When it comes to trucking, fuel prices move the needle like almost nothing else. So, with the average price of a gallon of diesel hovering around $6.47, roughly 75% above the year-ago level, Tesla would seem perfectly positioned to sell as many units of its long-delayed electric Semi as it can crank out. There’s just one problem: The company still hasn’t built enough of the high-powered chargers the truck depends on, a bottleneck that could keep sales stuck in the slow lane.

Tesla, which began building Semis early this year, marked the start of “high-volume” production at its dedicated plant for the truck in Sparks, Nevada, late last week. Dan Priestly, director of Semi sales, said in the livestream that the facility will soon produce 1,000 units a week and up to 50,000 a year. That capacity may eventually matter. But Tesla has only opened a handful of its own “Megachargers,” direct current charging stations that can deliver up to 1.2 megawatts of electricity – enough to power more than 500 homes – so far and may only have 30 such stations operating by year-end. That means deliveries this year are likely to fall far short of the 5,000 or more predicted by Tigress Financial Partners early this year–and the tens of thousands Elon Musk has said he wants to sell.

“I might say 250 or less,” electric trucking researcher Jason Roycht, founder of Meridius Consulting in Detroit, told Forbes . “The problem is there’s not enough charging ready.”

Tesla has proposed setting up about 60 Megawatt Charger Stations (MCS), though few are operational. Each of those 30 MCS units the company hopes to power up this year would be able to handle multiple trucks charging at the same time, Priestly said during the factory event.

However, “only 14 MCS stations are listed as open, in development or in pre-construction, of which just five are open today, including two that are at Tesla sites,” said Loren McDonald, CEO and Chief Analyst for Chargeonomics. The other three are in California, operated by Tesla partners in Bakersfield, Fresno and San Bernardino. That number could soon rise owing to excitement over the Tesla Semi, particularly given the spike in diesel costs, though it’s unclear how quickly many more will be operational.

Musk, as tends to be his habit, set unrealistically high expectations for Tesla’s electric Semi when the model debuted in 2017 , bragging about how cheap it would be to operate compared with a diesel rig, how compelling it would be for drivers, with its futuristic exterior, center-seat position and rapid acceleration, and range of up to 500 miles per charge. But much like his past predictions for self-driving cars, solar roofs and selling 20 million Teslas a year, reality has been a bit different. Initially, the truck was to hit the road in 2020, starting at about $150,000. Its launch slipped to 2023, and production didn’t actually start until this past April. The standard range model, capable of 300 miles per charge, costs about $250,000, while the 500-mile version starts at $290,000, at least 50% more than a new diesel truck.

Even with a higher sales price, the Tesla Semi is “going to make a ton of sense economically,” Musk said in video comments for the factory opening. “Because the cost of electricity per mile is much less than the cost of diesel, especially in these types of trucks.”

With the ongoing war in Iran spiking diesel prices, that would seem to be the case. But there are still hurdles to overcome. In addition to the charger shortage, big trucking fleets will likely hesitate to place massive Semi orders until they have a clearer view diesel prices will stay high, said Roycht. That’s because the biggest trucking companies in the U.S. typically buy fuel under long-term contracted rates, locking in prices for years that are far more favorable than current pump prices.

“Somebody like a J.B. Hunt has these contracts that have been structured for decades with fuel surcharges,” Roycht said. “So you don’t really feel the pain as a carrier. You feel it a little bit for usage that’s not on the clock, so to speak. But it’s kind of a dirty little secret that nobody [in the trucking industry] really pays retail. Everybody’s got their fuel card.”

Roycht, who previously worked on electric semi sales for now-defunct Nikola and with Bosch’s trucking team, said California will be the main market to watch for the time being owing to the state’s $120,000 rebate for electric big rigs, the country’s most generous incentive. Customers based there who are planning to buy Teslas have applied for the most rebate vouchers by far, though public records show relatively few were redeemed as of the end of July. A final tally of rebate voucher applications for the year will be posted in October, but will offer little visibility into deliveries.

Tesla has racked up thousands of orders for its truck, including 500 from Einride and 370 for Watt EV announced in recent months. The new ZET SCALE Alliance, a national consortium led by Catalyst Mobility and the Smart Freight Centre, announced plans to help purchase 2,500 electric semi trucks this month. Not all of those will be Teslas. Even including thousands of orders for the Semi made after its 2017 debut, Tesla doesn’t yet appear to have amassed 50,000 orders to match its annual production capacity. The company hasn’t provided a tally of truck orders in years, though it may begin to do so now that the factory is fully operational.

Neither Priestly nor Tesla responded to a request for details on deliveries this year.

Should the war in Iran, which triggered the spike in global gasoline and diesel prices six months ago, persist, that would likely boost demand for Tesla’s truck, though Roycht thinks the biggest trucking firms will be slow to add large numbers of Semis.

Even with higher diesel prices, “there’s not an immediate crisis at the carriers,” he said. “It’d be kind of stupid to make a business decision based on today’s price for fuel that’s going to be an investment that you’ll be stuck with for the next five years.”