Early in November Elon Musk, Tesla CEO took the stage to present the latest product of the company the Tesla Semi, an all-electric heavy-duty truck.
Now Jerome Guillen the executive leading the program, gave his own presentation about the electric truck at a conference in Europe.
Guillen is a French engineer best known in the Tesla community for being the Model S Program Director during a crucial time for Tesla’s vehicle program (2010-2013). He was a longtime Daimler engineer and led the development of the Cascadia truck prior to joining Tesla.
Yesterday Guillen had the opportunity to give his own presentation focused only on the truck at the annual conference of Transport and Logistics in the Netherlands.
Below is presented the full audio of Guillen’s presentation which we embedded in full below. In addition, there are some interesting bullet points from his talk:
- Guillen confirmed that Tesla aims to have the same cargo capacity as diesel trucks – meaning that it should weigh about the same as a diesel truck.
- He made a comparison between the aerodynamic designs of the Tesla Semi to a bullet train.
- He also spoke about development plans to adjust the Tesla Semi design to European trucking regulations, which is seemingly in the work, but it doesn’t sound like they have all the solutions yet.
- The exec expects that the Tesla Semi cost of operation advantage should be even greater in Europe than in the US because of the higher cost of diesel.
- Tesla also plans to offer destination chargers for its electric trucks on top of the Megachargers to enable longer ways,
- He also confirmed that Tesla uses the same Autopilot hardware suite developed for their passenger vehicles to enable Enhanced Autopilot features on Tesla Semi trucks.
- Tesla Semi offers a 360-degree view all around the vehicle with cameras in order to abolish blind spots.
- Tesla Semi doesn’t have a key like the Tesla Model 3. It relies on the Tesla mobile app instead.
