A small modification allowed Tesla Model S to travel 1,600 miles without charging

If any electric vehicle (EV) owner was told that their car could travel 1,600 miles by plugging it into a charger, they would be delighted.

Interesting Engineering has covered YouTuber Warped Perception's videos before, and if there is something we know, it is that he really does not shrug from putting his Tesla under some weird tests. Last year, he put three jet engines on the car to shave off a second in 0-60 mph acceleration time, and another time towed it on the highway to see how well its battery charged.

This time around, he modified the cargo hold of the Tesla to fit into a noisy single-cylinder generator that would charge up the battery of the EV.

How Tesla went without a charger

The YouTuber must be credited for coming up with bizarre ways of torturing the Tesla battery. On this occasion, he chose to charge it with a generator. But using the generator while stationary would be as good as stopping at a charging station, he decided to take it onboard with him and use it on demand.

This meant making some serious modifications to the rear of this vehicle, which mustn't be a biggie since, by this point, Tesla is surely not providing him any warranties on anything in that car.

So, a few hours of fabrication work later, the noisy generator was mounted on the car along with a motorcycle muffler bought on eBay, which did not do much to reduce the noise.

On the road with chargerless Tesla

With little time at hand to really test the efficiency of his system, the YouTuber set out on his road trip and soon realized that the generator was not pumping out enough power to charge the Tesla battery as quickly as it was being drained.

What follows are multiple occasions where he is seen in the video adjusting the pace of the car to maintain the state of charge of the Tesla battery. When he is close to halting points, the battery charge is often in single digits, causing many anxious moments, even with the onboard generator.

Speaking of which, the noisy generator is left on overnight at the hotel to allow the battery to charge, which must have surely angered many people. Not that anybody was hopeful, but the mileage of the generator is rather pathetic and worse than even an old gas-guzzling car. So, the whole experiment is rather an antithesis of what owning an EV is like.

In the week since the video has been uploaded, 14,000 people liked the idea and gave their stamp of approval by liking the video on the social media site. Hopefully next time, we will see something that actually addresses range anxiety than increasing it every mile of the way.