NEW YORK: Following the news that two of his electric cars had traveled from LA to NYC, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors shared his vision for the future in an interview on America’s CBS news channel.

This weekend, two Tesla electric cars drove from Los Angeles to New York in 76 hours. The Model S cars were powered exclusively from Tesla’s new solar-powered Supercharger stations that are dotted across America, and free to use for Tesla owners.

Elon Musk told CBS: "This is an important historic milestone, to be able to travel across the country, essentially as convenient for you as what one can do with a gasoline car.” Talking about Tesla's longer-term goals, he added: “The basic idea is to be able to travel for free, forever, on pure sunlight.”

When asked about the cars’ top-level costs of US$71,000, Musk said: “After various tax breaks it actually takes [the cost] down to about US$60,000, and the fact that you can travel free, long distance and your gas costs much less, it takes it down to a gasoline equivalent of about US$50,000. […] What we need to is to get to our third generation car; it is about half the price of Model S, it is a lot smaller, and is coming out in about three years.”

Elon Musk also responded to a question about people having confidence in the availability of charging stations: “We are getting close: about 80% of the US population is covered by superchargers and by the end of this year we expect it to be 85-90%.”

Tesla Motors is continuing to expand its Supercharger network of electric vehicle chargers around Europe too, with its very first station now open in Switzerland on a route between Zurich and Geneva, and a goal for 100% of Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark to live within 320 kilometers of a Tesla Supercharger station by the end of 2014.

To hear more about Tesla’s electric cars as well as his ventures into space travel, watch the CBS video here.

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By Clare Saxon