Tesla now plans electric semi truck volume production in ‘late 2025’

Tesla has updated its timeline for Tesla Semi, its all-electric semi truck, with now a plan to reach volume production in “late 2025.”

The Tesla Semi program has seen some significant delays – even since it has officially entered production.

It was first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to come to market in 2020, but it only officially entered production in late 2022.

Despite entering production more than a year ago, the program has been very limited.

In October 2023, we learned that Tesla had only built about 70 Tesla Semi trucks and the company was using them internally and with one main customer: PepsiCo.

In January 2023, Tesla announced an expansion of Gigafactory Nevada to build the Tesla Semi in volume.

However, more than a year later, we haven’t heard much about the effort.

Yesterday, with the release of its Q1 2024 financial results, Tesla gave a rare update on the production plans for Tesla Semi.

Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering, commented:

We’re finalizing the engineering of Semi to enable like a super cost-effective high-volume production with our learnings from our fleet and our pilot fleet and Pepsi fleet, which we are expanding this year marginally. In parallel, as we showed in the shareholders’ deck, we have started construction on the factory in Reno. Our first vehicles are planned for late 2025 with external customers starting in 2026.

The “shareholders’ deck” referenced by Moravy is this picture that Tesla released:

This shows some grading outside Gigafactory Nevada for a new construction project for Tesla Semi.

Electrek’s Take

Tesla Semi has to be Tesla’s longest vehicle program from inception to production yet – or volume production, at least.

But what I find most interesting is that Tesla unveiled the “production version” of the Tesla Semi in December 2022 and yet, it now says that it is using data from current pilot programs to change the Tesla Semi for volume production in late 2025.

Therefore, the “production version” unveiled two years ago was really more Tesla Semi 0.5.