Elon Musk wants big rigs to trade their diesel for electrons. Last night, the Tesla CEO unveiled his hotly anticipated truck (and decided to throw the announcement of a new $200,000 super car in for good measure). The Verge has a nine-minute highlight reel of the event, in case you’d like to watch the grand unveil yourself.
The real news here isn’t the car, even if it will go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 1.9 seconds—it’s the electric tractor-trailer, which has been the source of much speculation since Musk announced its development last summer. To hear him speak, you would be compelled to think that this is the future of trucking. Or at least it will be when it launches, which is expected to be in 2019—though the firm isn’t exactly known for punctuality.
Frankly, it sounds too good to be true: the claim is that it will go 500 miles on a charge, hit 60 miles per hour three times faster than a regular truck when fully loaded, power up a 5 percent gradient at 65 miles per hour, drive itself most of the time using Autopilot—and cost just $1.26 a mile to run, versus $1.51 for a diesel. (Those running costs could actually be lower, too, if the trucks were platooned, one behind the other, to cut drag.)
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