Tesla Semi Wins Largest U.S. Electric Truck Order Ever

AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla has landed the largest electric truck order in U.S. history. ZET SCALE, a newly formed alliance of shippers and carriers, named Tesla its primary manufacturer on Tuesday for an initial order of 2,500 electric Class 8 trucks — a single deal large enough to nearly double the number of battery-electric heavy trucks operating in the country.

The award caps a remarkable stretch for a program that spent years being written off as perpetually late, and it arrives just as Tesla prepares to formally open the Nevada factory built to produce the truck at scale.

A record order, backed by household names

ZET SCALE, run by the nonprofit Catalyst Mobility together with the Smart Freight Centre, selected Tesla through a competitive request-for-proposals process that scored bidders on price, range, charging capability and production capacity. Kenworth, RIDE and Volvo were named secondary manufacturers that carriers can choose from if their routes call for it, but Tesla took the top slot outright.

Pooling freight demand from founding shippers — a group that includes Microsoft and PepsiCo — let every truck maker bid lower than it could for a single fleet. "The Tesla Semi is designed for lower cost per mile operations than diesel," said Dan Priestley, director of the Tesla Semi program, in the announcement covered by Teslarati.

Financing built to convert skeptics

The structure is designed to pull in carriers who have so far avoided electric trucks. ZET Financial is issuing the purchase order for all 2,500 units and will place them with fleets through a fair-market-value lease, lowering the upfront barrier that has slowed heavy-truck electrification.

The trucks will roll out over the next few years across 10 freight hubs spanning Los Angeles, Stockton, Bakersfield, Seattle and Tacoma, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Chicago, Atlanta, and the Newark and New York region. ZET SCALE has framed the first order as only an opening round, with a stated long-term goal of 10,000 trucks or more.

Even if Tesla ends up building a majority rather than all 2,500 units, it would still be the biggest Semi commitment to date — dwarfing Einride's 500-unit order in August and WattEV's earlier 370-truck California deal. The Semi's growing order book lines up with its recent European debut at the IAA show in Hannover, where Tesla showed the 500-mile Long Range variant to fleets across the continent.

Timed to the factory's big moment

The announcement lands two days before Tesla formally inaugurates its Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, on September 24. The 1.7 million-square-foot plant sits next to Gigafactory Nevada's 4680 cell lines and is engineered for 50,000 trucks a year at full ramp, with production director Priestley confirming the line "is now ramping." Media that have already ridden in the production Semi at the Nevada plant came away impressed with the truck's refinement.

With a record order in hand, a factory built for volume, and a truck now selling on two continents, the Tesla Semi is finally shifting from a long-delayed promise into a heavy-duty business scaling in real time — and the momentum looks set to build from here.