Tesla opens electric semi truck reservations in Europe

As Tesla Semi pre-orders keep adding up, reservations have actually been limited to North America for the most part.

Now Tesla is opening reservations to a few European markets.

During a presentation in the Netherlands last month, Jerome Guillen, Tesla’s Vice-President of Trucks, said that the company is currently undergoing development adapting the Tesla Semi design to European trucking regulations.

Since it’s still in the works, Tesla didn’t open reservations for its electric truck in Europe.

Some companies still managed to reserve the truck indirectly.

For example, Italian trucking company Fercam announced that they ordered a truck to bring to Europe through their US partner MAO Inc.

But now Tesla has opened reservations in the Netherlands, Norway, and in the UK on its website:

Tesla first started taking reservations with a $5,000 deposit per truck, but has changed the listed deposit price last month to $20,000 for a “base reservation” of the production version and the full $200,000 for the “Founders Series” truck.

Electrek’s Take

It should help pre-orders keep rolling in, but unfortunately for those new reservation holders, it looks like they won’t have access to the $5,000 early bird deposit price.

I think it will be interesting to see Tesla’s customer deposit account at the end of the quarter. It was at $686 million at the end of the last quarter – mostly because of Model 3 deposits.

Now with Model 3, Roadster 2020, and Tesla Semi reservations, I think it will skyrocket to around $1 billion.

That’s basically an interest-free loan for the automaker.

Model 3 deliveries are starting to ramp up and depending if the delivery rate is higher than new reservations, which is likely going to happen within the next quarter, the Model 3 deposits should go down.

But I’d wager that Tesla Semi and the Roadster 2020 should bring in enough new reservations to compensate in the short-term.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.