Elon Musk says he's "about to end range anxiety" through a software update to the entire Tesla Model S fleet. It's happening this Thursday, and the sound you hear is the Speculatron5100 grinding to life as everyone tries to figure out what the hell Musk is planning.
Naturally, Musk took to Twitter to make the announcement, offering about as many details as his infamous D tweet last year.
First few thoughts:
- This could have something to do with the "torque sleep" mode Musk promised for Tesla's dual-motor models that boosts efficiency by intermittently tweaking power output to each motor while coasting. However, Musk says this over-the-air update affects all Model S sedans, so that's probably not it, and just managing power output might not be "the end" of range anxiety.
- Then there's the battery swap possibility, which hasn't rolled out to anyone beyond one station accessible to maybe a few dozen (at the most) hand-picked Tesla owners (likely employees). That's more of a hardware thing than a software thing, so maybe there's more to read between the lines.
- Finally, Musk and his engineers have figured out how to wirelessly send power to the Model S using a combination of satellites, mirrors, and thousands of solar-powered lasers that charge the batteries using magic crystals and unicorn tears while the cars are in motion.
We've got an email into Tesla for more details on Thursday's event, and Musk is also speaking at the NVIDIA GPU conference on Tuesday, where we'll be reporting live. Expect a flurry of questions – and probably no answers – then.
Contact the author at damon@jalopnik.com.
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