PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant that owns many brands such as Doritos, Lipton, SodaStream, Cheetos and Potato Chips (originally Lay's), is one of Tesla's first and largest truck customers – its distribution center in Sacramento, California, purchased no less than 21 semi-trailer trucks from Elon Musk's electric vehicle company, whose symbolic name is "Tesla Semi." It recently revealed how electric trucks – a mode of transportation that many argued was possible, but could never compete effectively with fuel-powered trucks – had affected its operations.
In a video produced by the North American Cargo Efficiency Council, Pepsi's director of transformation and strategy, Amanda DeVaux, says that the key to leveraging the efficiency of Tesla's trucks is running them for about 12 hours a day on tracks that are mostly below 160 miles. However, the fleet includes three such vehicles dedicated to "long-range routes" of 400-725 km, made possible by special Tesla payloads deployed along the routes, And can charge the trucks from 5% to 95% in just 20 to 30 minutes.
Run On Less – Electric DEPOT – Pepsi Beverages from NACFE on Vimeo.
But the most astonishing statistic was that noted by Dejan Antonovich, Pepsi's electrification program manager, who revealed that the trucks' ability to use the energy generated during braking to slightly recharge the batteries meant that when driving on challenging routes, the level of charge in the batteries not only stopped decreasing – it even increased.
These figures are quite encouraging, given that, as mentioned, many have expressed skepticism about the ability of electric trucks to offer efficiency close to that of conventional trucks. This is despite growing environmental awareness and the statistic that trucks make up only 4% of vehicles in the U.S., but consume 25% of total fuel on highways and contribute nearly 30% of carbon emissions. This is yet another case in which Elon Musk's company has succeeded in doing the impossible in the opinion of many, as we recently reported that SpaceX did with reusable rockets.
It should be noted that beyond their impressive efficiency, Tesla's trucks have recently become the subject of many viral videos due to their enormous power, which allows them to overtake fairly powerful vehicles when driving on roads throughout the US.
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