In an April interview with TED‘s head curator Chris Anderson, serial entrepreneur and future-builder Elon Musk shared a teaser shot of the truck Tesla plans to release in September.

Henderson said the truck didn‘t look like your typical friendly around-town delivery truck and Musk agreed, saying it was a heavy-duty long-range semi truck, with the highest weight capability.

“Essentially it‘s meant to alleviate the heavy-duty trucking loads and this is something that people do not think today is possible,” he said. “They think the truck doesn‘t have enough power or it doesn’t have enough range. With the Tesla semi we want to show that an electric truck can actually out-torque any diesel semi. If you had a tug of war competition, the Tesla semi will tug the diesel semi uphill.”

Henderson said in the short term he assumed the Tesla electric truck wouldn‘t be driverless, and asked if they were going to be trucks truck drivers wanted to drive.

“Yes,” said Musk. “What will be really fun about this is you have a flat torque rpm with an electric motor, whereas with a diesel motor you have a torque rpm that looks like a hill, so this will be a very spry truck. You could drive this around like a sports car. There‘s no gears, it‘s like single speed.”

Musk admitted he‘d test driven a prototype of the truck around a parking lot.

“It‘s really weird, because you‘re driving around and you‘re so nimble and you‘re in this giant truck. It was crazy, driving this giant truck and making these mad manoeuvres.”

The full TED interview can be found here…