Owners of Model 3 sedan of Tesla Motors Inc. would most likely be charged for using the network of Supercharging stations of the company. At present this service comes free to the owners of current models of the company, said Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.

“Free Supercharging fundamentally has a cost,” Musk, 44, said on Tuesday during Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

“The obvious thing to do is decouple that from the cost of the Model 3. So it will still be very cheap, and far cheaper than gasoline, to drive long-distance with the Model 3, but it will not be free long distance for life unless you purchase that package,” he said.

The price of the package was not made clear by Musk.

The Supercharging stations of Tesla are built to enable long-distance — even coast-to-coast — driving in Tesla’s all-electric cars and to ease “range anxiety”. Such Supercharging stations are typically located at malls on highways between major cities.

For customers of the Model S and Model X, the use of any of the 623 Superchargers in the world is free. However Tesla has found that some customers go to their local Superchargers out of habit. According to the company’s website, the Superchargers deliver more than 10 times the range provided by other chargers – 170 miles of range in 30 minutes.

“The best thing to do is to charge your car where you charge your phone: at home and at work,” said Musk.

As Tesla prepares to begin producing the Model 3, slated to start at $35,000, about half the base price of the larger Model S car, the smallest and youngest publicly held U.S. automaker is investing heavily in growth.

Consumers stood in long lines to place $1,000 deposits for the promise of a fully electric car with a range of at least 215 miles (346 kilometers) resulted in Tesla having 373,000 pre-orders for the Model 3.

Musk has already set an ambitious goal of building 500,000 vehicles a year to 2018, two years earlier than previously planned based on the pre-bookings and potential demand. Tesla has said that the first Model 3 deliveries will be in late 2017.

Critical to getting the Model 3 out on time and at the lower price is the battery factory Tesla is building east of Reno, Nevada. Battery-cell production there will begin in the fourth quarter, Tesla has said. An investor in the plant is Panasonic Corp. which is the supplier of battery cells for the Model S and the Model X sport utility vehicle.

Tesla and Panasonic are moving to slightly larger battery cells, Musk said. They will move to cells that are 20mm x 70 mm instead of using cylindrical cells that measure 18 millimeters x 65 mm.

(Adapted from Bloomberg)