620 mile range seems like a lot of battery weight for a performance car. Is that weight of batteries necessary to supply enough current and to reduce heat load on individual cells? Or would there be a smaller battery pack that would be even more performant due to reduced weight?
This range is not really surprising. Musk has previously stated that the performance limitation on the Model S has always been the battery. So the bigger the battery, the more juice you can pull for crazy launches. The 620 mile range is just a side-effect of putting in a bigger battery so it can hit the acceleration and top-speed numbers needed to put it in the super-car big-leagues.
Theoretically, you could get more performance out of a smaller pack, the VW ID. R used just 43kWH to set the electric record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. However, that's a lightweight race car.
Tesla seemed to want to make this a really livable car with lots of superlative records so by using super light construction paired with a massive battery they can build a car with incredible range (This range would be a production car record.) but that same pack can handle incredible draw. I imagine this will be like a model S on crack: It won't handle fantastic but will have hilarious power.
Also, they claimed that it was using twin Model S packs in their design but were planning to move to a Model 3 evolution based pack. (The Model 3's pack is much more energy dense due to larger, better, specialized cells.)
There are tradeoffs around capacity, power, and longevity. I suspect Volkswagen doesn’t care if the battery in their prototype racer is trashed after a year, so they can push it hard.
Yes, a larger battery pack can provide more power. You can see this at work in Tesla’s lineup already: the longer range variants also have better acceleration.
Is that really true? Electric cars should theoretically be able to handle rapid acceleration more efficiently than ICE vehicles, and regenerative breaking makes deceleration less wasteful as well. How much energy would really be wasted by pushing the vehicle to its limits?
So they unveiled it 2017, and now they are selling it? So now you can reserve. Hmm, maybe I missed it but when do you then actually get one? Is it the same thing like their other cars (i.e. when it is done)?
I am a bit confused about what is novel about this. It is not the unveiling, so it must be the reservation possibility but I might be wrong.
Additionally I hope nobody ever tries to "red line" it on a public road for their own and everyone else's safety. 4.2 sec 0-100 and a 250+ mph max is a very temping but potentially deadly combination.
Does anyone who owns a Tesla know if you can configure it to reduce the acceleration or artificially limit the top speed (e.g. "teenager mode" in other cars)?
> Does anyone who owns a Tesla know if you can configure it to reduce the acceleration or artificially limit the top speed (e.g. "teenager mode" in other cars)?
In my Model 3, dual motor, I can do both: Limit acceleration and limit the top speed.
> Does anyone who owns a Tesla know if you can configure it to reduce the acceleration or artificially limit the top speed (e.g. "teenager mode" in other cars)?
Yes it has both options however they're profile settings that can be changed by the operator. There's not parental profile or anything like that.
There's a valet mode which just nerfs the car all around but that's independent from the speedlimit and acceleration characteristics settings.
Taking any car up to 250mph requires special tires and can only be achieved at a handful of test tracks. Most airport runways don't have enough room to do it.
There are plenty of cars that are capable of taking out school busses full of nuns and orphans. The ‘16 Corvette driven by my 72 year old mother is a car I personally am incapable of fully thrashing on a public road without eventually slamming into something. And that only cost $50K.
The Roadster, should you be the kind of dumbass that can barely keep your ‘94 Camaro between the lines, will merely (please pardon the pun) accelerate the process.
Many of the cars on that list are 7 figure (or are in 2019 dollars). So we're likely going to see more of these types of cars on the road just given to its relatively lower price.
The Hellcat is dangerous, but I wouldn't say it's as dangerous as a Model S or Model 3 Performance, all that power can't hook so the Traction control lights are just flashing from a stop.
Meanwhile a Model S P100D is a whole second faster to 60 with this incredible 20mph 'JUMP' with zero lag, I got a test ride in one and felt as if something like a slip on the throttle off the brake would find you 20 feet inside a storefront, which there's a few examples of online lol.
You really have to work to be stupid with it though, the built in stability control has to be manually disabled and you have to be using the red key as well. Otherwise the Car's computer shuts it down.
Just look at all the videos of idiots spinning out and ramming spectators while leaving Cars and Coffee. You’d never be able to achieve that sort of loss of control in a Tesla.
The Lotus Evija looks better than this. But hey, that is a 1.5mil car.
The "250mph+" claim looks dubious given the shape/aero of this car - though I don't claim to be an expert and I suppose this might not be the finished shape of the car either.
The Lotus does not appear more aerodynamic than the Roadster. It has more "aggressive" features, but these do not improve aerodynamics and probably makes aerodynamics worse. The old Tesla roadster had a 0.31 drag coefficient (by the end of its run with Tesla's aero mods), Model S has 0.24, Model 3 has 0.23. I suspect the 2020 Roadster has better than the old Roadster, so somewhere between 0.30 and 0.20.
The large intakes of non-electric supercars also kills the drag coefficient.
The supercar Bugatti Veyron has a drag coefficient of 0.38.
So again, can you point to a more aerodynamic supercar? I'm not talking about subjective cosmetics (frankly, I find the cartoonishly "aggressive" features on lots of supercars a little childish), but objective aerodynamic performance?
The Tesla here looks like an early Lotus Elise/Exige in terms of body shape and size - sans a front intake. This type of shape was okay for the Elise/Exige because these weren't marketing a 250mph+ top speed or anywhere close. Indeed the short wheel base of these cars made them unsuited to those high speeds anyway. Which is another point - this Tesla seems to have a short wheel base also - which further makes me wonder about the 250+ claim.
I'm trying really hard not to take a dump on the Tesla though as I do like them. I'm sure they know more than me and that the info they've released is very early days and designed to generate interest.
Since the car produces 10.000Nm, I estimate the peak output power is around 1500kW. So at full power it could drain the 200kWh battery in about 8 minutes. In 8 minutes you will have covered ~33 miles @ 250mph.
Of course there are many other factors at play here.
For comparison: a Bugatti Chiron/Veyron is known to empty its 100L fuel tank in about 12 minutes at full power.
You probably achieve the stated range at ~65MPH. Range decreases approximately with the square of the speed, so range at top speed would be around 16 times lower.
No, it comes from personal experience with Tesla’s other cars.
Note that the listed range comes from a standardized EPA test cycle. It’s more thorough than just cruising at 65MPH but the end result appears to approximate that.
BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus, and probably other luxury brands made the same choice. I agree it has drawbacks, but it seems already established as a luxury norm.
Sports cars tend to be neither luxurious, comfortable nor practical.
One of the many reasons that I never understood why one would buy something like a new Lamborghini Huracan, when you for a similar price could be looking at a Rolls Royce Phantom.
Sports cars are a specialized good, by nature. You're explicitly deciding to sacrifice some things in favor of some other thing (in this case performance). The people you are going to sell it to are therefore exactly the people that are willing to make that sacrifice, the people that just wanna go really friggin fast
Because it is far superior to any italian sports car on any parameter that matters outside of a track.
If you want a great car (we are of course ignoring fuel costs here), it is the most comfortable thing you'd ever park your buttocks in, and a much more well thought out vehicle. The usual Lamborghini or Ferrari would in comparison feel like a Peugeot 104 on a good day.
If you want to turn heads, this certainly does it better (although a Lamborghini or Ferrari is likely to get more attention from kids).
Sure, a Huracán has a faster 0-100, but if you want to enjoy the car outside of the track, it would be awful to drive in. Plus, it's still slower than a much cheaper production sedan (Tesla Model S P100D Ludicrous). If you're not going to be the fastest anyway, you might as well be the most comfortable.
None of these high-end vehicles hold their value anyway. Hell, there are really no new vehicles that hold their value. Only classics do.
The specific design is quite different but that's the approach Honda took with their sorta-convertible Del Sol in the 90s. It's not a big deal but it does make you make a conscious physical action and it's a bit of a scramble if it starts to rain.
ADDED: As others have noted, trunk storage is fairly common although it's usually not manual.
I call bullshit on this. 1000km range and 400km/h top speed?
Obviously you can't have both but each of this is unrealistic enough on its own.
You can't even go 400km/h on the Autobahn, which roads are they building this for?
And fully loaded SUVs like the Hyundai Kona get somewhat about 500km in normal crusing mode. 1000km is either a breakthrough in battery technology or measured/calculated when going 50km/h at best.
Unrealistic values imho, but I'm open to be proven otherwise.
>You can't even go 400km/h on the Autobahn, which roads are they building this for?
They're competing against ferrari/lamborghini/mclaren. The top speed is for the track, not the street. That should be quite obvious....
> I call bullshit on this. 1000km range and 400km/h top speed?
The range is clearly not based on going the top speed for the duration. The distance Tesla gives is typically based on a combined city/highway driving profile. They also provide calculators to estimate your range bssed on the mixture as well as a map program that tells you where you'd need to charge getting from point A to point B if you're going on a long-distance trip.
Speed / power is a similar affair; a bigger battery is essentially more battery cells, and more power. The increased weight doesn't significantly detract from top speed, as air resistance dominates. In fact, additional weight increases down-force on the road, and thus the maximum force the wheels can apply.
Not if you’re battery-limited in performance. An ideal performance electric car is all battery and motor with the weight of everything else reduced as much as possible. That naturally means your battery will be way over-sized compared to a typical electric car.
Electric batteries are power-limited as well as energy-limited. So if you want more power, you need a bigger battery. (Alternate chemistries are also possible, but even then you reach a practical limit.)
The naive approach is to think of a battery like a gasoline tank, whose size and capacity you want to minimize if you’re going for performance records. But really it’s part of of the powertrain, and having a larger battery brings a bunch of other benefits like longer lifetime (in miles driven), charge & discharge speed (in kilowatts), higher thermal mass (can handle those big spurts of power that might temporarily exceed the cooling system’s capacity), and higher electrical efficiency at a given discharge speed (a larger battery at a given voltage has lower internal resistance, thus less resistive losses and less heat generation).
