Here’s how things stand now for Elon Musk. It’s finally here.
The Tesla Semi, first announced by Elon Musk in 2017, has been one of the company’s most delayed products. However, the new electric truck has arrived, with PepsiCo being the first customer to receive some of the 100 vehicles it pre-ordered.
“One of the reasons we partner with Tesla is that PepsiCo owns one of the largest private fleets in North America,” said Mike O’Connell. Pepsi’s vice president of the supply chain. “We’re launching 15 in Modesto… and then we’ll have 21 in Sacramento.”
First, on a single charge, Pepsi uses trucks to deliver Frito-Lay products up to 425 miles from its Modesto, California, facility. It also delivers Pepsi on 100-mile daily routes from its Sacramento warehouse. Going direct to stores and making 300- to 400-mile runs to other warehouses.
Pepsi decline to say whether it had pressed the trucks to see if they had the promised 500-mile range.
News went to Frito-Lay Modesto, where PepsiCo has been working with the California Air Resources Board to transform the facility to demonstrate the sustainability profit of zero and near-zero emissions technologies. The Tesla Semis are the most recent additions to the company’s fleet of over 80,000 vehicles.
“This project has resulted in a 91% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. We’re using it as a model to cascade to our other operations,” O’Connell said.