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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that they needed to get the drag coefficient down, and did so by first raking the windshield back, then pinching the cab horizontally to get some more gains. That narrowing of the cab then led to the center-seat arrangement?

Bonus being that you don't need to configure a LHD and RHD version of this truck for different markets.

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LHD/RHD swamp doesn't really matter given that the truck is probably too long for UK.

They would still need to swap out headlights anyways.

It's possible to have that same hardware headlight and control distribution patterns/behavior in software

UK is not the only country to drive on the left of the road, including Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic

...and it's unlikely that Tesla truck would be a popular choice in these countries.

It may be too big also for Japan, so maybe fine only for Australia?

Different markets can’t be addressed with the same truck anyway. Lights are different, mandatory equipment is different, EU trucks are limited cabin-inclusive, US trucks are cabin-exclusive, etc.

Lots and lots of LHD trucks serve the UK making daily cross channel trips, or even just based here full time from Dutch / Eastern European shipping firms.

The UK was until very recently part of the same market, with no reason to change all their truck design rules after Brexit.

The US/Europe scenario is not the same.

This truck still appears to have a passenger seat on the right side, though, despite the driver being in the middle? So presumably they'd still have to reconfigure it for RHD.

Efficiency seemed like the reason for the tilted windshield too.

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