Is EV Range Still Getting Better?

From 2011 to 2022 the longest-ranging electric car each year went from 94 miles to 520, a rise of 96 per cent and a decade of steady gains. Then it stopped. The best of 2023 and 2024 was 516, and 2025 and 2026 both sit at 512.

The record itself has stood for over five years: a Lucid Air Dream Edition Range on 19-inch wheels, rated on 14 September 2021. Nothing sold since has beaten it, including Lucid’s own later cars.

Tesla’s best followed the same shape. It reached 405 miles with the Model S in 2021 and 410 by 2025, a gain of 1.2 per cent in four years.

The median tells the opposite story. It rose from 82 miles in 2012 to 258 in 2022 and 295 in 2026, and the number of rated electric models went from 8 to 321. Long range stopped being a frontier achievement and became a standard feature, which is a better outcome for buyers than another record.

The expectation going in was that announced range would flatter the eventual rating. It does not. Across 20 like-for-like pairs, where a public promise can be matched to the EPA rating of the same trim, 14 cars beat their promise, 2 matched it and 4 fell short. The median result is 3 per cent better than advertised.

The shortfalls are worth naming because they are the exceptions. The original Model S was promised 300 miles in 2009 and rated 265 in 2012, 11.7 per cent short, which Tesla attributed to a change in the test procedure. The Model S Plaid on 21-inch wheels was promised 390 and rated 348; on 19-inch wheels it later rated 396. The Lucid Air Dream Performance was listed at 503 and rated 471.

Three headline figures have no rating at all because the cars were never built or never tested: the Model S Plaid Plus at 520, the tri-motor Cybertruck at over 500, and the 2017 Roadster at 620. A promise with no rating cannot be scored, and this page does not score them.

When Tesla unveiled the second-generation Roadster in November 2017 it promised 620 miles of range. Nine years later the highest EPA rating achieved by any production electric car is 520, and that record is five years old.

At the October 2026 reveal Tesla gave a figure of about 300 miles, and its engineers later told Top Gear to expect 310 to 320 in real use. That is roughly half the original promise. None of those numbers is an EPA rating, because the car is not in production and has not been tested.

The 620 figure is not impossible in principle; it is simply unmatched in practice, by anyone, after nine years in which the rest of the industry doubled its typical range. It belongs on the chart as a line nobody has reached rather than as a rating.