It may seem like ages ago, but it wasn’t all that long ago that ‘range anxiety’ was a legitimate concern amongst prospective Tesla owners. To help convince potential buyers that they wouldn’t be left stranded on the road with an empty battery pack, Tesla embarked on a two-pronged strategy. First and foremost, the company began rolling out an extensive network of Supercharger locations all across the globe. Second, Tesla over the years has slowly but surely added range to its fleet of vehicles. Today, you can pick up a Model S with an impressive 335 miles of range. Beyond that, Tesla’s next-gen Roadster is poised to deliver an even more impressive 620 miles of range on a single charge.
The range figures above are based on normal driving conditions, but the actual range of an electric car can be increased significantly via a technique called hypermiling. In short, hypermiling involves driving a car in a way (read: slower) such that power is used far more efficiently as to keep the battery pack up and running for a significantly longer time. Recently, a pair of enterprising folks in Colorado decided to take their Tesla Model 3 out for a carefully controlled drive and, in the process, managed to eek out a range of 606.2 miles over the course of 32 hours. The only breaks were for a quick breakfast, driver swaps, and brief stretching outside of the car.
The circumstances behind the 606.2 mile journey are beyond boring, but such is life when you’re intent on hypermiling as opposed to driving normally. Specifically, the Model 3 in question had the AC turned off and drove around a 1-mile loop, always staying between a speed of 20 to 30 MPH. And seeing as it’s been sweltering hot around the country over the past few days, one of the Model 3 drivers noted that the inside of the cabin reached a temperature of 108 degrees at one point.
Final #Model3 hypermile numbers from @teslainventory and I: 606.2 miles (975 km), 66 kWh, and 110 wh/mi, and 32 hours of driving. At its peak it was 108F in the cabin with no a/c running. Thank you @Tesla and @elonmusk for making such an incredible piece of machinery! pic.twitter.com/Z1LJk4Ligk
— Sean Mitchell (@seanmmitchell) May 27, 2018
The entire journey was captured on YouTube, all 32 hours of worth. If you want to check out the last 8 hours of the trip — and we can’t imagine you would — you can check it out below.
