The Tesla Roadster, the company’s first production model, debuted in 2008 with a 56kWh battery that, over the years since, have been dwarfed by its stalemates’ even most modest of capacities.
Tesla had announced that they will offer Roadster owners the ability to upgrade this to a higher capacity bank of cells back in 2014, and now the company is finally bringing into the hands of its customers. Albeit in limited supply.
At a shareholders meeting in June, CTO JB Straubel, as reported by Electrek, said: “We have a pretty limited production capacity. We are using some very old Roadster production equipment […] We can right now build a few battery packs a week – something like 3, 4, 5ish a week or I should say ‘retrofit’ since we take back the old battery pack and we retrofit completely into a new battery pack.”
Even at $29,000 USD (or roughly $38,000 AUD), Tesla does not intend to make much or any profit for the upgrade, adding:
“The price of the Roadster 3.0 battery upgrade is $29,000, including all labor and logistics. This is equal to Tesla’s expected cost. It is not our intention to make a profit on the battery pack. The reason the cost per kwh is higher than a Model S battery is due to the almost entirely hand-built, low-volume (only two or three per week) nature of Roadster battery packs. lt also includes additional work to remove, upgrade, and reinstall the power electronics module (PEM).”
The Roadsters that have undergone the battery pack retrofit will have their maximum range extended to an estimated 547km due to an increase in about 40 percent in charge capacity to roughly 80kWh. As such, an ‘R80’ badge will be fitted once the procedure is complete to denote the car’s enhanced range.
Tesla says that owners interested can place a deposit of $5,000 US Dollars (or $6,600 Australian) to have reserve their spot.
For more on Tesla vehicles, including prices and specifications, check out our Showroom.
