Everything I Got Right and Wrong About the Tesla Semi After Finally Driving One

Back in May 2023 I called the Tesla Semi a glorified day cab with poor driver positioning and weak features.

In July 2025 I said that outside of what it could do as an electric truck, it was never appealing from a driver’s standpoint, and that current cab configurations ran circles around it on comfort, especially as legacy OEMs moved to electric while keeping the same cab standards as their diesel models.

In February of this year I said electrification might well be the cheaper option, but the Tesla Semi itself was overhyped and rough to look at.

And in April, when a video went around of a Frito-Lay Semi pulling away from a gate with what somebody called a “massive trailer”, I called it rage bait and pointed out that snack haulers run lift axles because the product weighs almost nothing. So nobody has to wonder where I stood.

I’ve held a Class A CDL with a hazmat endorsement for most of my adult life and spent close to three decades around this business, and I’ve been one of this truck’s louder skeptics. Then I drove one loaded. Here’s what held up and what didn’t. What I was actually worried about My doubts ran in three directions.

One, I questioned whether the range numbers would survive contact with real freight and real weight. Two, I questioned whether a company built around passenger cars understood what this job asks of a person across a fourteen-hour day.

Three, I questioned the center seat, which struck me as a decision made by people who had never backed a 53-foot trailer into a tight dock. One of those three still stands. The other two didn’t make it past the first few miles I drove. The seat I was most ready to hate You climb in and you’re sitting dead center, screens on both sides.

Every instinct I have says that’s wrong. I’ve spent my career with a door and a window on my left and a whole lot of truck on my right, and that geometry sits so deep in muscle memory that being centered feels like somebody rearranged a room you’ve walked through in the dark for twenty years.

Tesla’s argument is that the side-by-side layout is inherited from horse-and-buggy days and that most trucking is done by one person, so you build around that person. Intellectually, that’s hard to argue with. Teams exist however, most of this work is done solo.

In practice, the direct forward visibility is better than anything I’ve driven, because you’re looking down the centerline of the truck instead of down one edge of it. You stop guessing where your right side is. You can see it. Side visibility runs through cameras and mirrors, and here’s the honest version. It kinda works.

It’s also different, and different takes a little time getting used to. I wasn’t going to get fluent in a camera-and-mirror setup in one session, and neither will you. But the blind-spot problem I fully expected to find didn’t show up the way I expected it to. That’s the first place my “poor driver positioning” take took a fact check hit.

The window is the tell Small thing that says a lot. The earlier trucks had a pop-out window. The production truck has one that rolls down. That changed because customers pushed and Tesla admitted the original call was wrong. The reason isn’t glamorous.

Badge readers, toll booths, call boxes and guard shacks all sit around that height, and a pop-out window turns every one of those into a problem. You don’t get a big window to roll down like in a regular truck, but you have a decent sized one that does. I care about that more than most of the original spec sheet.

It means somebody listened to people who pull up to gates for a living, and it means they were willing to say out loud that they missed. That posture isn’t common in this industry. The brake pedal is the part that got me This is the one I didn’t see coming, and it’s what I’d lead with if you asked me my initial takes. You barely touch the service brake.

Regenerative braking handles so much of the deceleration that the rhythm of driving changes. You lift, and the truck slows with authority even loaded. It isn’t the soft coast you get lifting off a diesel when using the low setting of your Jakes.

It’s closer to working a Jake in the hills, except it’s happening constantly, in traffic, on ramps, coming into a dock. Think about what that means for anybody who’s constantly running mountain grades. Brake fade, heat, snubbing your way down a hill while watching air gauges and hoping the guy ahead of you knows what he’s doing.

I didn’t run a mountain descent, so I’m not telling you it erases that. What I can tell you is that on flat ground with weight behind me, the service brake became something I used at the very end of a stop instead of throughout it. Run the maintenance math yourself. Shoes, drums, air system components, and the labor on all of it.

If regen carries most of the deceleration on a regional route with a lot of stops, that’s a real maintenance line item moving the right way. I’m not putting a number on it, because I don’t have one, and anybody speculat