Wednesday 23 July 2014

“Record” time for USA Tesla roadtrip

Two motoring journalists claim to have broken the current record for a cross-USA road trip in the Tesla Model S electric car last week.

They clocked in at 67 hours and 21 minutes, around eight hours quicker than testers at Tesla made the journey from the East to the West Coast. The Tesla team made it in 76 hours and 5 minutes.

Dan Edmunds, Director of Vehicle Testing at Edmunds.com and colleague Kurt Niebuhr made the reverse journey (from LA to New York) of 3,331 miles, compared with Tesla’s 3,427.

They did so at an average driving speed of 63,2 mph, cruising 5.2 miles quicker on average than Tesla’s team.

Costing $0 in fuel, rebooting the battery on 23 stops at “superchargers” used 1.06 megawatt hours.

Writing about the drive on Monday, Edmunds rounded it off: “We have an appointment with a couple pints of Guinness that should pair quite nicely with our new world record.”

Earlier this month Tesla released all the patents to its electric car technology, with CEO Elon Musk writing in a blog: "They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology."