The first fleet of in the world will begin delivering in California. PepsiCo is finally rolling out its fleet of to begin operating on local routes out of its Sacramento bottling plant, as the reports. The have a range of 400 miles per charge, and PepsiCo has also installed four 750-kilowatt Tesla chargers to keep the EV trucks topped-up onsite.
FritoLay, a PepsiCo subsidiary, will also begin operating its own fleet of Tesla Semi EVs out of its manufacturing plant in Modesto, although the FritoLay fleet has only 15 Tesla Semis for now. PepsiCo is now the first company using Tesla’s commercial EVs, and it plans to bolster its budding fleet with another 64 Tesla Semi trucks through , which Pepsi plans to use for as well as local routes.
Pepsi, however, did not pay for most of the trucks it just received — Sacramento County generously picked up the tab for 18 out of the 21 Tesla Semis on behalf of the American food and beverage corporation, per the :
While PepsiCo officials hailed their commitment to sustainability at a Tuesday plant news conference, much of the initial cost of most of the trucks was paid by state and federal grants. The Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District paid for 18 of the 21 trucks to be used at the South Sacramento bottling plant with $4.5 million in grants, said Alberto Ayala, its executive director.
So, while the Pepsi Generation is going electric, this latest bit of corporate sustainability is built mostly on state and federal grant money. The executive director of the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District says grants like these are necessary right now to encourage companies to build out their EV fleets, because the Tesla Semis (and rival electric trucks from other companies, like ) cost around $250,000 each, roughly twice as much as a conventional diesel semi truck.
Due to these high costs and a current lack of , U.S. companies may be less inclined to invest in fully-electric big rigs. But PepsiCo has so far received $15 million in state and local grants to buy its EVs and put them to use in Sacramento and Modesto, while the federal government is also kicking in $40,000 per vehicle. Pepsi says the grants and subsidies are helping it move at a more rapid pace to transition its current diesel fleet to EVs.