Tesla opens supercharger locations in London and Birmingham

Tesla has opened two supercharger locations in London and Birmingham to allow Tesla car owners to recharge their vehicles more rapidly than they  normally would.

With the development, Model S owners should be able to drive from London to Edinburgh, stopping once in Birmingham for a 20-minute battery top-up.

The first new Supercharging site at the Hyatt Regency London can be accessed via the hotel car park, which is free to Model S owners for one hour at the time of charging. The facility offers valet parking.

The second Supercharging site too is at the Hyatt Regency, in Birmingham.

The 85kWh battery on the Model S, comes with a theoretical range of 312 miles. Customers  can drive the 100 or so miles from London to the Hyatt Regency Birmingham, then top up from two thirds to full 312-mile range capacity in 20-30 minutes, to resume their journey.

The company's Supercharging sites are available to Model S owners for free, for life and more are expected to come up in due course of time.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors is pushing ahead with its European expansion opening its 50th supercharger station available for free to its Model S drivers, Engineering and Technology magazine reported.

With the supercharger at Narbonne, France, the 50th in Europe, Tesla car owners can drive from Stockholm to Cote d'Azur without the risk of running out of power along the way.

The company's strategy of building superchargers that allow electric car drivers to charge their cars within 30 minutes to the full battery capacity and giving the owners of Tesla cars free access to those facilities, is designed to eliminate range anxiety, seen as a major hurdle in the way of more widespread electric vehicles use.

The company built its first supercharger in Europe a year ago in Norway and has since established its presence across the continent, particularly in the UK, Scandinavia, Benelux and France.

Tesla had already built 168 supercharger stations worldwide, making it both the largest and the fastest-growing fast-charging network in the world. The European Supercharger network, in July alone delivered over 600MWh of energy to Model S vehicles, accounting for 2.2 million miles driven.

Though the  Tesla Model S, boasts a range of 300km, and has been praised as a major breakthrough in the electric vehicle design, it has had less enthusiastic reviews with the US Consumer Union's monthly Consumers Reports magazine writing earlier this week that the acclaimed car had "more than its share of problems".