A few new details about Tesla’s upcoming ‘affordable’ electronic vehicle came out of a talk the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk gave last week, and Electrek has the key takeaways from the event. Musk shared info around what we can expect from the upcoming mass market ‘Model E’ from the electric car-maker, and those details suggest we’ll see a car with double the range and battery capacity of existing affordable electrics.
Musk said that the Model E will be about 20 percent smaller than the Model S, and that it’ll attain the same 200 mile range on a single charge. That led Electrek to the logical conclusion that the Model E’s battery will be around 80 percent the capacity of that found in the Model S, which amounts to around 48kWh. That’s still over double the 24kWh battery in the Nissan Leaf, which has an estimated range of 75 miles on a full charge.
The Model E should be priced at around $35,000 or half the entry-level cost of the Model S, thanks to economies of scale and improvements to battery production tech, which would indeed put it within striking distance for a mass market car buying audience. It would also make Tesla the market leader in an entirely new category when it comes to electric vehicles, which is good news for the car maker’s bottom line over the next decade or so.
Tesla recently announced that it would be building a battery “gigafactory” to help it drive down the costs of its battery packs by over 30 percent, which is designed in term to help it build ad scale production of its mass market vehicle, which it wants to bring to market within around three years’ time.