https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-09/tesla-semi-skepticism-lingers-months-after-musk-s-first-delivery
The combative CEO has yet to silence those harboring doubts about his newest model.
10 February 2023 at 1:41 am MYT
Elon Musk has long relished trolling those who’ve doubted him and Tesla.
In 2018, he vowed to send “short shorts” to hedge fund manager David Einhorn, who’d been betting against Tesla’s stock. A couple years later, the company actually listed satin trunks as a gag gift for sale on its website.
Musk heard “various forms of ‘you’re a fraud,’” he told the crowd at Tesla’s Model Y unveiling in 2019. His defiant retort: “You can drive that fraud!”
The Tesla chief executive officer’s latest reveling had to do with the Semi, the heavy-duty truck that took five years to go from prototype to production. “Some people have said this was impossible,” Musk
said during a Semi manufacturing event in Nevada last month. “But, uh, you can drive it.”
The reasons for this proverbial victory lap were clear. Weeks earlier, Tesla handed off its first Semis to PepsiCo, which took delivery of 15 of the big rigs for its massive Frito-Lay facility in Modesto, California. The purpose of the late January event in Nevada was to announce a $3.6 billion investment to expand the use of Tesla’s existing factory near Reno to build more battery cells, as well as Semi trucks.
While those were causes for celebration — something Musk can afford to do again, the way Tesla shares have soared this year — there’s still a lot of uncertainty as to just how meaningful the Semi will be to Tesla’s business. I had a lot of questions for the company when I drove out to Modesto to see the trucks in person last month. While I was able to climb into the Semi’s spacious cab and its centered driver’s seat, test drives were off limits.
Tesla staffers on site didn't comment. PepsiCo representatives confirmed they’d taken delivery of all 15 trucks ordered as part of a $30.8 million project I wrote about in November — the one for which California’s Air Resources Board picked up half the check — but had little else to share about the product.
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