Some Tesla owners from Australia (Simon Hackett and co-driver Emilis Prelgauskas) recently did what nobody succeeded doing since the appearance of electric cars on the market: they went 501km with one battery charge, from Alice Springs, in the Australian Northern Territory, to the finish marker at a point 183 km north of Coober Pedy, in South Australia.
Indeed, the speed was not high, just 55 km/h, a speed where drag doesn’t matter so much.
“Emilis and I have decades of experience flying gliders competitively and we applied the same energy conservation techniques to our driving, with significant results! The car had about 3 miles of range left when the drive was completed. We travelled 501km on a single charge. Let that sink in for a minute.
“The security seal was applied to the charge port door when we started the journey. As this is being done as part of the Global Green Challenge, we have a full set of official verifiers here who will attest to the results and to achieving the outcome. We were followed along the journey by our support crew and a documentary film crew – so we have it on film.
“It’s late here and we have another 541k to drive (with an intermediate charge stop) tomorrow – and another two days of the event left after that. When we’re done, we will have driven over 3000 km’s in the Roadster over the course of only six days, from Darwin to Adelaide.”
The Roadster’s autonomy is 244 miles by default – I guess the 2010 edition will offer more.
[source: Tesla motors]
I want some of that! 244miles is more than enough for me. That’s more than 350km š can’t wait till I can afford one. Wish they would bring out an economy model already. I could afford almost half my current car payment extra right now to pay for such a car. And I would still save money!