Commercial Vehicles

Thor Trucks ET-One is ready to take on the Tesla

By Sagar

Posted on December 17, 2017

A lot of people seems to have a thing for that Norse mythical god. It was made popular by Marvel Comics. As for the automotive industry, it was made popular by the new Volvos in the form of DRLs.

Today, there is a new one. The Thor Trucks’ ET-One aims to hammer down on the recently unveiled Tesla Semi. The LA start-up was founded by Dakota Semler – who comes from a family background of making military electronics and Wine.

Back to the truck, the ET-One is a prototype built from parts sourced from other tractor-trailers. For instance, the chassis is from a Navistar truck. Basically, a converted and modified diesel Semi. It claims to haul 80,000 pounds, and has a range of up to 300 miles (around 482 km). The powertrain options range from 300-700 hp, sourced from TM4.

The battery pack is a lithium-ion cylindrical cells, and claims to have the highest energy density.

Compared to its competitors, not only Tesla, but others too who are developing electric Semis, Thor Trucks is small with just 18 employees.

“We wanted to show the world that you don’t have to be a big original equipment manufacturer, like a Ford or GM, or a tech mogul with deep pockets to start making progress in this space. With no outside funding, we assembled a team of experienced, gutsy, and passionate engineers and went to work researching and designing the ET-One in-house. This meant rearranging and retrofitting old chassis, experimenting with new battery design, and constantly iterating on our learnings. It was scrappy, it was challenging, but it was also fun. And now we have an electric semi that is on the road and is on its way to being cost-competitive with (and much simpler and more stable from an engineering perspective than) the diesel guzzlers that currently dominate the heavy-duty fleet space,” says Semler in his blog.

Also, the Bloomberg interview below is pretty cool too –