Tesla Semi Goes on Tour

The long-delayed Tesla Semi was trotted out for press last week, when one prototype was tasked with delivering some Superchargers.

Its been a wild week for Tesla, with deadly Autopilot crashes making headlines on both coasts and the revelation that CEO Elon Musk fathered twins with one of his employees (bringing the Lil’ Musky count to 9, so far) coming just ahead of news that he was backing out of his $44B purchase of Twitter, so you can kind of forgive them for trying to generate some good news for Tesla investors.

With that in mind, the EV maker took the opportunity to show off its long-delayed, all-electric Tesla Semi both in-person at Laguna Seca and online, in a 13-second video posted to Twitter. The trucks shown seem like recent prototypes, and were seen delivering a pair of pre-assembled Supercharging modules, each with four stalls.

As we’ve noted before, the Tesla Semi isn’t in production yet, but tests like these are valuable for giving the company an opportunity to gather valuable data ahead of production and to give the marketing a little something extra to tease.

While just one Semi isn’t going to have a big impact on the number of stations that Tesla is installing globally every day, it does mean that the company could use them to expand and accelerate their installation. Prefabricated Superchargers like these can be produced right at the plant and then quickly transported for easy installation, rather than the more conventional method of installing and connecting everything on-site.

Tesla Semi samples have been making a bit of a tour lately, making appearances beside a Tesla Cybertruck at Michigan International Speedway during an SAE International competitive event. Also, earlier in June, there was a video of a Tesla Semi spotted on a California highway. There is still no official production start date for the Tesla Semi, but some predict that it would begin in 2023 at the earliest.

SOURCE | IMAGES: TESLA, VIA INSIDE EVS.