The California Highway Patrol has shared a video of a Tesla Semi electric truck handling a closed icy road.
Electric semi trucks are still quite new and there are a lot of naysayers about them.
Bill Gates was one of them. He didn’t believe that a battery-electric truck could travel 500 miles, but he was proven wrong by the Tesla Semi.
But battery-electric trucks still have a lot to prove. Tesla Semi is working on it by putting in the work.
Tesla is operating a fleet of Tesla Semi trucks between Gigafactory Nevada east of Reno and its California operations.
One of the critics of the Tesla Semi is that it primarily operates in the easy climates of California and Nevada, but to go between the two states, the electric trucks have to go through mountains and the Donner Summit. Conditions can get pretty bad there and the local California Highway Patrol announced that they had to close the road because it was so icy:
“Things got a little icy!! We are now holding eastbound I-80 traffic at Donner Summit due to multiple big rig spinouts at 60 miles. We are working on clearing the roadway as fast as we can. There is no estimated time of reopening the roadway.”
But interestingly, the CHP shared an image of a Tesla Semi going through these icy roads:
The Tesla Semi seems to be handling the conditions fairly well compared to the other big rigs that were reportedly “spinning out”.
Tesla is currently only producing the electric truck in low volume for its own fleet and for a select few customers, but it plans to bring the vehicle to higher volume production at an expansion of its Gigafactory in Nevada.
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