Tesla just unveiled the world’s fastest long-haul semi truck, which can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in only 5 seconds while pulling a trailer. The much-anticipated reveal was the subject of speculation for weeks, with observers wondering whether it would be a freight industry curiosity—or a transformation. The initial take is that it might be the latter.

And that wasn’t even the biggest surprise of the night. 

What followed was a scene straight out of the 1980s sci-fi TV show Knight Rider. With the trucks dominating a stage inside an airport hangar and a raucous crowd gathered around, the trailer of one of Tesla’s Semis tilted up, a cloud of smoke swirled, and out came an all new Tesla Roadster, a reprise of the vehicle that first defined the company as a maker of ultra-fast electric cars. Before the Model 3, Model X, and Model S, there was the Roadster. But this was something very different from the original. 

The new Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, by a good margin, clocking 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds in the $200,000 base model version. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: 620 miles on a single charge. At the invitation of Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, the crowd of Tesla owners and enthusiasts at the Hawthorne, California, airport jumped the barriers and swarmed the vehicles. 

“Wow, that was cool!” Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford C. Bernstein Co. analyst, wrote in a report to clients after the event. “Tesla’s addressable market for Semi Trucks may be considerably larger than we had estimated.”

Musk, 46, is known for being a showman, and Tesla is in the midst of a slower-than-promised rollout of the Model 3, the critical mass-production electric car that will make or break the automaker. The two new vehicles unveiled Thursday night could be seen as distractions at the very time when the company needs to be focused.

As central as the Model 3 is to Tesla’s survival, though, the Semi and Roadster are formidable in their potential to generate revenue. Of the two, the most important for Tesla’s future, the future of transport electrification, and the environment in general is the Semi. 

The truck is a massive Class 8 Day Cab, capable of hauling a maximum vehicle weight of 80,000 pounds—pretty much the biggest long-haulers get—for a whopping 500 miles on a single charge, according to Musk. After the airport event, he sent potential fleet customers out in the Semis on endless breakneck loops along the runway. The trucks get to 60 mph just as quick as a Model 3.

Beyond speed, the Semi’s range and charging time are significantly better than the expectations of six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg before the event. This means the market Tesla is chasing is wide open. In North America alone, the diesel freight trucks in the Tesla Semi’s class account for about $30 billion in sales annually, or more than 250,000 new trucks, according to industry data tracked by Bloomberg.

The Semi’s specs mean that a driver could put in almost 900 miles a day, only stopping to charge during a 30-minute lunch break, and picking up 400 miles of battery range while eating his sandwich. That’s faster than any charger capability today—possibly by an order of magnitude. Moreover, that 900 mile-a-day capacity is actually more driving than U.S. laws allow.  The two prototype Semis on display Thursday were day cabs, but Tesla plans to build a version with a sleeper cabin, too. 

Given the Semi’s potential for long-distance hauling, the one remaining hurdle for luring truckers to electric is cost.

Video: Walmart is using aisle-roaming robots to keep its shelves stocked

Walmart delivered another blockbuster quarter fueled by strong online sales growth and an uptick in its food business. The Arkansas-based company said e-commerce sales surged 50 percent in the fiscal third quarter, while same-store sales were up 2.7 percent.

The world’s largest retailer has been pursuing a digitally focused growth strategy for the last year, which includes an aggressive push into online grocery and increased capital spending on digital supply chain capabilities and in-store technology.

Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon noted that a series of strategic initiatives paid off last quarter, including expanded online grocery pickup, and the launch of mobile express returns. McMillon also highlighted the company’s use of aisle-roaming robots to improve out-of-stock issues and price discrepancies in its stores.

McMillon said Walmart’s food business posted its strongest performance in quarterly comp sales in almost six years.

“Our associates are using technology and apps for inventory management and price changes that help make their jobs easier and increase productivity in the stores,” he said during a pre-recorded earnings call. “Store leverage is helping to allow our strategic investments in e-commerce to continue.”

“Existing customers have become advocates for popular initiatives like online grocery and free two day shipping, and as a result, new customers, suppliers and partnerships are coming to Walmart.”

As for the numbers, Walmart reported net income of $1.75 billion, or 58 cents a share. Revenue climbed 4.2 percent, to $123.18 with non-GAAP earnings of $1 a share. Analysts expected revenue of $121 billion and earnings of 97 cents a share. Shares of Walmart were up nearly 9 percent in early trading.

Looking to the full year, Walmart is expected non-GAAP earnings per share ranging from $4.38 to $4.46, up from its previous forecast for $4.30 to $4.40 a share Wall Street is expecting $4.38 a share on revenue of $496 billion.

“We expect top line growth going forward to be led more by comp sales and e-commerce with less emphasis on new units in the U.S.,” Walmart CFO Brett Biggs said on the earnings call. “We’re prioritizing e-commerce, technology, supply chain and store remodels over new stores and clubs.”

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The tax plans have evolved rapidly since House leaders first introduced their bill at the beginning of the month. Amendments in the Ways and Means Committee restored some cherished tax breaks that had been targeted for elimination, including those for adoptive parents, and expanded the bill’s tax breaks for owners of businesses that are not organized as traditional corporations.

The Senate bill differed from the House version when it was introduced last week, and broke further away on Tuesday night, with a package of amendments that included repealing the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most individuals buy health insurance. To comply with procedural rules that would allow Republicans to pass the bill on a party-line vote in the Senate, the amendment also set an expiration date — Dec. 31, 2025 — on all the individual tax cuts in the legislation.

In light of those changes, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation projected on Thursday that Americans earning $30,000 or less would see their taxes increase, as a group, beginning in 2021, if the Senate bill becomes law, apparently as a function of the mandate repeal driving fewer Americans to claim tax subsidies for insurance.

The committee also projected that Americans earning $75,000 or below would face large tax increases in 2027, after the individual tax cuts expire. When only looking at individual’s tax bills — and not the effects of corporate taxes on individual’s incomes — the committee said Americans at all income levels would see tax increases in 2027, compared to what they would have been if the Senate bill had not passed.

The Senate and House plans also differ on their treatment of state and local tax deductions. The Senate would kill them entirely. The House would maintain them only for property taxes and cap the deduction at $10,000 a year. Economists generally say that those tax breaks are inefficient. But eliminating them, in the context of the House bill, would add up to a large geographic transfer of income, according to research by Carl Davis, the research director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington.

The House bill would raise personal taxes on Californians and New Yorkers by a combined $16 billion in 2027, Mr. Davis found, while cutting personal taxes on Texans and Floridians by more than $30 billion in total.

His analysis finds so-called red states, which Mr. Trump carried in 2016, would receive more than twice as much in personal tax benefits under the plan than the blue states won by Democrat Hillary Clinton, when adjusting for the size of each state’s economy. Only one red state — Utah — would receive lower personal tax benefits under the bill than would be expected, given how much it contributes to the national income; the average blue state, by contrast, would receive lower benefits than expected.

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“It’s not unusual for a tax bill to have varying impacts in different parts of the country,” Mr. Davis said. “But the degree to which this bill makes winners and losers out of different states is remarkable.”

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Curtailing state and local deductions helps finance a core feature of both the House and Senate bills, which happens to be one of the few provisions Mr. Trump has called nonnegotiable in tax discussions: cutting the corporate income tax to a flat 20 percent rate, down from a top rate of 35 percent today. Republicans have kept those cuts permanent, even as the Senate applied an expiration date to the individual cuts and to a key tax credit for families preserved in the House bill. The Senate bill also sets an expiration date on breaks for so-called pass-through businesses, whose owners pay taxes on profits through the tax code for individuals.

In Washington, Republicans have stressed that cutting corporate taxes will supercharge economic growth, accelerating job creation and raising wages in the process. By that theory, making such cuts permanent is essential.

The gamble is apparent. Polls show that voters want corporations to pay higher, not lower, taxes and that they doubt corporate rate cuts will show up in their own paychecks, as the White House has claimed. Perhaps not coincidentally, Republican leaders have pitched their bills largely as middle-class tax cuts, stressing the benefits for the typical American family during television appearances and news conferences.

“The policy expects that the corporate tax cuts will do the most for growth,” said Lanhee J. Chen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who was the policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012. “On the other hand, they’re the hardest to explain.”

It is an especially tricky explanation in the context of the requests Republicans are making of individual taxpayers, particularly the middle class, to trust that any benefits they see from the bills will not vanish over a decade. The Senate bill is scheduled to deliver an individual tax increase on 137 million tax filers in 2027 if Congress does not intervene first, according to calculations by Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore ISI. Liberals warn the shock would be huge for low- and middle-income families.

Republicans are “making a choice as to which elements of their plan are permanent,” said Jacob Leibenluft, a senior adviser at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former economic aide under President Barack Obama, “and I think it’s worth starting with taking them at face value.”

Canceling those looming increases would further add to the federal budget deficit, if the move is not paired with spending cuts. Middle-class families planning ahead can imagine two possible consequences from that decision: Either an immediate increase in their taxes eight years from now, or an explosion in federal budget deficits, which could necessitate spending cuts to safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare.

“The bill reflects talking out of both sides of your mouth at the same time — neither of which is leading to good policy,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Republican leaders in both chambers have said that they will not allow individual tax breaks to expire — and that their corporate cuts will yield enough growth and additional tax revenue to pay for themselves, or at least come close. Ms. MacGuineas and others fear the opposite could be even more likely: that growth will fall far short of those optimistic projections, and when the expiring tax provisions come up for reauthorization, budget deficits will be swelling. The result, they say, would be more hard choices — and predictable ones.

Correction: November 16, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the expiration date of individual tax cuts proposed in the Senate tax overhaul plan. The cuts would expire on Dec. 31, 2025, not Dec 25, 2025.

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