Hey folks. I was the one that took that video. let me know if you have any questions.

What is that sound that you can hear right when the car starts accelerating? Is it the tires slipping?

Look at the road, he had already done that jaunt a few times before this video was shot. The road is full of skid marks from the wheels slipping before being caught by the traction control.

This car is absolutely traction limited. It should be able to post even better times with racing slicks.

tires

What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?

European or African?

Is this relevant? Its not like the African swallow is migratory.

No need to be racist about it!

Not sure if you're trying to make a joke and it fell flat, or if you've never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail and are missing the reference.

It fell flat. Sometimes to make comedy you have to attempt new things and sometimes they miss wildly. I actually started the thread so I do know the reference.

I'm not much of a Python fan so this is the first time I had the opportunity to make the reference. Annoying it fell flat!

For people like me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2R3FvS4xr4

Do you not understand what 0 mph is or why do you use scummy clickbait titles?

Meaning of life?

42

That's the answer. What's the question ?

What's 5 x 7?

What do you get if you multiple six by nine?

42

Why did you sped up the video instead of posting the original? You can see it by the movement of people around the car at the moment of acceleration.

Probably not sped up. What you're seeing is a sudden acceleration of the camera's viewpoint when panning to the left in order to keep up with the 1.9s to get to 60mph.

Looks more like they jumped out of surprise rather than the movements being artificially sped up.

I didn't speed up the video. That is the original.

What can you see?

Would be good to get an answer on this from the author since he was so kind to show up.

@davidwhodge ?

That's some unreal level of acceleration. Never seen anything like it.

Something that really impressed me is how smoothly the Model S launches in the Wet, see here: https://youtu.be/iyXSJAICaBc?t=210 [Real Time @ 3m30s] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNzLTW_l2q0 [Slow Motion]

Elon talked during some event how the latency / response time of the torque control in the Tesla drive-train is ridiculous compared to gasoline and for that reason even RWD models should handle well in the snow. To be fair, some people talk about the (at least older) RWD models being a bit crazy on Snow/Ice. I can only assume that the newer models are much better and the Roadster likely better again - plus it's actually AWD but anyway the point was more about the torque control :)

By comparison one of the kings of Launch Control is well known to be the Nissan GT-R. You can see in this wet launch that while it still does a great job, it definitely has some spin as it basically intentionally causes a loss of traction at the start, calculates the traction available based on the acceleration it does get to then adjust the power output and differential splits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTJGE0wzJpE

For other really fun scientific/computerised stability control, this video about the Koenigsegg Agera R is great: https://youtu.be/SywqgH7n-5g?t=34

It shows him literally reefing the wheel side to side at 1m15s while full throttle. Even my 2009 Evo X has surprisingly good stability management in the wet - and it is now probably nearly 2 decades old technology behind any of these other cars and only a 50k car not a 200k-1m car. Still crazy and computers are amazing.

I'd be pretty nervous running something RWD with massive torque and power on ice. I'm sure it's better to have a more predicateble delivery, but with ice 7 months per year I'm staying clear of high power RWD cars...

The electric advantage though is that you can infinitely (or well close enough) modulate that power delivery. And in fact I think they recently added a "slow and comfortable" acceleration option to the Model S (the opposite of Maximum Plaid :-)

The snow comments were also mostly in regards to the context of the Model 3 which is not that "high power" but it also has obviously quite a substantial amount of torque from a get-go compared to traditional gasoline torque curves.

Generally speaking though I would agree.. I love AWD, Breathe AWD.. and my Model 3 will be AWD :) .. and we don't get any snow!

Also 7 months of snow is probably very different to much less of it I imagine.

electric dragster 0-100 in 1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LQXB1DX-2Q

Wow, the shape change in the tires is crazy, didn't know that the effect is so big.

> 3000ftlbs torque off the line, equaling zero to 60 miles per hour in 1.0 second flat

Kind of looks like it's from a game with bad physics. Except it's not.

Yeah ok, that's pretty rapid.