re: Tesla Semi could be ‘the biggest catalyst in trucking in decades’

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I have no doubt it will happen. I just don't see it happening in any of our lifetimes.

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Ten years ago, did you think that every single person you see would have a touchscreen computer in their pocket by now?

And newsflash: THERE ARE ALREADY FULLY-AUTONOMOUS ELECTRIC VEHICLES ON THE ROAD TODAY. We are still within your lifetime, right?

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It's not near as simple as any of you kids think.

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The hardest parts will be political/legal/regulatory.

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You're talking about a fundamental shift in a transportation system that spans an entire continent.

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They use the same roads..

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Even if Tesla started full production tomorrow you'd still have years (probably decades) of road reconstruction,

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The roads don't need to be reconstructed to accommodate electric trucks, they need to be reconstructed because they're falling apart.

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hundreds of power plants to build

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Our power capacity has been increasing forever, and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. I think you're really overestimating the extra "surge" that will be required to power more electric vehicles. It will be a lot, but our capacity will scale with the demand because it has to. There will be money to be made there, so it will be done.

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and then building up the infrastructure to charge the things every few hundred miles.

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Luckily, we already have a fairly robust infrastructure for transporting electricity.


Yeah, it's going to take a long, long time to replace EVERY truck, if that ever happens. But the reality is that within MOST of our lifetimes, autonomous electric trucks will become more economically viable than human-driven diesel trucks.