Tesla will open a factory in Sparks, Nevada to mass-produce the Semi. The company announced this truck in 2017. Nine years is a normal amount of time to wait for a vehicle.
Elon Musk promised the Semi would revolutionize freight. He said it would cost less per mile than diesel. He said it would have a 500-mile range. He said a lot of things. PepsiCo bought some. They use them to drive chips around a parking lot for photo opportunities.
The factory exists to scale production. Scaling production requires demand. Demand requires customers. Customers require a functional product at a competitive price that doesn't strand them in Nebraska with 40,000 pounds of refrigerated chicken and a dead battery. Minor details.
Retail traders saw this headline and bought calls. They do not own trucking companies. They have never spoken to anyone who owns a trucking company. They have never seen a bill of lading. They think freight is something that happens on YouTube. One guy on Reddit calculated that if Tesla captures 8% of the commercial trucking market by 2027, the stock will hit $600. He used a discount rate he found in a dream.
The Semi weighs 25,000 pounds without cargo because batteries are heavy. Physics is inconvenient. The truck loses payload capacity. Payload capacity is how trucking companies make money. Losing it is bad. This is not complicated.
Musk will stand in front of the factory and talk about sustainable logistics. He will not mention that Nevada's grid runs on natural gas. He will not explain where the lithium comes from. He will definitely not discuss residual values on a used electric semi with 300,000 miles and a degraded battery pack that costs more to replace than the truck is worth.
The stock went up four percent on the news because the market is a casino where nobody reads the rules.
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