Since the night of Saturday, Tesla has been offering a new version of its premium electric cars Model S and Model X with more range on its US website, as observers report in several forums. “Long Range plus” replaces the previous Long Range variant. This increases the range of the Model S according to the US EPA standard from 373 miles to 390 miles (628 kilometers), for the Model X from 328 miles to 351 miles (565 kilometers).
So far, no changes can be seen on the Tesla website for the performance variants of Model S and Model X. Neither on the websites for other markets such as Germany. Here, the two electric cars will continue to be offered as maximum range or performance, and the range details according to the European WLTP standard are unchanged.
The news from Model S and Model X with a longer reach, at least in the USA, caused confusion. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also contributed to this: on Twitter, he initially announced the higher range without explanations and then, when asked, explained that the two electric cars were already being produced with the requirements for greater range, which would soon be activated by a software update. In the past few months, a series of “small hardware improvements” have been gradually introduced in production – “the software simply thinks the car is less efficient than it is,” Musk wrote.
Many small hardware improvements throughout the car that have been introduced gradually over past several months
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 15, 2020
This suggests that the higher EPA range was not achieved with a larger battery, but with more efficiency in the rest of the drive. The hacker @green discovered in Tesla’s software code at the end of January, however, indications of new batteries for Model S and Model X, which he said should be introduced in three months at the latest, i.e. by the end of April. Now he explained that the greater range could mean that a battery with a capacity of 110 kilowatt hours would be installed. But one can only say that with certainty when the first “Long Range plus” electric cars from Tesla are delivered,
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