A Tesla Semi Megacharger mobile charging unit has briefly shown up at the Tooele, Utah Supercharger. Images of the mobile Tesla Semi Megacharger made the rounds on social media before the charging unit was reportedly removed from the site.
The Tesla Semi is equipped with a very large 1000-volt battery. In the company’s Master Plan, Part Three, Tesla included a table that outlined its present and future vehicles. These included the Semi, which was listed with a 500 kWh LFP battery for its “Light” variant and an 800 kWh high-nickel battery for its “Heavy” variant. It remains to be seen if Tesla is already rolling out these battery sizes for the Semi’s current iteration.
Tesla has deployed a Tesla Semi truck mobile charging station in Utah. https://t.co/MoGNVrlgHL pic.twitter.com/BdYNFGhkgr
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 21, 2024
Considering that the Semi has a very large battery pack, the Class 8 all-electric truck is charged with its own dedicated Megacharger, which includes a different and much larger plug than the company’s regular Superchargers, which use the North American Charging Standard (NACS).
This was confirmed as much in the Megacharger sighting in the Tooele, Utah Supercharger, as the mobile charging unit featured a much larger non-NACS plug. The Megachager mobile unit also looked like it was built similarly to the prefabricated Superchargers that are produced at Giga New York. Strangely enough, the whole charging unit was reportedly gone from the site when members of the Tesla Owners Club Utah decided to visit the Tooele Supercharger.
It’s gone, no sign of the charging station. For what it’s worth, that location is horrible for a semi, so logically it didn’t make any sense to have a charger there.
— Tesla Owners Utah (@TeslaOwnersUtah) August 21, 2024
While Tesla has not provided any context behind the sudden appearance and disappearance of its Tesla Semi mobile Megacharger at Tooele, the location is roughly 490 miles away from Giga Nevada. As such, the mobile Megacharger unit might have been set up at the Tooele Supercharger as part of long range road tests for the Class 8 all-electric truck.
Overall, the brief presence of the mobile Megacharger is quite exciting, as it hints that Tesla is looking at solutions that could quickly build out a dedicated charging infrastructure for the Semi across the United States. And that, ultimately, is one of the ways that Tesla could make the Semi into a legitimate competitor in the long haul trucking industry.
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