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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

Minor inconvenience. Pepsi doesn't care how you hand papers to someone. FedEx doesn't care if you get mud in the cab, you'll just have to clean it after your shift.

This is the kind of efficiency tool that will be bought by large corporations and forced on drivers.

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You still have to look over you shoulder when merging and need the ability to shift your body to see in the mirror or to check where your tire is when backing up.

I get that lots of car drivers merge by faith, but you kill people and potentially spend time in jail in a CMV.

Local deliveries are far more dependant on this than OTR, and even the drivers of front discharge cement trucks with narrow cabs complain about this.

Sucks to have to drive this then.

If Pepsi believes it can cut its transport costs for certain routes by 20% it doesn't care how inconvenienced or annoyed you are.

It doesn't until there are negative externalities, you know, like labor retention rates, that cause those transport costs to go back up.

Tesla might be able to sell some of these to some companies for a while, because brand recognition and Elon stans in purchasing positions. That's not really a good strategy for long term growth, and Tesla can't just will an automotive niche into existence.

This guy genuinely has no clue what labor retention rates are. He thinks an unsafe truck that saves a tiny percentage of money will actually save large corporations cash on their bottom line

The thing you're missing, and most folks in this thread are missing is... there's already a bunch of electric semi's out there available for purchase right now.

Nobody is buying them (by nobody I mean so very few...). If Pepsi really thought electric was the way to go, they would already be doing it.

Tesla's semi is going to be a major flop...

They have already sold a bunch of these. Close to 1000 units now I believe. Pepsi ordered 100 of them.

A pre-order based on a marketing prototype is not a real sale.

Their range is awful that's why. Most of them have ranges with less than half of what the Tesla Semi has.

Pepsi probably bought their delivery slot for the publicity more than the trucks being practical. It isn't like they got the first delivery slot by finding a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.

If it really "sucks", you'd probably see incident rates go up, meaning down time, maintenance costs, legal issues, even impact on the public image. There is a point where bad mood and annoyance of a troubled work force become a serious inconvenience.

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