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The incoming Tesla Roadster will be offered with a “SpaceX” performance pack, says company boss Elon Musk, which will give the all-electric performance car acceleration times that are out of this world.
Well, we actually don’t know what it will do just yet. But given SpaceX is Musk’s rocket and spacecraft company (and that Musk has hinted at incorporating rocket tech in the past) it’s unlikely to be slow. In fact, he has promised his EV Roadster will outperform a petrol-powered sports car in ever possible way.
Musk made the announcement at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in Silicon Valley, also promising his new EV would go into production in 2020 (costing circa-US$200k when it goes on sale), and that it would be, in his own words, “crazy”.
To make the Roadster faster than the specification detail revealed last year will be no small feat. When announcing the car in November, Musk promised it would the fastest production car ever, capable of a sprint to 97km/h (or zero-to-60mph) in a staggering 1.9secs. It will scream on, he tells us, to 161km/h in just 4.2 seconds, on its way to a seemingly impossible top speed of 402km/h.
And that, Musk says now, is just the base model.
“What we unveiled with the Roadster was the base model performance. It’s going to have a SpaceX options package. It’s crazy,” he said.
"Gasoline cars still have sort of a halo effect, and I think if we can show an electric car can outperform a gasoline car in every way, then we can sort of get rid of that halo effect."
Thanks to a gigantic 200kWh battery, the Roadster will also offer a theoretical driving range of 1014 kilometres. Enough, Musk points out, to drive from Los Angeles to San Fransisco and back.
In Aussie terms, you’d be able to get from Sydney to Brisbane, and still have enough left in the batteries to to do a few happy laps of Fortitude Valley.
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