A Tesla big rig that caught fire kept both directions of California’s Interstate 80 closed in the Sierra Nevada for hours on Monday.
Cal Fire crews responded to the scene of an electric semi-truck fire around 3 a.m. near Emigrant Gap. California Highway Patrol later confirmed they were dealing with a hazardous materials situation due to potentially toxic fumes from the big rig’s batteries.
First responders say that the batteries of the electric big rig were still burning hours later.
Nah. It seems like a quiet victory that no one let him mess with.
Except they promised it was going to be the NBT in trucking and that companies would be stupid to buy anything else, and it was supposed to be in mass production 5 years ago. In actuality they delivered a couple dozen prototypes to a single company (at least as far as I’m aware) that is using them solely for greenwashing their delivery fleet. Even then, they’ve been absolutely unreliable heaps that probably have cost Frito-Lay far more headache than the slight PR bump they got from them. Oh, and don’t forget that any truck driver will tell you they have an absolutely useless cabin that was clearly designed by someone who had never even been in a truck cab before, and was designed solely for the techbro demographic to gush about, in between its 0-60 time and unrealistic range.
Meanwhile, I see Rivian-made Amazon delivery vans literally every single day, and have legitimately seen more companies operating Nikola semi trucks (the ‘scam’ company that supposedly only could roll a truck down a hill) than the Tesla Semi. And that’s just startups, not counting the actual Mercedes and Volvo Class 8 trucks that are already on the road. It amazes me how people seem to act like Tesla has delivered on literally any promises they’ve ever made, when in actuality it’s just an incredible feat of goalpost moving.