Tesla opened up its brand new Semi factory for a full walking tour, and we filmed the whole thing. In March of 2026, right as the plant outside Reno, Nevada was coming to life for the start of production, Ashlee Vance walked all 1.7 million square feet with Dan Priestley, the head of Tesla's Semi program. The tour runs the way the factory does, from raw coils of metal and a giant stamping press at one end to a finished electric semi truck rolling through a towering light tunnel at the other. At full speed, this building is meant to turn out 50,000 trucks a year, which works out to a new Semi coming off the line every seven or eight minutes.
Along the way you see things few people outside Tesla ever have. Truck cabs glide overhead on some of the heaviest electric monorail carriers in the world, holding assemblies north of 10,000 pounds above the factory floor. Three battery packs, built on the same cells as the Cybertruck, get bolted into a frame in a process Tesla calls battery marriage. The cabs travel down the line sideways, a trick that saved about 40 percent of the floor space. Priestley also tells the origin story of the whole program, which started when JB Straubel asked why Tesla parts were being hauled between its factories on diesel trucks. Diesel semis are about 1 percent of the vehicles on American roads and burn 16 to 18 percent of the fuel. That is the opportunity.
The tour ends with a ride in the Semi itself, where Priestley, who went out and got his trucker's license for this job, explains the center driving position, why regenerative braking changes mountain descents, and how a driver can put 300 miles back into the battery during a legally required 30 minute break. Tesla has more than 13 million test miles on these trucks. Now comes the hard part: convincing the trucking industry to switch. If you want to see how American manufacturing actually gets stood up, this is the whole thing, end to end.
LINKS
The Man Putting Tesla Motors Into Classic Cars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0o11hZ1EuE
Tesla Semi: https://www.tesla.com/semi
More factory tours from the same corner of Nevada:
Redwood Materials factory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSSgAPylz60
SendCutSend factory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8oufrrXaig
Core Memory: https://www.corememory.com
ABOUT THE HOST
Core Memory is hosted by Ashlee Vance, a two time New York Times best selling author and filmmaker who has spent two decades covering technology and science for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of the best selling biography of Elon Musk, created the Emmy nominated series Hello World, and produced HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die. With Core Memory, he drops into the labs, garages, factories, hangars, and occasional questionable warehouses where scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups are building the future.
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https://www.instagram.com/ashlee.vance/
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Find Kylie Robison at
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https://www.instagram.com/kylie.robison
CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:14 A Factory Laid Out Like a Truck
04:46 Why Does Tesla Even Make a Semi?
13:48 How Fast Can You Build a Semi?
16:55 Would You Get Married in a Light Tunnel?
22:30 One of the Heaviest Monorails on Earth
32:58 Witnessing a Battery Marriage
44:05 Why Are the Cabs Moving Sideways?
57:53 Time to Ride in the Semi
1:02:48 A Steering Wheel in the Middle?
1:06:28 Will Truckers Actually Go Electric?
