
Canadian grocery chain orders 25 Tesla electric Semi trucks - gk1
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/18/canadian-grocery-chain-orders-25-tesla-electric-semi-trucks/
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moxious
Why would they do this? It doesn't seem to make much business sense other than
to be PR for the grocery company.

They've given Musk $5k x 25 trucks ordered, on promises of trucks delivered in
a year or more, from a company that usually misses its deadlines. And oh by
the way the truck doesn't have a price yet, so they're not committed to
actually buying.

Maybe they're just giving tesla an interest free loan for a few years for PR?

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IkmoIkmo
A company pre-ordering is quite different from a consumer. They've probably
put up a fraction of the regular $5k.

But even if they hadn't, this story hit newspapers in pretty much every region
they have consumers. At a WACC of 6%, a two-year 125k loan means they've got
quite an effective PR move for $15k in interest payments.

Remember this is a company with $46 billion in revenues, not a mom-n-pop store
or small local chain.

It's a good move without even going into whether the semi ends up worth buying
a few years down the road.

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coldtea
"Canadian grocery chain buys some trucks AND cheap PR"

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batrat
If this is what makes corporate embrace new technology and protect the
environment in the same time, I'm 100% for it. 25 doesn't sound much, but it's
enough to test the ground and get some advertising for "free".

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macspoofing
>If this is what makes corporate embrace new technology and protect the
environment in the same time,

If the electric-semis deliver on the promised cost savings you won't need to
convince any business of anything. No business is resistant to anything that
can reduce the cost of business.

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thisisit
I guess we are going to seem this kind of coverage for next couple of days -
X, Y, Z companies have order a, b, c quantities of Tesla Semi. Unless there
are real world reviews these orders amount to nothing but test runs.

