Tesla to Upgrade Roadster, Offer Trade-in Credit in China

Tesla Motors took full advantage of the holidays. Around Christmas and New Year’s, its common for companies to put off major announcements until after the calendar change. However, Elon Musk is not a man who seems to follow traditional leadership pathways. Musk announced on Christmas Day via Twitter that the latest Tesla Roadster will have a major upgrade.

That change is a battery upgrade that will allow the roadster to travel over 400 miles on a single charge. He specified that the vehicle would be able to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a single charge. However, Tesla later released new details about how the vehicle would achieve that range, and it didn’t have everything to do with battery life.

An official Tesla Motors blog post indicated there would be a Tesla Roadster 3.0 upgrade. The three areas in which Tesla is improving the vehicle are batteries, aerodynamics and rolling resistance. The new battery will reportedly have 31 percent more energy than the original roadster in a new 70 kWh package. The change in aerodynamics is going to involve a new retrofit aero kit. That kit is expected to lower the drag coefficient from 0.35 to 0.31, a 15 percent improvement. Finally, new tires are expected to improve the rolling resistance of the Roadster from 11.0 kg/ton to around 8.9 kg/ton. The combination of all three of those improvements together is expected to get the Roadster its nearly 400-mile range. However, EPA testing will indicate how Tesla’s 3.0 improvements fared, once rubber hits the road.

Another recent development from Tesla is a trade-in program in China. In an effort to further infiltrate the growing Chinese automotive market, Tesla will soon allow consumers to trade-in their vehicles. Chinese consumers can sell their cars to Tesla for credit towards a Model S Sedan.

While this announcement is recent and the results aren’t yet known, what if this program caught on in the U.S? Tesla has indicated that they will sell their own used cars, what about selling trade-in vehicles? Do you think that Tesla will get into the used car business in the USA?