 300-mile range should cost around $20,000 more than the basic version.
Ricketts, however, emphasized the importance of investment in battery technology. “Investing heavily in research and development, Tesla is proving that major breakthroughs are happening quickly,” she said.
Kamath said, “There are a number of manufacturers that are in the electric vehicle space, as well as in the electric vehicle battery space. While Chinese manufacturers are present, there are also Japanese, Korean, German and U.S. manufacturers that have competing battery technologies.”
“Lithium ion battery production is not very labor intensive,” Kamath added. “Competition is typically not driven by labor costs.”
Ricketts reports that new buyers are encouraged to charge their cars each evening using a standard power outlet in their garages. “Most of our Roadster owners find that they never even come close to depleting the battery. Charging is really just a matter of ‘topping up’ continuously,” she said.
Pohorsky said, “For the San Francisco Bay area, you can get from San Jose to San Francisco and back on one charge for a car that’s got a decent amount of battery in it. People need to sit down and really think about how much they normally drive in a single day, and that is surprisingly low.”
Concerns also persist over the impact that increased electric car usage will have on local energy grids. Kamath addressed this, saying, “While utilities do have to examine the effect of electric vehicle adoption on their distribution networks and may have to accelerate upgrades to their capacity in some places, at present, our analyses show that local power systems can accommodate the expansion of electric car adoption without much difficulty.”
He added, “The additional power drawn by electric vehicles is relatively small compared to the capacity of the grid, and a great deal of the charging is expected to occur at off-peak times, like the nighttime.”
A 2008 episode of the British television program "Top Gear" was particularly damaging to Tesla’s battery life reputation. In the episode, host Jeremy Clarkson is shown racing the Roadster against a similar gas-powered sports car when the battery is purported to have died, a claim that was eventually shown to be false.
At the time, officials at Tesla noted that the battery never dropped below 20 percent capacity while filming that particular sequence, despite what viewers were led to believe.
Clarkson, who initially praised the car, said in the episode, “If it does run out, it’s not a quick job to charge it up again. To fill the tank on a normal car, it takes a couple of minutes. To fully recharge the batteries on this from a normal 13-amp socket like this takes 16 hours. So to get from here to the top of Scotland would take more than three days.”
Ricketts noted that Tesla’s customers are often less concerned with the car’s battery life. She said, “With a range of 245 miles, the Roadster doesn’t worry many people. In fact, the range is often cited as a reason for buying the car.”
This has not stopped the company from employing some higher-profile strategies to emphasize that Tesla drivers have similar capabilities to drivers of gas powered vehicles. Ricketts said, “We have also made high-profile roadtrips in the Roadster — from California to Detroit for the International Auto Show, for example — to show that distance driving is possible in an EV.”
Tesla is hopeful that its technology will further the popularity of electric vehicles. “With longer ranges being achieved by EVs, and more successful distance tests being run, the public is starting to see how practical driving electric can be,” Ricketts said.
Centered on Palo Alto, the radii of the circles on the following maps show an approximate range for several different vehicles in the electric category. The Lotus Elise, a gas-powered sports car, is included for comparison.