Tesla Roadster, the $100,000-plus all-electric sports car manufactured through 2012, will be given a set of retrofit upgrades to increase its driving range from 244 miles to nearly 400 on a single charge.
"The original Roadster battery was the very first lithium ion battery put into production in any vehicle. It was state of the art in 2008, but cell technology has improved substantially since then. We have identified a new cell that has 31% more energy than the original Roadster cell," Tesla Motors
wrote on its company blog last Friday.
Along with the new battery cell, Tesla also explained that the Roadster 3.0 will get a new aerodynamic kit that reduces drag by 15 percent to a coefficient of 0.31.
Lastly, new tires will improve the rolling resistance coefficient by 20 percent.
In real world terms, the new improvements mean that the Roadster can travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single charge — a feat Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will soon show off in early 2015.
All of the improvements were made in light of building Tesla's second publically-available vehicle, the full-sized, five-door Model S — which began with the 2012 model year.
In its blog post, the company made it explicit that, "No new Model S battery pack or major range upgrade is expected in the near term," but,
as The Washington Post pointed out, "It obviously *will* happen long-term," Musk tweeted recently.
On New Year's Eve, Musk also tweeted that the company is working on building a highly-original new charging system for electric vehicles.
ABC reported that it would be available for existing Model S cars, as well as future Tesla models.
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