In what’s surely the most Silicon Valley automotive news this week, a noted Tesla hacker has posited that Tesla will soon roll out a Model S electric sedan with a larger, 100-kWh battery pack, after he hacked a Model S and found references to such a model in the code. The news comes courtesy of Electrotek, which uncovered the hacker’s tweet to Tesla CEO Elon Musk noting?in inscrutable code-speak?the references to a P100D hidden in the Model S’s onboard software.
If you’re confused at this point, allow us to clear things up with some background. First of all, Tesla’s model naming for the Model S sedan follows a convention where a “P” (for Performance) might be followed by a number and, if a car comes with all-wheel drive, a “D.” The number refers to the car’s battery capacity in kWh, and right now the base Model S is the “70,” for having a 70-kWh battery and rear-wheel drive. The top model, following the discontinuation of the P85D, is the all-wheel-drive P90D, which added 5 kWh to the P85’s battery capacity this year. Hence, a P100D would be both new and, in keeping with Tesla’s naming convention, the new top dog in the Model S family with a 100-kWh battery. So how could the hacker, Jason Hughes, uncover such news in a current, non-P100D Model S’s operating system" Easy. Tesla Motors designed the Model S computer to be upgradeable, with over-the-air software updates sent to ca...