Tesla Will Exceed 700-Mile Range Soon

Tesla Model S (Credit: Tesla Motors )

As other automakers are jumping into the electric vehicle market, Tesla Motors is pressing down on the accelerator and pulling away. The company is flexing its muscles specifically when it comes to battery tech. CEO Elon Musk recently divulged that a 600-mile range for its vehicles will be realistic around 2017, with a target 725 miles by 2020.

Those kinds of figures would quiet reservations consumers have about electric cars not going far between battery recharges. It would mean less stopping and plugging in, actually making owning an electric vehicle more practical than one with an internal combustion engine.

That’s also a big leap forward from the approximately 300-mile range the top-of-the-line Teslas boasts right now. Every time Musk makes some bold announcement like this, the doubters start to line up. It’s something that comes with the territory of pushing boundaries, and most of the time Tesla proves these individuals wrong.

Lest everyone forget, Tesla has been hard at work constructing its uber-large battery production facility. While it looks impressive in drone footage with the massive roof wearing a seemingly endless sea of solar panels, that only begins to scratch the surface of the site’s future importance. It will help Tesla churn out more batteries for less money, opening the way for the budget-friendly Model 3 in the near future. It’s also not a huge leap of logic to conclude that the Gigafactory will be the key to Tesla creating batteries that can more than double the range of the different all-electric models.

Hopefully this revelation pushes the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and others to create electric cars that can go 800 or 900 miles without charging. Ultimately, consumers are the ones who win out with all of this innovation, plus everyone will be able to literally breathe a little easier.