Tesla was spotted using his mobile service fleet trying to fix a new Tesla semi-electric truck that broke down in California.
Tesla unveiled the production version of its Tesla Semi Class 8 electric truck and delivered the first units last month.
PepsiCo took delivery of the first Tesla Semi Trucks. Within weeks of delivering the first truck, PepsiCo said it already had 36 Tesla semi-trucks in service.
Since deliveries to Pepsi, sightings of the electric truck on public roads have increased significantly, and one of them was even spotted being towed by another truck – raising reliability concerns.
As we reported at the time, this shouldn’t be a big problem for the time being. The production program is still in its infancy and some failures are to be expected. Indeed, reliability is extremely important for commercial vehicles as they lose money when not in use and as such it is important to track progress on this front. But we would need more data over a longer period of time before we actually have reliability concerns.
Now we have another data point, as another PepsiCo-owned Tesla semi-truck was stranded on the side of the road in Modesto, California this week:
Interestingly, Tesla was first spotted trying to fix the truck with a mobile service technician:
Before we began delivering the truck in December, we reported that Tesla had already begun building a team to service Tesla semi-trucks in California, including mobile technicians who travel to customers.
Electrek’s take
Obviously, I don’t share the concerns of the Twitter poster, which openly admits to being an investor in Hyliion, a maker of hybrid hydrogen trucks, a segment of the truck industry that I think will benefit from all-electric trucks like the Tesla Semi will be swallowed up in the next few years.
Again, I agree it’s important to keep an eye on these issues as they continue to spread, but so far we’ve seen two broken Tesla semi-trucks out of a fleet said to be at least 36 trucks, and we’re still early in program.
Electric trucks have the potential to require less maintenance and be more reliable than internal combustion engine trucks because an electric powertrain has fewer moving parts.
But it’s still a new technology used in semi-trucks. It will take some getting used to.
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