Elon Musk announced a level faster than the already crazy Insane Mode when he recently talked about the latest upgrades to the Model S.
Insane mode was not enough for the Tesla Team – they craved Ludicrous! Insane mode, if you recall, gets you from 0 – 100kph in a shockingly quick 3.2 secs. Just to put that in perspective the Porsche 911 GT 3 (3.8 991) takes 3.6 seconds and it takes the Bugatti Veyron (16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse) supercar, 2.6 seconds to get to 100kph. The Holden Commodore SS 6.0 V8 has figures of 5.1 secs from 0-100kph – quick by any other standards but decidedly a slow ‘muscle’ machine by comparison.
Bugatti Veyron
Youtube is full of videos with different dedicated sports machines taking on various Model S configurations to see what’s quickest off the mark. Mostly the Model S leaves the competition for dead. The only vehicle I’ve seen beat the P85D Model S has been the Lamborghini Aventador (around US$400,000). With the new Ludicrous mode however, the Aventador now looks decidedly lazy.
Ludicrous mode takes the model S into true Supercar acceleration speeds – 0-100kph is now 2.8 seconds, a mere 0.2 secs slower than the $1.5million 16 cyclinder Bugatti Veyron, the worlds most expensive production car.
But should a luxury family saloon be pitted against dedicated sports and supercars? In a mere two years the Model S has changed substantially. The top end Model S now sports a 90kWh battery pack (and further range), its acceleration has increased from an impressive level to a Ludicrous level, the car has both front and rear drive motors and now boasts a range of autonomous features. It may still be called the Model S but the improvements since winning Car of the Year in 2013 have been remarkable. It’s streets ahead for the Car of the Decade award.
The Model S, more than any other vehicle, is challenging our perceptions of the automobile. It really is a smart device on wheels that continues to morph and amaze. Get all the latest from Elon himself – http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/three-dog-day
In 1980 I was an engineer in the Energy Authority of New South Wales (as it was then called) department which was doing a research project into alternate energy in vehicles.
We were having vehicles converted to electric drive and our senior electrical engineer who had been working at the University in Tasmania before joining our department had built an electric drive unit into a Bedford van which he drove up from Tasmania to Sydney, and he was busy with a second one which was being worked on in the laboratory which was set up for our research project.
After I retired and started learning about building web pages – after 1999 – I built several pages of topics which were of interest to me and ultimately web pages on electric vehicles as my interest had always remained.
Today, Sunday 26 July 2015, I was looking in a search engine for items on the Tesla when I discovered your web site for the first time.
My web pages are not as technically advanced as yours because I don’t have enough knowledge to put on my web pages items such as you have on yours, but here is the web address for my first electric vehicle page:
http://www.red-jos.net/elec1.htm
and there are now 4 more web pages following that one.
Regards and best wishes with your ev site.
Mannie De Saxe
Great article. Nice to see comparisons of the Model S performance up against the performance figures of other well know Australian cars along with the million dollar plus exotics. The Tesla truly is the ‘game changer’. Nobody, and I mean ‘nobody’, can honestly deny its superior performance over the now last century Internal Combustion Engine. In my limited experience with the Model S 85P I would describe its performance in one word as ‘frightening’. What the P90D delivers must therefore leave me speechless – I can’t wait to experience that!