You ready for a hot take? Here it is: I'm indifferent towards the Tesla Model S.
Tesla Mobile Service by LuckyStrikeID livery link (GTS)
Tesla cars are things you either love or hate, what with the stereotypes of a typical Tesla owner, stereotypes of anti–EV petrolheads, the shenanigans of the company's CEO, the list goes on. Simply put, there are a plethora of reasons to form an opinion about this week's car even before driving one. Me personally, I think I've exhausted my list of complaints regarding EVs in my horrendous Taycan "review", and so as someone who's at his wit's end being woken up by pops and bangs at 4 in the morning from a fart can Golf in his neighbourhood and on the verge of sticking the piping hot exhaust up the owner's rectum and vigorously popping both, even someone like me looks forward to a future when cars can't make noise anymore, or snap my neck in a jam like my DCT equipped Fit Hybrid.
Cayman GT4 entry cost aside, what I like about the Tesla Model S Signature Performance P85 is just how unassuming it is; no crazy doors, no fake ICE noises, no gearboxes, nothing of the sort. It's just a car. It does car things. It just happens to be electric. As a result, it feels a lot more consistent to drive than the Taycan, and we needn't mention the i3 beyond dismissing it in one sentence. More than just fine however, the way a Model S drives even made me go, "wow!" a few times, despite me experiencing it solely in a game that flawlessly distills away any sense of speed from the player. That is to say: the Model S is more than just a one trick pony, and it shows in the corners of all places where EVs usually tend to fall apart in comparison to ICE cars.
The first thing that will grab your attention almost literally are the brakes on this thing: they each are deserving of their own verified checkmark, and not the piddling 8 dollar variant, either; they'll bring the Model S to a halt in distances I'm sure will put many legendary 90s sports cars to shame. "But how can that be in a car weighing over two tonnes on the same Sport Hard tyres GTS slaps on every production car?", you may be asking at this point. Quite frankly, I don't have an answer for that. The Sport Hard tyres on the Model S feel nothing like the Sport Hard tyres on every other car I've tested here in Car of the Week; they feel more like Sport Softs, with damn near racing slick levels of grip, and I kept going back to double check on my setting screen to make sure I wasn't going insane on race day. Combine the ravenous brakes, black magic tyres, and suitably stiff 1.6Hz springs, and the end result is a car that never feels its 2,018kg (4,449lbs) kerb mass. If I had to make a guess purely from the driving sensations behind the wheel and never had a chance to actually look at the spec sheet, I'd guess this thing was 1.6 tonnes (3,527lbs) at most.
Being of a middling P85 grade, the Model S is technically an RR car, if we have to force ICE definitions onto it. Only the rear wheels are driven, and the tiny motors that directly drive each wheel sit behind the centreline of the rear wheels, still entirely within the subframe. Don't let that turn you away from trying to drive one however, because it's the batteries that weigh the most in an EV as opposed to the motor, and so the implications of the motor's location isn't as massive as the engine's location in an ICE car. Case in point, the RR P85 has the same weight distribution of a front engined GT3 racing car, at 48:52 front to rear. Now, of course, with its peak torque of 600.2Nm (442.7lbf⋅ft) driving only the rear wheels from near idle, it should come as no surprise that the Model S will kick out its rear end on corner exits, and you will need to pay it extra mind to keep its rear end in check coming out of a corner absent the sound of an engine revving disproportionately quickly, which I didn't even realise I had come to rely on so much until I hyperlooped my Model S around during Race 1 at Tsukuba. This is definitely a car you'll want to drive with headphones or earpieces on, just so you can hear every little tiny chirp of the rear tyres, as they're the only warnings you get from the car that it's about to break loose absent real world sensations or a semi decent steering feedback simulation in the Gran Turismo series.
Even more terrifying than its tail happiness on corner exits however, is the Model S' tail happiness on corner entry, where it will snap and spin faster than even an air–cooled 911 if you attempt to give it any steering angle while on the brakes. I theorise that this is where the omission of typical drivetrain parts, such as a locking differential, hurts the Model S, because the Model S is just disproportionately nervous under braking for the grip and balance that it has, as if the individual electric motors can't figure out how aggressively to regen brake, especially relative to each other, causing such snappy behaviour on trail braking. Again, I can't say for sure—I'm only guessing here, because the only thing I know for sure is that a car with this much grip, springs this stiff, and such a balanced chassis cannot possibly be this awful on the brakes unless some wizardry has gone wrong. Regardless of the cause, that near uncontainable rear snappiness makes corners with deep apexes, like Turn 1 of Tsukuba, very precarious to tackle, as you'll have to fight the car from wanting to spin out in the long, arduous tiptoe journey to the apex of the turn. I find that I'm forced to under utilise the front tyres' grip to keep the rear end in check, which is as backwards, counterintuitive and disappointing as thinking with your ass rather than your head. That, or firing staff of a newly bought company, only to beg them to come back when you realise you're in way over your head. Pick whichever analogy works for you; they're in no way related.
If (or more accurately, when) the car does begin to slide, either from corner entry or exit, the Model S quickly becomes the single most playful and manageable thing to drift I've ever slid in this game, bar none, making it such an instrument of hoonage. While cars like the AE86 and Cayman GT4CS allow me to half grip and half slip my way through a corner with just a hint of yaw angle, the Model S is the only car in the game I feel allows me to not only initiate a full on sideways smoking slide, but also hold, adjust, and retain it for long periods of time without spitting me out from whence I came! Not even Yoshihara Dai's D1GP BRZ is this easy to drift! Again, the tyres on the Model S just feel different from anything else in the game, and I think it's bloody beautiful and I want to try fitting them on any other ICE car. This arcade racer "driftability" means that you can carry some mind bending speeds into tighter corners, such as the last corner of Laguna Seca for example, simply because the car is mostly already rotated when it hits the apex, meaning that it can unleash all of its 422HP (314kW) that much sooner. And in case you were worrying about that overeager slide sending you into a kerbside sausage and launching your Tesla into Mars, fret not; kerbs almost don't register through the car at all. I don't know how they've managed to set the car up to be stiff and responsive, yet soft and compliant on the racetrack! You can mount and molest sausage kerbs in this thing all day, any day, from Laguna Seca to Red Bull Ring; the car simply wafts right over them. Simply put, this is a car that will almost make you drift and cut corners and look like a flamboyant jackass whether you mean to or not.
With its strong, sustained acceleration, surprising cornering ability, and even just some real life stuff like having two boots and a flat rear legroom, the Tesla Model S makes a lot of sense on paper. Unfortunately, my heart doesn't follow my head as usual, and I can't find myself liking or loving the Model S. A lot of that is due to its tail happiness on corner entry, and how I always feel like I had to under drive the car to save myself and it from itself, like I have to baby it constantly, and it's just tiring. Might just be me being a dinosaur and not having sampled many EVs yet, but nonetheless, the Model S is not a car that ever enticed me to dance at the limit with. It's not a car that I ever feel like I really got to know as a result. It might not be saying much about the car itself, if not for the fact that a bone stock WRX STi, a cheaper, underpowered, manual gearbox saddled, much more stable, similarly compliant and plush AWD car, gave me that communication, trust, and enticed me to bring it to its limits more where my peers died in their Model Ses, all while I set the fastest lap of the race in my WRX at Bathurst. At this point, I don't even know if it's my head or heart that's saying "no" to the Model S anymore. All I know is, I'm indifferent towards it. It won't get a Car of the Year vote from me, but if we had a Sleeper or Surprise of the Year award? The Tesla Model S would get my vote for being that damn good when it had no right whatsoever to be.
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