Jay Leno Test Drives the Tesla Semi
When it comes to Jay Leno, you probably know him for one of two things. Either you know him as the former late night show host, or you know him as a connoisseur of all things motor vehicles. Tesla was interested in his opinion as the latter, and as such let him drive a Tesla Semi, giving us all a greater insight into how the truck performs.
Details
The news comes from the YouTube Channel “Jay Leno’s Garage. If you have the time, the 42-minute video is a good watch.
Though Leno asks some hard-hitting questions, the Tesla employees, including Tesla Semi Chief Dan Priestly, sometimes mitigated their information like a politician would. When asked about the Semi’s weight, Priestly went on to speak about why Tesla expanded into the commercial vehicle manufacturing business:
“So when we launched our factory in Nevada, our Gigafactory that supports all our powertrains to get built for our cars in Fremont, our co-founder and CTO at the time, JB Straubel, said it doesn’t make any sense that we should be shipping all of these parts for electric cars on diesel trucks. We should do electric trucks.”
For those who do not have the time to enjoy the full video, here are some unveiled key points:
- The Semi runs at 800,000 volts, compared to a typical Tesla car running at 400 volts. The auxiliary machines, such as the radio and windshield wipers, run at 12 volts.
- The video introduced a low roof model Semi, which Priestly said, when pulled by the larger Semi, leads to approximately 67,000 pounds in gross vehicle weight. While we do not have numbers, we infer that the larger Semi is 37,000 pounds and the smaller one 30,000.
- The Semi senses its gross vehicle weight and adjusts its power accordingly, so drivers will feel less of a dragging effect when pulling cargo.
- Jay Leno compared the turning radius of the vehicle to that of a Model Y, a much smaller vehicle. This is anecdotal, but we thought it was worth mentioning.
Conclusion
Tesla has been mostly tight-lipped on the specifications of the Semi, so talking with Jay Leno and letting some information about it go public may have a positive bias, but the video footage does not lie: the Semi travels uphill and brakes with grace.
Jay Leno says that this may be the start of the biggest revolution since trucks first replaced trains as the primary method of transporting cargo. That is quite a tall order to fill, but we hope that we will be able to provide financing for these technological titans once they become more commonplace.
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