The company’s stock is up $11.80 on Tuesday afternoon.
Tesla’s stock was up nearly 6% last week, but that was before the company announced a major upgrade to its battery pack.
That upgrade is expected to add up to about 300 million pounds of lithium-ion battery cells to the vehicle.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the battery upgrade will deliver up to 500 miles per charge, which will be enough to make the Model 3 and Model X SUV viable in a few years.
Tesla said it’s planning to have that battery pack available by the end of 2021, though it’s not clear when that could be.
Tesla said the new battery will be compatible with existing Tesla cars as well as the Model S sedan and Model 3 SUV.
We’re going to make it more attractive for people to buy Tesla.
It’s also not clear how that will impact Tesla’s sales.
Musk said the upgrade will also boost the Model X pickup truck.
“We’re still waiting on the battery pack to get the same capacity as the existing pack,” Musk said.
“But the improvement in the battery capacity is going to be more than enough to enable us to build a Model X, and it will be more powerful than the existing vehicle.”
Tesla said the battery will help it “make even more EVs” and that it plans to have about 350 million EVs available by 2025.
The Model 3 is expected be Tesla’s first mass-market electric car.
It will offer a price tag of $35,000.
The Model S and Model Y were the company’s cheapest cars to date, though the latter two were not yet fully released.
Tesla has a lot of work to do to become a mass-production carmaker.
Last week, the company posted a $1 billion loss and was forced to postpone a launch date of 2021.
At the same time, Musk said Tesla was getting close to completing a deal to sell its Gigafactory in Nevada to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn.
That factory is expected by 2020 to produce 1.2 million lithium-air batteries per month. Bloomberg
