The Motortrend P85D review starts with a comparison to the million-dollar McLaren F1 supercar, a car that Elon Musk used to own, and which we both remember being parked by the front door at the first Tesla event in 2006. (Here is a vintage video of Elon receiving his F1.)
And here is what MotorTrend has to say about the D:
“The P85D accelerates like nothing else we’ve tested. With electric-fast reactions, its traction control matches wheel torque to available road grip to produce the launch of the gods.
“In the options selection, you’ll be able to choose three settings: Normal. Sport. And Insane.” Elon Musk glanced around and grinned. “Yeah, it will actually say ‘In-sane.’”
How crazy? Musk: “Our goal was to match one of the fastest cars ever made: the McLaren F1.”
Can the F1 designer’s fabled carbon-fiber, 627-hp, Ferrari-humbling masterpiece actually be paced to 60 mph by a five-seat sedan with a trunk sized for a Home Depot haul?
Ask the man who’s owned both. In 2007, as the revelry wore down after Tesla’s original (now trademark) half rock concert/half car introduction for the Roadster at the Burbank airport, I was walking back to my car only to find, parked out front, an F1. Later I realized it was Musk’s. Yeah, he’s already familiar with this comparison.
The McLaren F1’s time of 3.2 seconds to 60 mph was the technological redline of what a mad genius Grand Prix designer could conjure from a road car. I tested one back in the day, and although it was at a closed airstrip encircled by acres of table-flat run-off room, it was among the most shattering few seconds of my life. One moment everything was still; the next, the cabin had exploded in a maniacal machine racket. The tach needle swept clockwise, the clutch pedal fought my left foot’s stabs, the shifter pinballed through its detents, the V-12 engine charged through its revs again, my right foot feared staying planted but did anyway, everything shook, and I just hung the hell on as the world melted into a smear. Exhale. Launch one of Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets horizontally, and you’ll get the idea.
But scrambling to the same 60 mph time in the P85D bears no resemblance to that at all. With one transmission gear and no head-bobbing shifts, it’s instead a rail-gun rush down a quarter-mile of asphalt bowling lane. Nothing in the drivetrain reciprocates; every part spins. There’s no exhaust smell; the fuel is invisible. Within the first degree of its first revolution, 100 percent of the motors’ combined 687 lb-ft slams the sense out of you. A rising-pitch ghost siren augers into your ears as you’re not so much accelerating as pneumatically suctioned into the future. You were there. Now you’re here. The wormhole between the two is courtesy of a second motor on the front axle.
Essentially, the two motors’ email-instant reflexes mean the stability control system is the drivetrain itself—and vice versa—not a Band-Aided layer of throttle- and brake-mitigating technologies overlaid on a big-inertia crankshaft and flailing pistons accustomed to Pony Express reaction times.
The P85D accelerates at the highest rate the road’s mu (its coefficient of friction) allows. It’s surreally efficient. And it’s so fast off the line that the slower-sampling rate of our two high-frequency GPS data loggers was actually missing some of the action; within the first 1/20th of a sec (not even the “O” in “One Mississippi”) the car was already going 0.7 mph. To 30 mph the P85D would be four feet ahead of the fastest-accelerating sedan we’ve tested, the Audi RS 7, a gap that holds to 60 when the Tesla punches the clock at 3.1 seconds
How will the psychological landscape among Mercedes-Benz AMG, Audi RS, and BMW M crowd be recast if, when a Tesla Model S P85D rolls up at a light, it’s game over, guys? Brace yourself, Teutonic Status Quo, because the quickest-accelerating sedan in the world isn’t German anymore. It’s from California. As they say in Palo Alto: Auf Wiedersehen!”
And here are some Elon quotes from yesterday’s conference call:
“Everyone and their mom is approaching us with battery improvements. I think literally their mom in some cases.” (18:40) “My advice for anyone with a breakthrough is: please send us a sample cell. Don’t send us Powerpoint. Just send us one cell that works. That would be great. That sorts out the nonsense and the claims that aren’t actually true. The battery industry has to have more B.S. in it than any industry I have ever encountered. It’s just insane.” (19:20)
“I do think the X is going to be something quite special… I think people will appreciate that we get the details right. If you get all of the details right is like the difference between a diamond with a flaw and diamond without a flaw. But it’s damn hard to do that.” (27:57)
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