Elon Musk's Tesla starts delivering the Semi truck nine years after he unveiled it

American billionaire Elon Musk's Tesla has started delivering its Semi electric truck to a first group of customers, almost nine years after he drove one onto a stage in Hawthorne and promised production by 2019.

Executives announced the deliveries at a webcast event on Thursday night at the company's plant in Sparks, Nevada, where trucks bearing the logos of PepsiCo, DHL and US Foods sat parked outside.

Musk did not attend. "I'd recommend placing more orders if you haven't already, but the waiting list is already pretty significant," he said in a recorded message.

Tesla did not say what the Semi costs or how many it will build this year. It repeated that the Nevada plant is designed for 50,000 trucks a year.

The first Semi came off the high-volume line in April, but the company's July shareholder letter dropped an earlier forecast of volume production in 2026 and said only that production would begin this year.

The order book filled up before the doors opened. On Tuesday, ZET SCALE, a new alliance of large shippers whose founding members include Microsoft and PepsiCo, named Tesla the primary supplier for 2,500 battery-electric Class 8 trucks, according to Catalyst Mobility, the nonprofit formerly known as CALSTART that runs the program with the Smart Freight Centre.

That single order is nearly double the number of electric heavy trucks now on U.S. roads. Kenworth, Volvo and RIDE were named as secondary suppliers, and the alliance aims to scale to 10,000 trucks.

Last month Sweden's Einride agreed to add 500 Semis to its fleet, at the time the largest order on record.

The timing helps. Diesel prices in the United States have climbed to record highs on the back of the war with Iran, sharpening the operating-cost case for electric freight.

Dan Priestley, Tesla's director of Semi engineering, said the long-range version carries a full load 500 miles on a charge. "That's 500 real-world miles. Our customers have validated it," he said. A standard version manages 325 miles.

The road here was long. Musk unveiled the Semi in November 2017 with a 2019 production target.

Tesla made limited deliveries to PepsiCo in late 2022, then went quiet as the company prioritized cars, Cybertruck and robotaxis, while Volvo, Daimler and Chinese rivals built out their own electric trucks and U.S. EV incentives were rolled back.

Whether the Semi becomes a business or stays a showpiece depends on numbers Tesla has yet to publish: the price per truck and the rate at which Sparks can build them. What it has now is demand, a factory and a customer list. For a product that was two years late in 2019, that counts as arrival.