Einride to add 500 Tesla Semis to autonomous electric fleet
Key takeaways
- Einride plans to add 500 Tesla Semis over 24 months, tripling its Saga AI-equipped fleet.
- The trucks will serve Amazon and other customers across freight corridors in five states.
- Einride expects a fleet of 1,500 to 2,000 trucks by 2028 while targeting cash-flow break-even.
Autonomous and electric freight company Einride plans to buy 500 Tesla Semi trucks in the next 24 months and run them on its Saga AI fleet intelligence platform, a plan the companies say will be the biggest deployment of its kind so far.
The leaders of Einride, headquartered in Stockholm and listed on Nasdaq in June, said the Semis will serve Amazon and other customers and run in freight corridors in California, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas. If completed as planned, the 500-unit deal will triple Einride’s fleet running on the Saga AI operating system, which has so far overseen more than 19 million miles driven.
Einride will finance the purchase of the Tesla trucks through a four-year asset-backed loan arrangement that has an effective interest rate of about 14%, CFO Anubhav Verma told investors and analysts on an Aug. 18 conference call. Verma said bringing on the Semis, along with growth in Einride’s work at five Amazon locations, should grow the company’s revenues to a point where it will start 2027 at about $90 million annually versus a first-half pace of about $54 million.
CEO Roozbeh Charli told analysts that his team’s 500-truck order with Tesla is important to Einride's ability to turn more of the roughly $800 million in potential sales with partners into real revenue.
“The capacity of the vehicles and the specification of the vehicles also unlocks another realm of use cases for customers in terms of lanes and distances,” Charli added.
A big midterm goal for Charli and his team is to break even on a cash flow basis in 2028. By then, Einride’s executives expect that the company’s fleet will comprise between 1,500 and 2,000 trucks. In the first six months of this year, the company’s operations had a negative cash flow of about $56 million.
Word of Einride’s Tesla deal comes less than a week after the company’s leaders said they were teaming up with Paccar’s DAF Trucks division in Europe to bring the Einride Driver hardware-software platform to DAF vehicles. The companies plan to do some testing later this year and commission DAF trucks to run on the Einride Driver stack next year. (The Driver product also powers Einride’s own cable-autonomous vehicles (pictured at right), for which it contracts with outside manufacturers.)
Shares of Einride (Ticker: ENRD) initially popped more than 20% in Aug. 18 trading but steadily gave up ground after that (along with their publicly traded peers Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI). They closed at $5.73, down 7% from their previous close. They are now down about 60% since mid-June, and the company’s market capitalization is now about $815 million.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of experience in business journalism. Since 2021, he has written about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications FleetOwner, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, Oil & Gas Journal, and T&D World.
With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector and many of its publicly traded companies.