An electric car with 650km range? Coming soon, says Tesla’s Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that it won’t be long before the pioneering electric car company will be making cars with nearly 650 kilometres of real driving range.

“It won’t be long before we have a 400-mile range car,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday.

While a long range driving range is not necessarily a requirement for all drivers of electric vehicles (in Australia, the average daily commute is only around 40km), detractors of EVs often point out the shorter range of EVs generally compared to internal combustion engine vehicles.

Nevertheless,a long driving range is something of a selling point, particularly in Australia for those who often drive the comparatively long distances between our cities and towns, even if longer range generally means bigger batteries and bigger up front costs.

(ED: This is another part of the new energy economy that people struggle to get their mind around. The biggest cost for batteries, wind and solar is the upfront cost, the running costs are much less).

To date, Tesla’s longest range vehicle is the Long Range Model S electric sedan, which has a real world driving range of 370 miles (or 595km).  This is based on the more accurate US-based EPA rating compared to the inaccurate NEDC cycle used in Australia – which shows 660km range for the LR Model S.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy’s electric vehicle dedicated site, The Driven, click here…