According to The Drive, Michigan-based energy storage startup Our Next Energy (ONE) was able to eke out a whopping 752 miles (1,210 km) of range from a Tesla Model S on a single charge after swapping the all-electric sedan’s battery out for one of the company’s own.
For comparison, that puts the Vision EQXX Concept that Mercedes-Benz recently showed off at CES 2022 with a 621-mile range to shame.
“We conducted two tests, the first on public roads in a trip that spanned Detroit, Michigan, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and back,” said Mujeeb Ijaz, founder and CEO of ONE and former Senior Director of Energy Storage at Apple. “We recorded 752.2 miles on this run at an average speed of 55 mph and in average ambient temperature conditions below freezing.”
While those results bode extremely well considering EVs tend to take a significant hit to range in colder climates, they weren’t even close to the best numbers the replacement battery put up.
“The second test was conducted indoors on a vehicle dynamometer at 23 C (73.4 F) temperature at 55 mph and we achieved 882 miles during this test,” added Ijaz. “It is not surprising that we were getting more range on the dynamometer given the improved temperature conditions and no other factors such as hills and headwinds.”
The two-year-old startup’s secret sauce is its Gemini battery technology, which uses two different types of batteries in what essentially constitutes a single package.
Gemini batteries consist of a relatively small lithium iron phosphate (LFP) “traction” battery that delivers up to 150 miles of range, and another, much larger battery with a more radical (but still lithium-ion) structure that can juice the traction battery up with up to an additional 600 miles of range on the go.
Batteries developed on ONE’s Gemini platform are currently at the proof of concept stage, ready for prototyping.
In addition, the battery ONE retrofitted the Tesla Model S with weighed in at a whopping 203.7 kWh. The stock Model S comes with a 100 kWh battery rated for 375 miles (603 km) of range, while the Vision EQXX Concept that Mercedes claimed 621 miles of EV range with featured a 100kWh battery made with F1-grade materials.
It should be noted that ONE made no modifications to the Model S for any of the tests beyond simply replacing the car’s battery.
With the speed at which things are progressing in the EV battery space, it looks like consumers will soon have access to impressively high-mileage batteries that will make range anxiety a thing of the past.
