Former late night kingpin and longtime car guru Jay Leno got to do what so many in trucking have been dying to do since 2017: drive Tesla's supposedly game-changing Semi truck.
In a 40-minute interview and test drive session, Leno quizes Tesla Semi Chief Dan Priestly and Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen on the ins and outs of the Semi, in the process revealing the brand's design philosophy and lots of neat tidbits about the truck's performance and capacity.
While it's a fun and entertaining video, Leno's first question goes straight for the jugular: "What does this weigh?"
Priestly gives a lengthy answer:
We started out obviously designing the early cars like the Roadster and Model S and you might ask, well, 'Why did we get into heavy trucking?' and it all comes down to the mission. So when we launched our factory in Nevada, our Gigafactory that supports all our powertrains to get built for our cars in Fremont, our co-founder and CTO at the time, JB Straubel, said it doesn’t make any sense that we should be shipping all of these parts for electric cars on diesel trucks. We should do electric trucks.
So that’s what kicked off; it started with just a little investigation and over the years it snowballed, and one of our other executives Jerome (Guillen), who had come from Freightliner and designed trucks, was super passionate about it and kicked it into high gear and worked with Franz and the design team to say 'Okay, let’s make this into a real program and make it happen.' We really wanted to fulfill the mission and make electric trucks to really clean up the world and haul our own parts on our own trucks.
In the question asking business, we call that a dodge, a wide one.
