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Tesla Model 3 surpasses 600-mile mark in hypermile Guinness attempt

[Credit: Sean Mitchell/Twitter]

Published

8 years ago

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Less than a couple of weeks since setting a hypermile run record for the Model 3, Denver Tesla Club president Sean Mitchell, accompanied by Erik Strait, a fellow Tesla owner and host to a popular YouTube channel, managed to push the compact electric car 606.2 miles on a single charge, possibly setting a new Guinness World Record in the process.

Sean and Erik’s hypermile run stands as the first time a Tesla Model 3 has breached the 600-mile barrier. The trip lasted 32 hours, almost double the 18 hours that Mitchell took during his previous hypermile attempt. According to the duo in their livestream of their Guinness Record attempt, their speed this time averaged around 20-35 mph, slightly different than the 30 mph that Mitchell adopted during his first run.

The Tesla enthusiasts posted updates to their social media accounts during the duration of the trip. On Saturday evening, Mitchell posted an update informing his Twitter followers that they have hit the 500-mile mark. During this time, the Model 3’s battery was down to 12%. The Model 3 had used up 55 kWh of its battery as well.

By late Saturday evening, the pair crossed the 600-mile barrier. The Tesla Model 3 ultimately ran out of battery 606.2 miles (975 km) into the trip. According to an update posted by Mitchell on his Twitter page after the run, the electric car averaged 110 Wh/mi and consumed 66 kWh during the long, 32-hour journey. This is considerably longer than the 515.7 miles driven by Mitchell in his previous hypermile attempt.

The journey did not come without its challenges. During dinnertime on Saturday evening, Mitchell and Strait did not even stop for a meal. Instead, one of the pair’s friends decided to do a special burrito delivery, which Mitchell received through a fishing net he stuck out from the vehicle’s window. The pair also did not turn on the Model 3’s air conditioning, causing temperatures in the vehicle’s cabin to reach 108F at one point during the trip.

Mitchell and Strait’s hypermile run was sponsored by Boulder-based solar energy funding firm Wunder Capital. Wunder covered the costs of the trip and the Guinness Record submission. Stuttgart Auto Body, Colorado Detail, & Fyin.com also supported the hypermile run. 

Guinness currently only has a listing for the longest distance traveled by an electric vehicle. The record, which was set in October last year, was established using a modified BMW 5-series that was specifically designed for the Guinness Attempt. A Tesla Model S P100D driven by Tesla Owners Italia managed to hit 670 miles on one charge last August 2017 as well — a feat that warranted a tweet from Elon Musk. 

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In a statement to Teslarati, Mitchell and Strait described their experience during the recent hypermile run.

“It was amazing to me to see the support of the Tesla community. They were so supportive and encouraging of our efforts. They only did they support us by tuning into the livestream but they also, to our surprise, donated money through YouTube. The Model 3 is such a new car. This hypermile shows that not only is the Model 3 amazingly engineered for the masses, but EVs are a viable option for everyone,” Mitchell noted.

“It certainly brought attention to EVs in general and helped bring awareness about Teslas. We hopefully helped discourage range anxiety, even though we were an extreme case. We showed what Teslas are truly capable of. Also, by livestreaming the entire event, we had a lot of people tune in and ask a lot of good questions related to Tesla that we were able to help answer and clarify,” Strait stated.

The Model 3’s battery capacity and range have become some of the biggest advantages of the vehicle. Consumer Reports, which did not give the Model 3 a “Recommended” rating due to its braking distance, still stated that their car broke their records for range, managing to travel 350 miles on one charge.

Watch the final leg of Mitchell and Strait’s record-setting hypermile run in the video below.

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Lifestyle

Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

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3 days ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

6 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

1 week ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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