1 Comment A battery pack manufacturer has released a new solution for Tesla Roadster with aging battery packs. It would slash the car’s weight by about 400 lbs, but it’s not cheap. In many ways, the Tesla Roadster sparked the electric vehicle revolution. It was the first commercially available consumer EV with lithium battery cells – enabling over 200 miles of range on a single charge. The vehicle had comparable or better performance than many other gas-powered vehicles in its segment. The Roadster had its problem. It was a suboptimal solution as it was still heavily based on the Lotus Elise and not designed from the ground up to be electric, but it did its job as a proof-of-concept. Tesla only manufactured about 2,000 of them between 2008 and 2011 before moving on to the Model S and other vehicle programs that were built to be electric from the ground up. Despite being 13 to 16 years old, many Roadsters are still doing well. Electrek’s own Jamie Dow drives his daily. That’s despite Tesla not doing anything with the Roadster program since 2017 when it launched the Roadster 3.0 replacement pack. Battery technology has improved a lot since then, and a company has decided to take advantage of that and offer a new battery pack for Tesla Roadster owners. re/cell, a Texas-based supplier of remanufactured battery packs for EVs, has unveiled a new Roadster battery pack that aims to slash hundreds of pounds off of the sports car. Unlike Tesla’s latest vehicles, which are equipped with skateboard-like platform battery packs, the Roadster has a pack that sits behind the seats in the back and the modules are in the shape seen above. It does cause problems with balancing the weight of the vehicle. The pack is able to achieve the Roadster’s peak power output, but it should be a lot more fun to drive by shaving up to 400 lbs off of the car’s original 2,877 lb (1,305 kg) weight. It does come with a lower energy capacity than the original 53 kWh, but you should be able to achieve very similar range (over 220 miles) thanks to the efficiency gain from the weight loss. Here are the full specs of re/cell’s new Roadster battery replacement pack: Peak Power Output: 260 kW / 285 kW Weight Savings: up to 400 lbs / 180 kg Volume Savings: 3.7 cu ft / 100 liters Energy Capacity: 38 kWh / 47 kWh Rated Range: 220-240 miles / 350-390 km Cell Type: 18650 / 3500 mAh Cell Configuration: 31p99s / 39p99s