Tesla Motors made its entrance into the automotive market with the Tesla Roadster back in 2008. The $100,000 sports car wasn’t just Tesla’s first commercial vehicle, it was the first highway-capable all-electric vehicle to be mass produced and sold in the United States, and although the automaker is hard at work developing a more affordable electric vehicle for consumers, it still hasn’t forgotten about its earliest adopters.
Elon Musk, the renowned CEO of Tesla, announced via Twitter last week that people who purchased the original Roadster will soon be able to upgrade to a new battery pack, as well as some other improvements. While the current battery can power the car for an impressive 245 miles, the new battery will increase that number to a whopping 400 miles, a 60% increase.
“The original Roadster battery was the very first lithium ion battery put into production in any vehicle,” the company wrote in an official blog post. “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. Using this new cell we have created a battery pack that delivers roughly 70kWh in the same package as the original battery.”
It’s impressive to see how devoted Tesla is to improving its existing products, especially when you consider that the Roadster isn’t even in production any more. While the vehicle may have been what put Tesla in the market, it wasn’t exactly perfect. Despite its flaws, however, Tesla worked to improve the vehicle through constant updates during its production life, and now it seems like the automaker is doing that again with the battery upgrade.
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