Diesel Trucker With 700 Rigs Bets $15 Million on 50 Tesla Semis

Henry Malukas, who built HMD Trucking from a single truck into a $250 million company running nearly 700 diesel big rigs across Illinois and Indiana, told MotorTrend he is buying 50 Tesla Semi trucks in a deal worth roughly $15 million, a big vote of confidence from a lifelong diesel operator.

Malukas founded HMD 28 years ago with his wife Daiva, back when the initials stood for “hungry man driving,” and he estimates he has personally driven more than a million miles as a driver and owner-operator. With a fleet that is 99 percent Peterbilt diesel models today, his verdict on the Semi is hard to dismiss. “It’s an amazing product. It’s efficient, low maintenance, also the fuel cost,” Malukas told MotorTrend. “It’s unbelievable. And for the driver, I think it’s a dream come true.”

Even with diesel costs surging, fuel prices were not what convinced him. It was maintenance. “We don’t have real numbers yet,” he said, “but based on what I’m hearing, [Tesla Semi] should be much cheaper on fuel. But besides that, just the maintenance side, changing oils. We have to do so much stuff, I’m not even talking about fixing, but just maintaining the diesel vehicle. We have so much involved in that; trucks of oil, it’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done to deliver the loads.”

Malukas doesn’t sound bothered by the practical questions either. He plans to charge the trucks’ roughly 850 kWh battery packs on Tesla’s growing Megacharger network, which delivers up to 1.2 megawatts, plus his own chargers going up in Chicago, and the 82,000-pound gross combined weight rating covers his loads. The real watch item is execution: whether Tesla’s new Nevada production line delivers HMD’s 50 trucks on schedule, and whether the maintenance savings Malukas is counting on show up in his books the way the fuel savings already have for early adopters.

That bottom-line logic is exactly why fleet orders keep stacking up. Tesla just entered high-volume Semi production at its Nevada factory, the official battery specs confirm up to 500 miles of range from an 822 kWh pack, and the 2,500-truck ZET SCALE order doubled the entire US electric Class 8 fleet. Carriers like Hight Logistics are already running them on port routes. As for his own operation, Malukas believes electrics will eventually replace his whole diesel fleet: “100 percent. It works for long haul, any kind of trucking, for any kind of use, it’s going to be electric. The owners of the company look at the bottom line. This is a miracle in my eyes.”