9 ms·

Tesla Model S P100DL Motor Trend all-time world record 60mph in 2.27s

81 points by saurabh20n 10y ago

kisstheblade 10y ago
One thing I wonder is why Top Gear (the old one) / Grand Tour never has the tesla in it's episodes or drag races? Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it. And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that. Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?
- taurath 10y ago
  They did a road trip in a BMW i3 which is basically a commute car. And their point does stand - if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips.
  - bcrescimanno 10y ago
    As a former Tesla owner and current i3 owner, I really don't understand why the concept of the road trip is constantly held up as the standard by which electric cars should be judged. I really don't understand why people are optimizing for their once a year use case rather than their daily use case. Unless it's your lifestyle, road trips are the exception, not the rule. For my family, it means owning my i3 for commuting and my wife's Toyota Sienna for family trips. For others, it could mean renting a car for a week or two when you take a long road trip. As a fun note: As a BMW i3 owner, BWM offers me up to 2 weeks per year of complimentary gasoline car rental for road trips.
    - taurath 10y ago
      In the case of GT, roadtripping is the lifestyle that they are showing nearly every single episode. I road trip 5-6 times a year myself over 1000 miles, and for that reason I wouldn't personally want to go a full electric car. Nice about the rental car though! The GT people have standards which don't really apply to most people. Most of their shows involve cars that most people will never afford.
      - bcrescimanno 10y ago
        As a huge fan of both Top Gear and Grand Tour, I absolutely understand. My comment was less about their assessment and more about how the concept of the road trip comes up every time electric cars are discussed. Maybe I'm wrong in this assumption as it's based on purely anecdotal observation from my own interactions with people, your 5-6 times a year is an outlier.
        taurath 10y ago
        True! I don't often think about it but growing up in a very rural area a car has meant freedom to go anywhere. Everyone I know with an electric car loves them!
    - stuckagain 10y ago
      If you own two cars, isn't it actually you who have arranged your lifestyle in order to accommodate the electric one? And I feel kinda sad for anyone who feels that going more than 60 miles from home happens only once a year.
      - bcrescimanno 10y ago
        My comment was only meant to discuss people optimizing for the edge case (road trips) vs the common case (daily driving). There will always be people for whom long-distance driving is not the edge case. There's a pretty big assumption that travel beyond 60 miles (or 110 in the case of my i3) requires a car. There are a lot of ways to travel that don't involve driving. I travel frequently; it's almost always by air.
    - dmode 10y ago
      I have a Tesla Model S 60 (lowest battery capacity). I just completed a 800 mile road trip over the weekend. Bay Area to San Diego and back. Zero issues.
    - ajtaylor 10y ago
      I have a VW eGolf and a Toyota Sienna for exactly the same reasons (plus the wife really, really wanted a minivan).
  - maxsilver 10y ago
    > if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips. I don't know about that. They do it just to shit on EV's. (Disclaimer: I own an EV, but also like and watch Grand Tour). It's an entertainment show. They're not about objective analysis. It's the crank-call-radio-morning-show model applied to cars. Their complaints about the i3 was low range (needing multiple recharges) and weak power (when range extended). They could have used something like a Vauxhall Ampera, which is actually designed for the road-trip route they ran (all electric in London, powerful gas range extender for freeway driving at 80+mph). They could have used a pure-EV car that actually had decent range like a Renault Zoe, which would have only needed a single recharge stop to make their entire trip, even driving at 70mph the whole time. But they didn't. They didn't use a fair car to test, because then it would have been less funny.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  They did. It didn't go well: https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-vs-top-gear https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-vs-top-gear Of course there's more to the story - Top Gear isn't exactly "objective journalism" and the team will create a story out of thin air when it suits the show. See also "M3 vs Prius" segment: http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its-how-you-drive-it-that-matters/ http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its...
- tsomctl 10y ago
  The very first episode of The Grand Tour (The Holy Trinity) was about how awesome hybrids are (the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 and Ferrari LaFerrari). Granted, those cars are worth over a million dollars.
  - bcrescimanno 10y ago
    What's interesting about those 3 cars is that while they are hybrids, they don't leverage that technology to increase economy; they use it to increase power. There are real, physical limitations involved in gasoline engines and the electric motors are used purely to compensate for those limitations (time it takes for a throttle to open, fuel and air to mix, and ignite--the time it takes for a transmission to change a gear. These things can be made ultra-fast; but, they cannot be eliminated). BMW did a very similar thing with their 330e model; the electric motor is primarily used to increase the power from the relatively small engine that is normally only on the lower-end 320.
    - rifung 10y ago
      I thought they, or some of them, also only use electric power at low speeds? Doesnt that count as increasing economy?
      - bcrescimanno 10y ago
        I'm not sure about low speeds; but, I believe all 3 cars technically offer an all-electric mode that will let you drive with substantially reduced performance and with a range of 10-15 miles. That said, my original statement was mean to describe the objective of these hybrid cars; any additional "fuel economy" is probably best described as a side effect.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        From the episodes (I myself not being in the market for million dollar hybrid supercars), there's a significant amount of button pressing to have it go all-electric. And I think only 2/3 even had that option.
    - 10y ago
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- qqg3 10y ago
  If anything the Grand Tour was trying to show if affordable electric cars were here yet. They tested a reasonably affordable BMW alongside a traditional engined VW.
- general_ai 10y ago
  Because if you drive a Tesla hard, battery overheats and it shuts down. Plus once you run out of battery (even if it doesn't overheat) you need several hours to recharge it. Plus Tesla is only "high performance" in a straight line. I believe they had an episode with a Tesla. It ended up on a tow truck.
  - dlp211 10y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted. The Tesla S handles like a pig and you can't track the car because the battery can't handle it. These are valid criticisms. Though, the towing part of that episode I think was played up for the show. That said, for 90+% of people, the Tesla S, and almost assuredly the Model 3, will be more than sufficient vehicles for people. The focus on acceleration is an amazing selling point and most people will never track their car. The ranges on these cars are pretty excellent and charging stations are becoming more and more common. These cars aren't for me though, I'll gladly keep driving my BMW. The Tesla feels soulless while driving it and the skinny tires and the extreme weight shifts prevent you from hammering through corners which is were I believe driving is the most exhilarating.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I'll add a link to prove your statement is true: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-lightning-lap-2016-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-l... Anyone who doesn't believe it, watch the video. Car and Driver took a Model S onto a track and in less than a minute it was limping in low-power mode as the batteries were overheating. They also ran into an issue where the brakes stopped working. This was just during one lap of a small race track. The Model S is a luxury performance sedan, not a race car. It can't handle being pushed to its limits for any period of time. It just wasn't designed for that.
    - general_ai 10y ago
      You only need basic knowledge of physics to see why a high performance car without large radiators would overheat when expending a ton of energy per unit of time. Sadly a lot of people here lack it.
- sdsgshldghls 10y ago
  They have an anti-electric car agenda ? Feels like it
jessriedel 10y ago
This includes supercars with $1M price tags right? Honest question: why aren't all supercars electric if this is possible? I get that there are other parameters important for driving fast, like handling, but won't a million-dollar electric Bugatti always be faster than a gas one?
- deleted 10y ago
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- verytrivial 10y ago
  They're not mutually exclusive: The Koenigsegg Regera combines a powerful twin-turbo V8 combustion engine with three electric motors and cutting edge battery power via new powertrain technology called Koenigsegg Direct Drive. This revolutionary technology removes the traditional gearbox, making the car lighter and more efficient. http://koenigsegg.com/regera/ http://koenigsegg.com/regera/
- dharmon 10y ago
  One answer comes by looking at the 0-100 times instead of just 0-60. You can dig up lots of videos where they race Teslas against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Up to 60 the supercar is barely hanging on, but at that point the Tesla is tapped out while the supercar still has plenty of acceleration, and it completely leaves it behind.
  - falcor84 10y ago
    Doesn't 0-100 usually refer to kph, such that it's almost equivalent to 0-60mph (100kph is ~62mph)?
    - cknight 10y ago
      Not really. If you see both figures on the same page without any units named, you can generally assume from the context that 0-60 and 0-100 bare both in miles. 0-100 mph is still a pretty common performance indicator in its own right, it's just less commonly used compared to 0-60.
ferongr 10y ago
But can it complete a lap around the track without going into limp mode? High-power bursts are nice and all but sustained performance is important too.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  This is admittedly an old article so hopefully the engineering has improved since then, but to the best of my knowledge it's still an issue. Maybe they made significant improvements to the battery pack in the P100 though. http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurburgring-full-power-video/ http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurbur... edit: a quick Google of forums and articles suggests the car has a problem overheating when you drive it above ~100 MPH http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circuit/ http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circ... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/p90d-overheating https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/p90d-overheating
- jackmott 10y ago
  well, it is fun. maybe not important for a huge 4 door sedan.
deleted 10y ago
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justin66 10y ago
I wonder a little about anyone who reads about a car that will do the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds at 125 mph and thinks "that thing is all hype, it's not fast enough for me." If your plans for the day somehow involve a crash helmet and the Mulsanne Straight, yeah, you're going to find it a little limiting and it's the wrong tool for the job. But seriously, it's a 4-door sedan...
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Probably has a lot to do with tradition and the intangible "feel" of what it takes in an ICE car to get massive performance. Sure, the Tesla can do some amazing things (acceleration) but versus other established metrics ('Ring time) it's going to have 'cherry picking' asterisks next to its claims I think. There's likely more than a little bias against zipping around in a oversized Traxxis LiPo instead of romping around with a thumping motor and exhaust sound.
- vinay427 10y ago
  It also notably has overheat protections that don't allow for sustained acceleration, which makes it far less useful on a track day.
  - justin66 10y ago
    I can see taking it to the drag strip for a little fun, but a real track day? Does anybody do that with a big sedan like this? Just curious, I haven't seen enough of those to really have an opinion here.

81 points by saurabh20n 10y ago

One thing I wonder is why Top Gear (the old one) / Grand Tour never has the tesla in it's episodes or drag races? Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it. And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that. Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?

taurath 10y ago
They did a road trip in a BMW i3 which is basically a commute car. And their point does stand - if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips.
- bcrescimanno 10y ago
  As a former Tesla owner and current i3 owner, I really don't understand why the concept of the road trip is constantly held up as the standard by which electric cars should be judged. I really don't understand why people are optimizing for their once a year use case rather than their daily use case. Unless it's your lifestyle, road trips are the exception, not the rule. For my family, it means owning my i3 for commuting and my wife's Toyota Sienna for family trips. For others, it could mean renting a car for a week or two when you take a long road trip. As a fun note: As a BMW i3 owner, BWM offers me up to 2 weeks per year of complimentary gasoline car rental for road trips.
  - taurath 10y ago
    In the case of GT, roadtripping is the lifestyle that they are showing nearly every single episode. I road trip 5-6 times a year myself over 1000 miles, and for that reason I wouldn't personally want to go a full electric car. Nice about the rental car though! The GT people have standards which don't really apply to most people. Most of their shows involve cars that most people will never afford.
    - bcrescimanno 10y ago
      As a huge fan of both Top Gear and Grand Tour, I absolutely understand. My comment was less about their assessment and more about how the concept of the road trip comes up every time electric cars are discussed. Maybe I'm wrong in this assumption as it's based on purely anecdotal observation from my own interactions with people, your 5-6 times a year is an outlier.
      - taurath 10y ago
        True! I don't often think about it but growing up in a very rural area a car has meant freedom to go anywhere. Everyone I know with an electric car loves them!
  - stuckagain 10y ago
    If you own two cars, isn't it actually you who have arranged your lifestyle in order to accommodate the electric one? And I feel kinda sad for anyone who feels that going more than 60 miles from home happens only once a year.
    - bcrescimanno 10y ago
      My comment was only meant to discuss people optimizing for the edge case (road trips) vs the common case (daily driving). There will always be people for whom long-distance driving is not the edge case. There's a pretty big assumption that travel beyond 60 miles (or 110 in the case of my i3) requires a car. There are a lot of ways to travel that don't involve driving. I travel frequently; it's almost always by air.
  - dmode 10y ago
    I have a Tesla Model S 60 (lowest battery capacity). I just completed a 800 mile road trip over the weekend. Bay Area to San Diego and back. Zero issues.
  - ajtaylor 10y ago
    I have a VW eGolf and a Toyota Sienna for exactly the same reasons (plus the wife really, really wanted a minivan).
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips. I don't know about that. They do it just to shit on EV's. (Disclaimer: I own an EV, but also like and watch Grand Tour). It's an entertainment show. They're not about objective analysis. It's the crank-call-radio-morning-show model applied to cars. Their complaints about the i3 was low range (needing multiple recharges) and weak power (when range extended). They could have used something like a Vauxhall Ampera, which is actually designed for the road-trip route they ran (all electric in London, powerful gas range extender for freeway driving at 80+mph). They could have used a pure-EV car that actually had decent range like a Renault Zoe, which would have only needed a single recharge stop to make their entire trip, even driving at 70mph the whole time. But they didn't. They didn't use a fair car to test, because then it would have been less funny.
chadgeidel 10y ago
They did. It didn't go well: https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-vs-top-gear https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-vs-top-gear Of course there's more to the story - Top Gear isn't exactly "objective journalism" and the team will create a story out of thin air when it suits the show. See also "M3 vs Prius" segment: http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its-how-you-drive-it-that-matters/ http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its...
tsomctl 10y ago
The very first episode of The Grand Tour (The Holy Trinity) was about how awesome hybrids are (the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 and Ferrari LaFerrari). Granted, those cars are worth over a million dollars.
- bcrescimanno 10y ago
  What's interesting about those 3 cars is that while they are hybrids, they don't leverage that technology to increase economy; they use it to increase power. There are real, physical limitations involved in gasoline engines and the electric motors are used purely to compensate for those limitations (time it takes for a throttle to open, fuel and air to mix, and ignite--the time it takes for a transmission to change a gear. These things can be made ultra-fast; but, they cannot be eliminated). BMW did a very similar thing with their 330e model; the electric motor is primarily used to increase the power from the relatively small engine that is normally only on the lower-end 320.
  - rifung 10y ago
    I thought they, or some of them, also only use electric power at low speeds? Doesnt that count as increasing economy?
    - bcrescimanno 10y ago
      I'm not sure about low speeds; but, I believe all 3 cars technically offer an all-electric mode that will let you drive with substantially reduced performance and with a range of 10-15 miles. That said, my original statement was mean to describe the objective of these hybrid cars; any additional "fuel economy" is probably best described as a side effect.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      From the episodes (I myself not being in the market for million dollar hybrid supercars), there's a significant amount of button pressing to have it go all-electric. And I think only 2/3 even had that option.
  - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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qqg3 10y ago
If anything the Grand Tour was trying to show if affordable electric cars were here yet. They tested a reasonably affordable BMW alongside a traditional engined VW.
general_ai 10y ago
Because if you drive a Tesla hard, battery overheats and it shuts down. Plus once you run out of battery (even if it doesn't overheat) you need several hours to recharge it. Plus Tesla is only "high performance" in a straight line. I believe they had an episode with a Tesla. It ended up on a tow truck.
- dlp211 10y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. The Tesla S handles like a pig and you can't track the car because the battery can't handle it. These are valid criticisms. Though, the towing part of that episode I think was played up for the show. That said, for 90+% of people, the Tesla S, and almost assuredly the Model 3, will be more than sufficient vehicles for people. The focus on acceleration is an amazing selling point and most people will never track their car. The ranges on these cars are pretty excellent and charging stations are becoming more and more common. These cars aren't for me though, I'll gladly keep driving my BMW. The Tesla feels soulless while driving it and the skinny tires and the extreme weight shifts prevent you from hammering through corners which is were I believe driving is the most exhilarating.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I'll add a link to prove your statement is true: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-lightning-lap-2016-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-l... Anyone who doesn't believe it, watch the video. Car and Driver took a Model S onto a track and in less than a minute it was limping in low-power mode as the batteries were overheating. They also ran into an issue where the brakes stopped working. This was just during one lap of a small race track. The Model S is a luxury performance sedan, not a race car. It can't handle being pushed to its limits for any period of time. It just wasn't designed for that.
  - general_ai 10y ago
    You only need basic knowledge of physics to see why a high performance car without large radiators would overheat when expending a ton of energy per unit of time. Sadly a lot of people here lack it.
sdsgshldghls 10y ago
They have an anti-electric car agenda ? Feels like it

jessriedel 10y ago

This includes supercars with $1M price tags right? Honest question: why aren't all supercars electric if this is possible? I get that there are other parameters important for driving fast, like handling, but won't a million-dollar electric Bugatti always be faster than a gas one?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
verytrivial 10y ago
They're not mutually exclusive: The Koenigsegg Regera combines a powerful twin-turbo V8 combustion engine with three electric motors and cutting edge battery power via new powertrain technology called Koenigsegg Direct Drive. This revolutionary technology removes the traditional gearbox, making the car lighter and more efficient. http://koenigsegg.com/regera/ http://koenigsegg.com/regera/
dharmon 10y ago
One answer comes by looking at the 0-100 times instead of just 0-60. You can dig up lots of videos where they race Teslas against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Up to 60 the supercar is barely hanging on, but at that point the Tesla is tapped out while the supercar still has plenty of acceleration, and it completely leaves it behind.
- falcor84 10y ago
  Doesn't 0-100 usually refer to kph, such that it's almost equivalent to 0-60mph (100kph is ~62mph)?
  - cknight 10y ago
    Not really. If you see both figures on the same page without any units named, you can generally assume from the context that 0-60 and 0-100 bare both in miles. 0-100 mph is still a pretty common performance indicator in its own right, it's just less commonly used compared to 0-60.

ferongr 10y ago

But can it complete a lap around the track without going into limp mode? High-power bursts are nice and all but sustained performance is important too.

jayjay71 10y ago
This is admittedly an old article so hopefully the engineering has improved since then, but to the best of my knowledge it's still an issue. Maybe they made significant improvements to the battery pack in the P100 though. http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurburgring-full-power-video/ http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurbur... edit: a quick Google of forums and articles suggests the car has a problem overheating when you drive it above ~100 MPH http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circuit/ http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circ... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/p90d-overheating https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/p90d-overheating
jackmott 10y ago
well, it is fun. maybe not important for a huge 4 door sedan.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

justin66 10y ago

I wonder a little about anyone who reads about a car that will do the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds at 125 mph and thinks "that thing is all hype, it's not fast enough for me." If your plans for the day somehow involve a crash helmet and the Mulsanne Straight, yeah, you're going to find it a little limiting and it's the wrong tool for the job. But seriously, it's a 4-door sedan...

6stringmerc 10y ago
Probably has a lot to do with tradition and the intangible "feel" of what it takes in an ICE car to get massive performance. Sure, the Tesla can do some amazing things (acceleration) but versus other established metrics ('Ring time) it's going to have 'cherry picking' asterisks next to its claims I think. There's likely more than a little bias against zipping around in a oversized Traxxis LiPo instead of romping around with a thumping motor and exhaust sound.
vinay427 10y ago
It also notably has overheat protections that don't allow for sustained acceleration, which makes it far less useful on a track day.
- justin66 10y ago
  I can see taking it to the drag strip for a little fun, but a real track day? Does anybody do that with a big sedan like this? Just curious, I haven't seen enough of those to really have an opinion here.