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Although the exact load on the day was not shared, the event organisers have previously stated that the average loads during the trial have been around 31.8 tonnes (70,000 lbs).
Without the load size, this is all pretty meaningless. If you're going to talk avg load size, then you need to talk avg distances per charge/day.
Zero load, 53 MPH, 20 hours of driving, absolute flat elevation, zero wind or precip and maybe this thing could do this. Nothing Tesla says about this truck is worth believing given how much they've lied in the past. And there's absolutely no chance Pepsi "leaked" one of these dashboard without express permission from Tesla.
I disagree that it's that big of a deal. The real sticking point with autonomous driving is whether vehicles can actually complete the route successfully. Charging and range can be fixed with more batteries as semis have lots of capacity for weight and space.
The amount of goods that can be shipped and how much it costs to ship them is a massive part of this.
Vehicles have weight restrictions in a lot of regions. Everything you have to put into creating locomotion takes away from the transportation capacity. If the transportation capacity is too low, the investment into non-fossil fuel transportation of goods won't be made as rapidly by companies.
AFAIK a truck driver can only drive within a 14 hour window. Since this run seemed to take a lot longer than 14 hours, I'm guessing this might only be feasible if the truck gets handed off to a second driver?
Lots of 2-person teams out there that try to keep the rig pulling 24/7.
Also lmao at the dude pointing out traffic laws being from the DMV instance.
It's an unfortunate acronym for the area I'm in 😂
I commute to that area every day from about an hour west, I know all too well what you mean 😬
Just in case anyone was curious about the speed to make this happen: 14 hrs driving at 123 km/h (76 mph) = 1732 km.
Not impossible but it's unlikely this was done in 14 hours and they probably swapped out drivers to achieve this.
What's the speed limit for lorries where this was done? Because in a lot of places it's going to be less than 123 km/h.
American truck drivers are more like airplane pilots than European truck drivers.
They has to charge at some point. There was more than 1 driver.
You can see in the article they were driving 60mph almost the whole time they weren’t charging
Was it being towed at the time?
Strategic quick charging.
That's the real question. Was this the first Tesla Semi to drive without needing to be towed? That would be the impressive part of the story. 😆