Get ready to meet 'The Beast:' Tesla's semi-truck rolls out tonight

Tesla's long-awaited electric tractor-trailer truck will debut on Thursday night.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised a big, powerful truck he has nicknamed "The Beast." A teaser image Tesla has released, showing the truck heavily backlit, reveals a tall silhouette with futuristic angular headlights.

At an event that will take place at 8pm tonight in California, Tesla will unveil the new truck.


Electric delivery trucks are already on the market, delivering goods on local routes. Those sorts of trips, involving relatively short routes at slow speeds that start and end at the same location, are well suited to a battery-powered truck. Power demands are relatively low and the trucks can easily be recharged before each shift.



That's why many analysts have suggested that Tesla's semi truck would be best used to move cargo from ports to other relatively nearby locations such as rail yards, warehouses or distribution centers. As with smaller delivery trucks, this would involve short trips that would have the truck back at a base location for charging.


Toyota announced last month that it started a program at the Port of Los Angeles to put hydrogen-powered semi-trucks to just this sort of use.


Tesla has also said it's working to apply its semi-autonomous driving technologies to the semi-truck. Other companies are also working to build self-driving semis, including Freightliner, which announced it was testing an autonomously-driven semi-truck back in 2015.

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