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Tesla Rolls Out Roadster 3.0 Battery Upgrade (R80)

From 2008 to 2012, Tesla sold roughly 2,450 examples of the Roadster. When it was new, the model retailed for a mind-boggling $109,000. For those who want more bounce to the ounce, Tesla can retrofit its first-ever model with a juicier battery.
Tesla Roadster 3.0 (R80) Battery Upgrade 1 photo
Photo: augkuo on TMC
Colloquially referred to as the Tesla Roadster 3.0, the battery update was first announced in 2014. Elon Musk had promised an “almost 400-mile range,” yet that’s not exactly the case, if I’m honest. The retrofitted pack is good for 340 miles (547 km). It’s still a lot of range, though, even when this upgrade is compared with the Model S and the Model X.

However, how could Tesla explain the $29,000 price for this upgrade? Well, it’s not exactly simple to one-up the battery of the Roadster. “It is not our intention to make a profit on the battery pack. The reason the cost per kWh is higher than a Model S battery is due to the almost entirely hand-built, low-volume nature of Roadster battery packs. It also includes additional work to remove, upgrade, and reinstall the power electronics module (PEM.)”

Apparently, Tesla Motors can do no more than 5 retrofits per week due to a very good reason. “We have a pretty limited production capacity. We are using some very old Roadster production equipment […] We can right now build a few battery packs a week – something like 3, 4, 5-ish a week or I should say ‘retrofit’ since we take back the old battery pack and we retrofit completely into a new battery pack,” Tesla CTO JB Straubel explained to Electrek.

If you want to get the Tesla Roadster 3.0 battery upgrade, the first thing you need to do is place a $5,000 deposit, then wait as much as Tesla Motors says you have to wait. Once you’re bored to death from waiting, Elon Musk will come out of his hiding and announce that the second-generation Tesla Roadster will make its market launch in 2019. Funny, isn’t it?
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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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