Tesla with 600 miles battery range doesn't make sense, says Elon Musk

While Chinese competitors like NIO or GAC have announced performance electric sedans or SUVs with 600+ miles range on charge that will be arriving as soon as this year, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk again expressed doubts whether such a long range is needed at all. This is despite that Tesla advertises the upcoming Roadster 2 as capable of covering 600 miles on a charge, or that the cancelled Model S Plaid+ was supposed to have a 520-mile range. The claim was done by Elon Musk under a Twitter thread about the new Lucid Air which is marketed as a 500-mile EV. That much is not needed, he says:

We could’ve made a 600 mile Model S 12 months ago, but that would’ve made the product worse imo, as 99.9% of time you’d be carrying unneeded battery mass, which makes acceleration, handling & efficiency worse. Even our 400+ mile range car is more than almost anyone will use.

This marks the second time since last June when the S Plaid+ got nixed that Elon Musk claims 400 miles of range is the current sweet spot for electric cars. At the time, he said that "once you have a range above 400 miles, more range doesn’t really matter. There are essentially zero trips above 400 miles where the driver doesn’t need to stop for restroom, food, coffee, etc. anyway."

The Chinese electric cars that advertise 600+ mile ranges, like the NIO ET7 performance sedan, are measuring it with the more generous local cycle than the stringent EPA one uses in the U.S. Moreover, NIO achieves such an impressive range with a custom semi-solid 150 kWh battery pack that is quite heavy indeed, so it remains to be seen whether Musk's point about range proves credible when the ET7 model with the big battery pack hits the market later this year.

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