AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla has secured the largest electric truck order in U.S. history. ZET SCALE, a newly formed alliance of shippers and carriers, named Tesla the primary manufacturer for an initial order of 2,500 electric Class 8 trucks on Tuesday — a single deal large enough to nearly double the number of electric heavy trucks operating in the country.
The award caps a remarkable stretch for a program Tesla first unveiled in 2017, and it lands just two days before the company formally inaugurates its dedicated Semi factory in Nevada, a 1.7 million-square-foot plant engineered to build 50,000 trucks a year.
A deal built for scale
ZET SCALE, run by the nonprofit Catalyst Mobility together with the Smart Freight Centre, selected Tesla through a competitive request for proposals that scored bidders on price, range, charging capability and production capacity. Kenworth, RIDE and Volvo were named secondary manufacturers that carriers may choose from, but Tesla took the top slot.
By pooling freight demand from founding shippers including Microsoft and PepsiCo, the alliance 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.
The financing is engineered to win over carriers who have hesitated on electric trucks. ZET Financial is issuing the purchase order for all 2,500 units and placing them with fleets through a fair-market-value lease, with deployments planned across 10 freight hubs from Los Angeles and Houston to Chicago, Atlanta and the New York area. The alliance says the first order is only the opening round, with a longer-term goal of 10,000 trucks or more.
Records keep falling
The ZET SCALE order tops a rapid succession of milestones. Einride's 500-truck order in August was the previous record, itself eclipsing WattEV's 370-truck California deal earlier in the year. Tesla's growing customer roster — Walmart, Costco, Sysco, DHL and PepsiCo among them — has steadily validated the Semi's economics as production ramps.
That commercial momentum is being matched by infrastructure. Tesla continues to expand its Megacharger network for the Semi, which the company says can restore roughly 70% of range in about 30 minutes during a mandatory driver rest break.
The road ahead
The timing could hardly be better. The Nevada factory sits next to Gigafactory Nevada's 4680 cell lines, and Tesla will use its September 24 inauguration to showcase the line and lay out the Semi's total-cost-of-ownership case for fleets. With the biggest order in the category now on the books, the question is shifting from whether fleets will buy the Semi to how fast Tesla can build them. As reported by Teslarati, even a majority share of the 2,500-unit order would make this the largest Semi deal to date — a fitting headline heading into the factory's grand opening.
