@Paper Chaser : The semi is not limited to short haul, I have no idea why you would claim that. A 500 mile range model is just about filling a long haul driver's legal hours. One charging break would make it way beyond - no truck driver can legally drive over 1000 miles in a day. A legal limit is about 660 miles (11 hours x 60mph average). Chargers will roll out once the trucks start being made. Just like the supercharger network didn't exist until the cars did, they aren't going to unveil a bunch of megachargers for trucks that don't exist yet. And trucks have much more defined routes than cars, it's super simple to figure out where to put the chargers to make them the most effective.
So 500 miles of range (assuming Tesla isn't optimistic about the range claim and there's perfect charger placement exactly at the end of the semi's range) is about 25% less daily miles driven than a similar ICE truck. That's a massive difference in efficiency in a business where 1% fuel economy gains are a pretty big deal. Then the truck has to charge on a very specific Mega Charger for unknown hours at an unknown cost? Even if all of those assumptions hold up, none of the renders that I've seen show a sleeper cab, so where does the driver get to rest if they're not returning to a central depot?
The body looks larger than it is. The back couple of feet are just aero fairings:
They can probably add a sleeper without too much radical engineering, but that only adds weight to an already heavy cab, which reduces the freight efficiency. This isn't insurmountable stuff on a long enough timeline, but all of these things represent hurdles for the Tesla Semi to gain wide adoption, or to become viable as long haul trucks. It's not just about battery tech, or charging networks. There are legitimate issues with batteries for duty cycles involving heavy work for long periods of time. All of the legacy truck makers have been working on battery trucks for the same amount of time as Tesla. But they're also hedging bets with other technologies as well like Hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen combustion in ICEs, alternative fuels, etc because they are likely to be better for certain applications than batteries. Or at least represent an easier intermediate step. We've lived in a world with multiple fuels for different tasks for the last 100 years or so, and I don't think that general theme is likely to change. The future of work isn't going to have a single solution for fuel/propulsion. What works for short haul in CA may fail miserably for long haul in cold climates and vice versa. What works for city buses might not work for dump trucks. "Add more batteries" isn't always the answer, especially as we're struggling to make enough batteries for the few BEVs we already have. Is it better to allocate 700-1000kwh of battery capacity resources to a single semi, or divide it among 2-3 electric city buses, or 7-10 personal BEVs, or 50 PHEVs, or 500 regular hybrids?
And to be clear, a lot of these issues are present in all of the BEV semi trucks, not just the Tesla. But Tesla specifically has some obstacles to overcome that the other truck makers really don't (like supporting infrastructure, relationships and in depth knowledge of their customers' needs, etc). Stuff like that doesn't get talked about or thought about very much outside of the commercial sector, but it absolutely matters to the people writing checks for new semis.
Again, there's interest in the Tesla offering just like all of the others. I'm just skeptical that their slice of the pie is going to be very large on a national scale. Especially outside of short haul work.