From Fremont to San Diego, watch Tesla Semi perform a 500-mile run on a single charge

Tesla delivered the first-production Semi trucks to PepsiCo on Thursday (1st Dec 2022). Just days before this delivery day — that came after 5 years — the automaker tested the Tesla Semi for a 500-mile run on a single charge, the range that Tesla originally claimed at the unveiling back in 2017.

During the Tesla Semi delivery day presentation, Elon Musk said that we are going to post the whole video of the 500-mile single charge run on Youtube — unedited. Tesla showed a few shots of this journey during the presentation but later on posted the entire video on the world’s most popular video hosting platform.

“And, this wasn’t you know some ultra-clean, prcise test-track simulation or somewhere we, you know shut down a road, nope, this is the real world, this is over Grapevine, this is with traffic, this is true 500 miles. We were loaded just under 82k (lbs),” said Dan Priestly Sr. Manager of the Tesla Semi program who hosted the Semi day event along with Elon Musk.

Elon Musk and Dan Priestly cleared any doubts around this 500-mile Tesla Semi run on a single charge. They said that no special aerodynamics were used for this test and it was not done in a controlled environment. This test was performed on normal roads in usual traffic conditions.

Tesla Semi started the 500-mile journey from Tesla’s car factory in Fremont, California to PepsiCo bottling factory in Lakeside, San Diego, California. Accoridng to Google Maps, it takes around 7 hours and 45 mins to cover this distance on average highway speeds and moderate traffic via the I-5S and I-15S freeways.

Elon Musk and the Tesla team shared the following graph during the Tesla Semi keynote delivery. This is a map that not only shows the path of the 500-mile trip, it also shows the truck’s state-of-charge (SoC) at each major stop. When Tesla Semi started its journey at Fremont, its SoC stood at 97% and after reaching its destination in San Deigo, 4% of its battery still remained.

Graph showing Tesla Semi’s 500-mile trip on a single charge from Fremont, CA to San Diego, California. Credit: Courtesy of Tesla, Inc.

Elon Musk once again remembered the naysayers who predicted that the Tesla Semi will not be able to deliver a 500-mile range with full load. Once again Tesla and Elon Musk have proven the critics wrong and are on the verge of disrupting the heavy duty trucking industry.

The 500-mile Tesla Semi run is actually 8-hour long footage shortened using timelapse to about 2 minutes of video duration, let’s watch.

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