From Fred Lambert at Electrek
Tesla has received a massive new order of Tesla Semi electric trucks from a truck-leasing company.
It might be its biggest order for the Tesla Semi program yet.
When Tesla launched the Tesla Semi in 2017, the automaker used the same reservation model that made it successful with passenger electric vehicles.
However, Tesla made sure that a reservation would be a real show of interest in buying the electric class-8 truck since it has been first asking for a $5,000 deposit per truck, which it later increased to $20,000 per truck for a “base reservation” of the production version and the full $200,000 for the “Founders Series” truck.
It makes it that much more impressive when the electric truck program, which is not in production yet, secures large orders, like a recent 130 Tesla Semi trucks reserved by Walmart.
Now Pride Group Enterprises, a holding company with its main business being truck leasing, announced that it placed a reservation for 150 Tesla Semi electric trucks with the option to buy 500 trucks from Tesla:
Today, Pride Group Enterprises (PGE) is announcing that it has reserved 150 Tesla Electric Semis with the option to increase to 500 trucks. Sam Johal, Pride Group Enterprises CEO, announced that the company has placed a deposit to secure the initial units and build slots.
CEO Sam Johal commented on his company’s new Tesla Semi order:
With support from one of our long-term financial partners, Hitachi Capital, we are very excited to bring this innovative product to our strong customer base, helping forge a new path in clean transportation. We believe that electrification is the way of the future as we work together across multiple industries to reduce our carbon footprint. As well, we have the option to increase our order as we gauge customer acceptance of this new technology.
At 150 trucks with the option to buy 350 more, this could be Tesla’s biggest order of Tesla Semis yet.
It would be worth between $22 million and $100 million depending on the final number of trucks and the configurations.
Pride Group Enterprises would have to have placed a deposit of at least $3 million with Tesla to secure the order.
The group operates a dozen locations in the US and Canada, and it plans to make the trucks available to its leasing customers based on demand across the regions.
Tesla plans to offer the Tesla Semi with two options capable of over 300 and 500 miles of range on a single charge. They are expected to cost $150,000 and $180,000, respectively, but with an efficiency of less than 2 kWh per mile with a full load, the cost of operations is expected to be where Tesla Semi shines.
The company expects up to $200,000 in savings (mainly diesel and maintenance) over the lifetime of a Tesla Semi.
Pride Group Enterprises didn’t reveal when they plan on taking possession of their first Tesla Semi, but production of the electric truck, which has been delayed several times, is expected to start relatively soon.
At the unveiling of the Tesla Semi in 2017, the automaker said that the electric truck would be coming in 2019, but the vehicle has since been pushed to “low-volume production in late 2020.”
The timeline was later pushed to 2021, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently told employees in an email obtained by Electrek that “it’s time to bring Tesla Semi to volume production” without updating the timeline.
Recently, the automaker has been talking about building a few more pre-production Tesla Semi prototypes toward the end of the year and then move to volume production in Texas next year.
