It’s been a rough few weeks for Tesla, with production problems, lawsuits, and analysts speculating that the company is running out of money and will need a capital raise before the year is out to keep going. Now, Seeking Alpha writer John Engle is suggesting that the much-anticipated Tesla Semi project may be dead.
The Tesla Semi was unveiled in November 2017 to great fanfare and intrigue. Did Tesla have the magic ingredient to make an all-electric truck viable that has so far eluded so many others? A series of public announcements from the likes of Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, and UPS followed, suggesting that this truck was maybe – just maybe – going to revolutionize the industry.
After the initial glitz wore off,industry experts starting dissecting the few available numbers on the truck – and it wasn’t always good. Still, many believe an all-electric Class 8 truck could work in certain applications and there remained optimism that Tesla could deliver.
Then the Model 3 came along. Tesla’s Model 3 production problems are well-documented, and the long-awaited car has run into one roadblock after another as Tesla and Elon Musk try to straighten out their issues.
In the company’s most recent earnings call, Engle points out that Musk never mentioned the Tesla Semi – the darling of the company just mere months ago – until he was asked specifically about it by Phil LeBeau of CNBC, who wanted to know about reservation numbers and how far along in the process the development was.