Tesla cars are already leaders in mileage per charge. Most of the models have a mileage of around 325 miles per charge. But now, Elon Musk's company is aiming to cross the 1,000-kilometer (621 miles) barrier. According to Tesla CEO, the company is developing a battery that will give a 1,000-km range per charge while a new smaller hatchback will be launched for the European market.
Musk's comments came two months after a disappointing Tesla Battery Day (September 22) where he claimed that the company was developing a battery (named 4680) that would have a million-mile range and would close the gap with fossil-fuel cars in price. But with no product to show, Battery Day turned out to be a flop and disgruntled investors wiped out $50 billion from the company's market value.
Two months later, he has made another claim. "As far as range is concerned, I think have shown that the range can be very long. In fact, we could make it even longer than it is today. Our longest-range vehicles have a range of over 600 kilometers and there's more we could actually do. We even have some under development long term that could do 600 miles," Musk said during the European Battery Conference.
1,000 Kilometers Range
Regarding the first claim, Musk said such a cell is already under development at its Giga Factory in Texas, the U.S. While its famed tabless battery 4680 that will give range up to 1,000 kilometers will be equipped with cars from 2022. The first beneficiary of the battery would be the Tesla semitruck at around 300 Watt-hour/kilogram, the Daily Mail reported.
"Getting a range of 500 km is I think quite easy, trivial to be frank, for a semitruck and this is assuming a truck that is pulling a load of 40 metric tons," Musk explained. "If you want, for long-range trucking, you can take the range up to easily 800 km. And we see a path over time to 1,000 km range for a heavy-duty truck."
However, to match the cost of gasoline cars, Tesla will have to scale up its production of batteries. Musk has already made a plan to achieve that. Musk said that the company would build the world's largest battery factory near its car plant in Berlin, Germany. The battery plant will initially have a capacity of 100 gigawatts per year and then it would ramp up production with up to 250GWh a year.
Apart from that, the South African entrepreneur will also launch a smaller hatchback car for the European market in near future. He believes such a car would have demand in the EU due to inadequate parking space for bigger cars. "In the U.S., cars tend to be bigger. I was driving a Model X around Berlin and we had quite a lot of trouble finding a parking space that could fit it," Musk said at the conference.
