Tesla has confirmed a new batch of Tesla Semi deliveries, with its official Semi account saying today that “Chicago’s first 50 Semis” are on their way to the city.
It’s a rare data point. Tesla doesn’t disclose Semi deliveries, and it claims its new Nevada factory can build 50,000 of them a year.
HMD Trucking’s 50 Semis
The post, published on the @tesla_semi account on X at noon ET today, shows four Semis lined up at sunset under the caption “Hello Windy City.” Tesla didn’t name the customer.
But the only 50-truck Semi order tied to Chicago belongs to HMD Trucking. The family-owned carrier was founded in Chicago in 1998, runs more than 650 trucks (almost all diesel), and ordered 50 Semis right after Tesla’s production event in September.
HMD took its first truck on November 2 and says it’s the first Tesla Semi registered in Illinois. COO Michael Mahler said Tesla “has been transparent with us regarding the capabilities of Semi every step of the way.”
The company ran a Semi for more than 4,000 miles over the summer and averaged 1.74 kWh per mile, right in line with Tesla’s 1.7 kWh/mile claim. The first trucks will mostly handle local runs around Chicago, and HMD is installing its own chargers there since Tesla’s Megacharger network is still concentrated along the I-5 and I-10 corridors in the West.
Owner Henry Malukas told MotorTrend the deal is worth about $15 million. That’s roughly $300,000 per truck, in line with the ~$290,000 Long Range pricing we reported when the first truck came off the high-volume line and a long way from the $180,000 Tesla advertised in 2017.
Nobody knows where the Semi ramp is
Here’s the problem: it’s nearly impossible to tell how many Semis Tesla is actually building.
Tesla launched volume production at its Sparks, Nevada factory on September 24, after pushing the ramp out of 2025. It says the 1.8 million sq ft plant is built for 50,000 trucks a year. But it never gave a ramp schedule, and its quarterly production and delivery reports only count “passenger vehicles sold to customers.” The Semi isn’t in there.
So we’re left with proxies. Tesla says its Semi fleet has over 98% uptime, without saying how big that fleet is. Before this year, the largest Semi fleet was PepsiCo’s, at 86 trucks in 2024. California’s truck voucher program received 965 Semi applications between January 2025 and February 2026, which points to real demand but says nothing about output.
The order book is the other clue. Einride ordered 500 Semis in August, WattEV has 370 on order, IMC Logistics wants 50 for California, and the ZET SCALE alliance picked Tesla as main supplier for 2,500 trucks. And now HMD’s 50 are rolling into Chicago, one of the first Semi fleets that will have to deal with a Midwest winter. Wisconsin’s Paper Transport has also been piloting a Semi in the Chicago market since the summer.
None of that adds up to a production rate, but it does look like Tesla is slowly ramping up deliveries.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla keeps the Semi numbers vague on purpose. It’s happy to talk about a 50,000-truck-a-year factory, and it posts hero shots when a batch ships, but it won’t give the one number that shows whether the factory is anywhere close to that.
The 50,000 figure is what makes the Semi look like a real business to investors instead of a niche program that took nine years to get going. Tesla has a long history of quoting capacity long before it reaches it, so we shouldn’t treat “built for 50,000” as anything more than a ceiling.
Our read: Tesla is still far from that 50,000 rate. Fifty trucks for one customer is 0.1% of a year at full capacity, and if Tesla were shipping in large volumes, a single 50-unit batch wouldn’t get its own post. But the ramp has clearly started, the order book is real, and it’s plausible Tesla gets into the thousands by the end of the year.
Good for HMD, too. A 650-truck diesel fleet in a cold market is exactly the kind of customer the Semi has to win. Malukas admitted “we don’t have real numbers yet” on savings, and HMD’s own blog is fairly sober about cost and winter range. Local routes, depot charging and a Chicago winter is the right way to find out. It all sounds plausible for the Tesla Semi.
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