Mark Brake/Getty Images Musk has talked about an electric truck for about a year.Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has been teasing the release of a new electric semi-truck for about a year, and the company is set to unveil one Thursday night. Industry experts have been predicting what features the new truck will have. Besides running on electric energy, the truck will be outfitted with technology that gives it more autonomy, relieving some duties from drivers and replacing them with “self-driving” skills, experts have predicted. Tesla TSLA, +0.39% isn’t the first company to experiment with self-driving trucks. Waymo, the company that spun out of Google parent Alphabet GOOGL, +1.16% , has also worked on self-driving trucks, as has Mercedes-Benz. Research by the nonprofit nonpartisan think tank Rand Corp. has shown that when vehicles are even slightly better than human drivers, they can reduce the number of fatal car crashes. Although other companies have made their own innovations with self-driving technology, Musk might create new excitement, said Jeremy Straub, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at North Dakota State University. Here are a few ways the new Tesla truck could change the roads.via