Ramon Laguarta, chief executive officer of PepsiCo Inc., stands for a photograph before a closing bell ceremony at a Nasdaq Inc. remote location in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday, Feb. 1, 2019.
Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images
PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta said on Monday that the company is expecting its first delivery of Tesla Semi trucks in the fourth quarter.
Laguarta was speaking from the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26. During an interview on “Squawk on the Street,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer asked about PepsiCo’s plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“You have your own truck network, you have your own delivery system. What are you going to do to be able to cut the emissions from that? Because it’s a great asset but it also generates diesel fumes. Would you be buying a Rivian product, would you be buying somebody’s trucks that use hydrogen? What’s your plan?”
“Transportation is about 10% of our overall gas emissions so it’s important and we’re working on different solutions,” responded Laguarta. “We replace our fleet regularly, every ten years more or less…and we’re already starting to buy electric trucks actually from Tesla. I mean I don’t want to promote anybody but that’s the brand we’re using so far and we’re getting our first deliveries this Q4.” He did not say how many trucks the company is expecting to receive.
The comments come almost four years after PepsiCo first announced it would purchase 100 Tesla Semi trucks. It was the largest known pre-order of the vehicle at the time.
The trucks were scheduled to begin production in 2019, but that production date was delayed. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during Tesla’s Q4 2020 earnings call in January 2021 that production of the Semi is on hold until Tesla can make a high volume of its 4680 battery cells. On the company’s Q2 earnings call in July, Tesla said it was pushing the Semi program to 2022 due to supply chain challenges and the limited availability of battery cells.
According to page 7 of Tesla’s most recent earnings update, the Semi is still “in development,” the company is not listing any installed annual production capacity for it, and its manufacturing location is still “TBD.” By way of contrast, the company lists capacity of more than one million vehicles per year for the Models 3, S, X and Y combined, with more capacity for the Model Y under construction in Berlin and Austin, Texas.
CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.