As reported by PC Mag: If you were expecting Tesla to announce a brand-new car today, we have a bit of bad news for you. Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to tease that there would be some kind of Tesla announcement this week. It's finally here, but it's only an update for the Tesla Roadster series of cars—the company's first major electric vehicle release, we should note.
That said, it's quite an update. The new "Roadster 3.0" package mainly focuses on extending the car's range, which sits at around a claimed 245 miles or so in the car's most recent iteration. With Roadster 3.0, Tesla is making a bevy of improvements to push that range north of 400 miles, or a 40-50% improvement to the Roaster's capabilities. To demonstrate this fact, Tesla plans to drive a Roadster from San Francisco to Los Angeles non-stop in early 2015. And, no, the company couldn't probably make use of one of its recently announced battery-swap stations along the way—those are only for Tesla's Model S cars.
Three main improvements to the Tesla Roadster are responsible for its increased range, and existing Roadster owners can purchase the upgrade pack at some point next year for a yet-to-be-released sum. The first improvement is a brand-new lithium ion battery, which helps catch the Roadster up with modern times (its 2008 battery, novel then, is a bit technologically dated at this point).
"We have identified a new cell that has 31% more energy than the original Roadster cell. Using this new cell we have created a battery pack that delivers roughly 70kWh in the same package as the original battery," reads Tesla's blog post.
A new series of aerodynamic upgrades will cut the car's drag coefficient by 15 percent. As well, new tires and wheel bearings are expected to deliver a 20 improvement to the vehicle's rolling resistance. Altogether, that's how Tesla boosts the Roadster's range. We're more curious just how much it might cost current Roadster owners, though we suspect the price won't be much of a problem for those who didn't have an issue paying north of $100K for a single vehicle to begin with.
The new upgrades mean that Tesla's Roadster is actually its longest-range electric vehicle at this point (for a one-shot trip with no charging or swapping, that is). While Musk does hint that similar upgrades will also hit the company's Model S line of vehicles at some point, there's no word yet as to when Tesla might tweak its more "mainstream" electric cars.
No comments:
Post a Comment