By Steve Hanley

Posted on March 5, 2016

Jason Hughes white hat hacker extraordinaire has uncovered signs that Tesla may be revealing a 100 kWh battery in the near future. By analyzing a series of alphanumeric characters found embedded within Tesla’s most recent firmware 7.1, Hughes was able to find a cryptographic message that would ultimately reveal that Tesla had a “P100D” in mind.

In a tweet addressed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Hughes let’s the cat out of the bag by revealing the encrypted message pointing to presumably an upcoming performance version of the Model S or Model X with a 100 kWh battery.

@elonmusk @teslamotors #tesla I know your secret. SHA256 of best part: 5fc38436ec295b0049f186651ebba5fd55e8d7b81eb61cbd00d3f1bf18dd9c81

— Jason Hughes (@wk057) March 4, 2016

The community at TMC quickly went to work to decrypt Hughes message. LuckyLuke of The Netherlands validated the SHA-256 encrypted message as reading “P100D”.

“With the latest 2.13.77 update [Tesla] included the badges for the P100D”

Hughes was quick to applaud the detective work by others with this tweet:

You guys are great. Fun to get home and find people have cracked some SHA256 I posted 😉 Nice work. #P100D #Tesla pic.twitter.com/46iqA74ghB

— Jason Hughes (@wk057) March 4, 2016

We spoke with Hughes to find out why the P100D discovery might be very credible. According to Hughes,

“there have been configuration options in the firmware as early as about two months ago. With the latest 2.13.77 update [Tesla] included the badges for the P100D, among other things. I’m very confident that it’s a real thing based on what I’ve seen of other things in previous versions of the firmware. For example, the ’90’ was in the firmware for some time prior to release looking at historic versions of the firmware acquired from other salvage [center displays]”

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that Tesla would be working towards a 100 kWh battery. Musk has repeatedly indicated that battery capacity will increase by approximately 5% a year. Though a jump from 90 kWh to 100 kWh is more than double that prediction, the goal of achieving a 300 mile battery has long been in the sights for the company. With the recent phase out of its 85 kWh battery, a 100 kWh battery would make for a compelling upgrade for buyers looking to maximize performance while increasing range by over 10% above the current largest battery offering.