letting off the accelerator, the Semi'smotor reverses, slowing the vehicle and using

(01:51):
that resistance to generate electricity to extendthe charge of the batteries during some of
the hillier parts of its run.During the event, the Semi was able
to more or less keep the samecharge it had from beginning to end,
coupled with its ability to fast charge. The only entrant to demonstrate that ability,
and Tesla was the clear front runnerfor the run on less competition,

(02:13):
and we do mean clear. Theclosest competitor for the whole event was what
EV's Nikola trey Beev, which wasable to travel about two hundred and fifty
five miles per day, less thanhalf of Pepsi COO's five hundred and seventy
four miles per day, and itonly gets worse from there with the entrance
from more traditional companies like Freightliner's ECascadia and Volvo's VNR Electric, only able

(02:38):
to get about one hundred and eightymiles per day each. Now, let's
talk about load, because the competitiondidn't pull any punches there. Earlier we
said that Tesla Semi pulled about seventythousand pounds the whole time. This is
about the industry's standard, the limitfor Class eight vehicles being around eighty two
thousand pounds of gross vehicle weight duringoperation. Every entrant had to pull this

(03:01):
type of load if they could manageit, and the Tesla Semi had zero
issues managing it. In order tostay efficient, tractor operators typically shuffle loads
around as opposed to simply delivering.They start the day with a full trailer,
deliver it to a location, andswap loads grabbing another product meant to
be brought to the next location onthe route. This way the fleet maximizes

(03:23):
the amount of time spent with aload, which saves on both money and
the driver's mental health. Ask anyof your trucker friends if they enjoy hauling
an empty trailer to see what wemean. So, just to sum it
up, for this entire competition,Pepsi cost Tesla Semis were the only trucks
in the lineup that performed to industrystandard. You can see why Pepsi is

(03:45):
very happy with the results. Andlike we said earlier, there's really no
better way to showcase a vehicle's capabilitiesthan a competition like this. Tesla can
have their engineers or Elon himself standon stage and say that the Semi is
a match for any diesel truck onthe market, but it can't compare to
the whole industry watching this bright blueelectric tractor do exactly what a diesel rig

(04:09):
does, but with no fuel costswell different fuel costs, and with California's
government set to phase out internal combustiontruck sales by twenty thirty six, this
competition finished just in time. PepsiCOO has already said that they were looking
to replace their whole delivery fleet withTesla Semis, but after this event,
you can bet Tesla's going to havea hard time filling orders. China is

(04:32):
looking to prepare their roadways for selfdriving vehicles, and their solution to the
problem of mixing manually piloted traffic withself driving units could literally pave the way
for Tesla's FSD rollout in the country. Tesla has been working hard to prepare
for the potential debut of their fullself driving beta, something that is still

(04:54):
hanging in the air at last check. Tesla has been setting up a China
based operations team that would be interfacingwith local government authorities to help the process
along. China has some very strictdriving laws that don't yet have any provisions
for autonomous driving vehicles, and sowhether or not Tesla's FSD program is able
to operate on Chinese roads depends entirelyon how quickly their regulations can be updated.

(05:19):
However, it's not like Chinese authoritiesare against the idea. In fact,
they've already been testing an entire infrastructuresystem for self driving vehicles. Back
in early July, the government ofSuzhou in the Jiangsu province began upgrading a
local stretch of road to become asmart expressway. At the moment, this

(05:40):
fifty six kilometer stretch of road ismostly a laboratory filled with over two hundred
and seventy sets of laser and millimeterwave radars, cameras, and antennas to
assist in metric gathering. Eventually,however, it looks like this sort of
solution might be used across the country, solving one of the biggest issues for
self driving vehicles on North American roads, mixing with manual and pedestrian traffic.

(06:05):
People tend to act in erratic waysthat are difficult for automated systems to predict,
so a dedicated roadway sounds like itwould be a great option. Currently,
the road is marked as being usableonly four Level four autonomous driving vehicles,
which Tesla's FSD is not only consideredabout a level two. Currently,

(06:25):
there are only a couple of companieseven testing Level four systems, and only
in low speed environments. However,China's testing of their current stretch of road
requires the use of systems that canhandle lane changes, ramp entry, and
overtaking, all of which are alreadyin the FSD's capabilities, So who knows
With some work China might relax theirrequirements for the use of this expressway.

(06:48):
It's a great solution to traffic mixingwith non self driving cars and seems like
a much safer route, if abit expensive, Creating a whole new bunch
of infrastructure just for autonomous vehicles isdefinitely not something you'd see in North America
at least. A new job openingposted by Tesla indicates that the Optimist robot
project is moving on to some preproduction work, or proto production as they're

(07:13):
calling it. Proto Production Supervisor HumanoidActuators Teslabot reads the title of the job
listing the position will be a leadershipone, having a team of fifteen technicians
to organize, but also working withthe Actuator program manager to build plans for
Tesla's internal actuator project. Back inJuly, we got a quick explanation from

(07:33):
CEO Elon Musk about what had beenholding up the project during the Q two
earnings call. He explained that whilethe initial tests with Optimists had attempted to
use off the shelf parts, theteam quickly discovered that they had to design
their own actuators as the off theshelf units weren't sensitive enough, and then
in September we got our first lookat the results of that work, with

(07:55):
a video showing some extremely impressive andintricate work being done by one of the
company's active bots. Actuators are themotors, the drive units, and gear
train of any robotic hardware, soit makes sense that Tesla would be putting
a lot of effort into developing stateof the art units for their bots.
Actuators in the joints and manipulation pointslike the hands, have to be finely

(08:18):
tuned to avoid juttering shaky motion.So posting a job like a production supervisor
whose entire role will be to createand fine tune the process by which these
actuators will eventually be mass produced isan indication that Tesla is close enough to
being finished with the design of theiractuators that they can begin that sort of
planning. But this job will notbe easy, even by Tesla standards.

(08:43):
Actuators are very precise, finely tunedparts, and in a robot like Optimists,
many of the smaller parts of thegear train will be quite tiny.
It's also unclear exactly how Tesla planson scaling up the production of their actuators.
They could attempt to automate the process, which carries its own challenges,
or they could stick with what they'vebeen doing up until now, which is

(09:03):
using highly skilled technicians to hand makeeach one. It's very likely that the
company intends on automating at least partof this process, but exactly how they
achieve this will be the job ofwhoever lands this production supervisor gig. From
the job description, it looks likeTesla is focusing on streamlining the current process
while looking for opportunities to prepare forlarger scale production, so it'll likely be

(09:28):
some time before we see a workingproduction line of these units.