Tesla Model S goes a record 560 miles on a single charge, Elon Musk is not impressed
Tesla's Model S, in its most luxurious, P100D variety, officially has a 337-mile range.
But if you drive very, very carefully, you can extend that by more than two hundred miles, as recently shown by two Tesla enthusiasts.
The practice is called hypermiling, and it involves driving in such a way as to achieve the biggest possible range on one fuel tank or charge. This usually means driving slowly, not using air conditioning, and even trying to get tail wind on your side to squeeze that extra mile of range.
Steven Peeters and Joeri Cools took a slightly different approach than usual, though. As explained in a blog post, unearthed by Electrek, the two took a Tesla Model S P100D to a closed, 16-mile loop in Belgium, and simply drove around in circles for nearly 24 hours until the battery said: enough.
As a result, the two enthusiasts drove their Tesla 560 miles or 901.2 kilometers on a single charge.
This beats the previous hypermiling record for a Tesla Model S, held by Casey Spencer who managed to squeeze more than 550 miles of range from a single charge of his 85D in 2015.
Hypermiling is not the best way to test a vehicle's range, as it is simply not the way cars are typically driven (and in many cases it's impossible to drive this slowly — many freeways, for example, have a minimum speed limit).
But it's a cool way to test the car's limits and learn about the most efficient way to drive — in this case, for example, Peeters and Cools learned that the P100D is most efficient when driven at 24.8 mph.
It's also a way to get noticed by Elon Musk, who claims even this record is ripe for beating if you've got the right tires.
You've heard the man. Get back to work.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
