Tesla’s Model S Gets “Ludicrous” Mode, Will Do 0-60 in 2.8 Seconds (opens in new tab)

Agreed. The 2015 Mazda3 we just bought has a horrible info/nav system that crashes and frequently stops responding. I'm guessing the actual chance of it ever being fixed at 0%. Tesla's get an automatic OTA update that would fix that kind of thing and it wouldn't be something you'd have to 'deal' with for the rest of your ownership of the vehicle.

This is an awful user experience though.

Look at mobile phones.

An old Nokia 3210 or something, just works. It does everything fine. It works as a phone. It was designed from start to finish, and built.

Compare that with Android. Every update they seem to break or remove some functionality. Endless software updates, restarting, etc. It was shipped with bugs, it'll always have bugs.

I'm not convinced this is an improvement. Also obviously has some pretty big consequences if the update system is hacked, or if there's critical bugs etc.

What is doubly amazing about this: they must really be confident of their testing procedures and software practices, because the liability of pushing a bad software update and causing injury to a driver... confidence, for sure. I'm certain this is the reason Toyota and others don't ever update the software in your car, after you purchase it, unless it's a recall firmware fix.

This sort of thing isn't really that new in the automotive industry. The R35 GT-R has had the same basic powertrain, chassis, and body since 2008, but year over year Nissan continuously upgrades the power output by tuning the ECU and turbocharger boost controllers. You can change an ICE's characteristics quite drastically just with a quick ECU reflash; you can make the cam timing delayed/dulled for better fuel efficiency, or you can set the lifter solenoid (if the engine has one) to activate at insanely low engine speeds to get as much torque out of the engine as possible.

The electric motor is a much simpler device compared to a classical Carnot heat engine. This, combined with Tesla's over-the-air root access to the deepest levels of the vehicle's systems, makes the actual process of tweaking and tuning the car feel much more seamless.

The entire automotive industry sees automobiles as upgradeable, it's called the "aftermarket". Conventional automobiles can be tuned and upgraded and have been for generations, except, us non Tesla owners can do it without the manufacturers say so. With Tesla you are forced to buy your upgrades from them, this is less flexible IMO.

It shows that they care about their product, their customers, and their brand.

Any other car company would save software updates for the latest years model and tell users that they have to purchase a new vehicle to receive the updates.

Great precedent Tesla, thank you, and I hope other car companies follow your lead.

Sorry, but honestly making it faster is about the opposite I want to see as an improvement. It is a near admission, we can't do jack about range so lets wave our dicks around at the stop light.

I was so hoping the D would have stood for distance/double/ etc before speculation ruined that idea. Now it seems their only news is, look its faster which runs counter to the conservation idea of EVs

At the same time, this means you do not really control your own car anymore. It's like a service.

What? I think I know what you mean, but how the hell are BMW not thinking of their cars as "actual products"?

"It gives an amazing user experience, "Hey restart your car and it's now got X and Y". Respect."

It's basically Apple's model with iPhone and Macs, except applied to automobiles.

I agree. Another crazy thing is that there is a shortage of Tesla-level batteries in the market right NOW. Yet aside from Tesla/Panasonic, no one else is ramping battery production to be able to produce millions of cars a year!

So when Tesla's $35k car becomes a mainstream hit in 2018, I have no doubt big auto will react with compelling competitive vehicles. The problem is they won't have the battery infrastructure in place to sell more than 50,000 units, and it'll take them several years to catch up to Tesla's production volumes!

That or purchase their packs from Tesla.

Why do you say the other makers are passive? BMW, Mercedes, Nissan, VW, Ford and Fiat all have fully electric cars. Sure none of them get near the range the Model S does, but they are getting involved in this. A Nissan Leaf offers roughly one third the specs of a Model S, but also at one third the price. Seems like progress to me.

The biggest issue at the moment is the limited range with battery only.

Even after a large network of charging stations is created, the user experience for long trips is not ideal - up to 1/4 of driving time may be spent charging.

The ownership paradigm may change at some point, but at the moment people like the idea of using their own car to go around town as well as going on vacation / see the parents / etc across the state or nation.

- Disclaimer - I work for GM

Really hard for big companies to change. They have built a loyal brand around big gasoline engines. In fact the sound of the engine is so important to them that BMW pumps fake 'vroom' sounds into the i8 so it sounds like a v8. I'm not kidding.

The batteries in a Tesla aren't very green and sadly they are quite large. Big automakers think in volumes of millions of cars, Tesla delivers about 25K (EDIT: looks like 40K projected for this year[1]) cars a year.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/05/12/tes...

In a straight line... The Tesla weighs more than an F150 and corners like a boat

It's as fast as the Nissan GT-R, which coincidentally costs around the same price as the Tesla. https://www.google.com/search?q=nissan%20gt-r

Note that 0 to 60 is not always what matters.

I have a Porsche Macan S (small SUV) which has 0 to 60 times in the 5 second range. But the acceleration from 50 to 95 (the point that your realize you are going to fast) feels almost split second.

The 2012 911 that I had had much better 0 to 60 times (in the 4's) but even with a 7 speed manual transmission didn't have the kick that the Macan has at the upper end. [1] (And it's really pretty neat to hit the gas and in an instant be practically at 100 miles per hour. Helps greatly with passing truck..)

Likewise if you take a test drive in a Cayman S which has better 0 to 60 than a Macan S it feels quite frankly like a "pig". I had a brand new loaner [2] and drove one for about 100 miles and went to town with it.

Lastly, engine noise is pretty cool at least the way I have experienced it.

[1] Generally you are going to do more accelerating once you get to 40 mph than you are from a stoplight at least that is what I have found.

[2] Side note I have found that with the Porsches that I have bought they do get better once they are broken in (2k to 4k miles..)

I've been reading Henry Ford's autobiography ("My Life and Work"), and it seems like Musk is taking a page directly from Ford's playbook with continuous product (and component) updates that are (mostly) backwards compatible with previously-produced vehicles in the same model.

The parallels are pretty amazing, and they go much much deeper too (eg. fabrication automation, experimentation, engineering to the highest extent possible, etc).

I feel like the limit of what these motors can do now is being held back by something they can't control anymore, tire grip.

I think a lot of these software updates on the acceleration speed aren't because they all of the sudden figured out how to get more power from the electric motor. I think it's from tweaking the "no-slip" system or whatever they call theirs. Basically when the car detects it's losing grip, it cuts back the power. I think this is a balancing act on how to get the system to push the limits of slipping without putting the average user into a ditch because they tried out the "ludicrous" mode.

I'm sure on static conditions in a lab, Tesla can make the thing do something like 2s. It would require something other than a regular tire on a regular road though.

I also wonder if there will be a way to "update firmware" on the fuse, so as to disable it, allowing remote self destruct mode. The advantage of a dumb fuse is it's basically going to work unless the laws of physics change, even though it's not as precise.

Incoming, "this isn't reddit" trolling. :)

I recently got to see this in the theater with my 6 year old. We have watched it at home dozens of times and he knows most of the big one liners. It was excellent. I love that the tesla team is willing to have so much fun with their upgrades. I can't wait until I can afford one.

You only need enough range to go as far as the next charger, or until your bladder is full, whichever is last. 300 miles is plenty (overkill, really) for long distance travel.

Gas car range is more about how many times per month you need to stop at the gas station in normal use. More range makes that more convenient. With home charging, the convenience of an electric car is better even with less range.

That's further than I get from my petrol Mazda Rx8

What you are missing is that it's a 1500A fuse.

Source: http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-s-just-got-upgraded-to-l...

> While working on our goal of making the power train last a million miles, we came up with the idea for an advanced smart fuse for the battery. Instead of a standard fuse that just melts past a certain amperage, which means you aren’t exactly sure when it will or won’t melt or if it will arc when it does, we developed a fuse with its own electronics and a tiny lithium-ion battery. It constantly monitors current at the millisecond level and is pyro-actuated to cut power with extreme precision and certainty.

That was combined with upgrading the main pack contractor to use inconel (a high temperature space-grade superalloy) instead of steel, so that it remains springy under the heat of heavy current.

The net result is that we can safely increase max amp throughout from 1300 to 1500 Amps. If you don’t know much about Amps, trust me this is a silly big number of Amps to be going through something the size of your little fingernail.

What this results in is a 10% improvement in the 0 to 60 mph time to 2.8 secs and a quarter mile time of 10.9 secs. Time to 155 mph is improved even more, resulting in a 20% reduction.

Without the performance characteristics for the fuse, I wouldn't imagine it would be cheap. Specialized electronic components are usually very expensive, especially if they're never mass produced and engineered to a specific task (component ICs for devices in space face the same issue). That engineering is pretty damn expensive, the tooling to make the small run of components is expensive, and quality control is expensive. Make a few hundred million and those costs vanish compared to the input materials, compared to a few thousand components where the overhead dominates.

I'm sure there are other hardware upgrades involved to achieve that than just a single fuse.

Not sure about the P85D specifically but the regular 85 KWh battery pack fuse[0] is $272 (min order 3) from Digi-Key [1]

[0] http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/37023-P85D-Pow...

[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/170M4416/170M4416-N...

Supply and demand... For every 1000 Tesla owner willing to pay $5, more than one of them is willing to pay $5k.

They determined that people will pay 5-10k for the additional speed. Nothing more than that probably.

Market segmentation. How do you get people to pay you another 10k? With a widget that is useless but has huge bragging value. People who don't care about 10k will spend it on this, and those who do care will have no different lives.

Aparently the new Roadster will. [1]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/17/surprise-tesla-is-working-o...

This article[1] was posted to Reddit, and included a 1/4 mile time of 10.9s and peak acceleration of 1.1g

1: http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/17/8994519/tesla-ludicrous-sp...

I'd imagine pretty good. It's got such a low drag coefficient, and at those speeds liquifying the tires is not as much of a problem. I'd think that the 60-100 times might be more impressive than it's 0-60 when compared to conventional cars!

Ok, I found it myself. It's "Beast Mode"! [1]

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/07/guess-elons-ludacris-fan/

Well, the battery is not a single monolithic design, it is composed of thousands of small (think AA) cells. My uneducated hunch is that that design helps them extract power from many cells in parallel. It's also huge, taking almost all the floor of the car.

Not sure how they cool that beast though.

There are lithium polymer batteries with a peak discharge rate (usually a few seconds) of 100+ times their capacity (C rating).

So if you put a lot of those single cells in parallel to e.g. form an 80Ah battery, you could for some time pull 8000A+ out of it at 3.7V (the car's motors probably need a few times that voltage, so there will be cells in series).

Put enough AA batteries in parallel and you could get that much current out of it.

Anyone who is aware of the mythical man month should know that throwing more people on a project does not magically speed things up. Tesla probably has a core team that can execute faster if they had less people on the project. The other spare Tesla engineers are not going to twiddle their thumbs... they're going to make the existing Model S more appealing.

> I think what they should address is getting out the affordable Model 3 as fast to the market as they can.

I agree, but I doubt this project took any manpower or resources away from the Model 3. If anything, it'll generate some extra cash to help with their R&D.

This is like saying that the Formula 1, exists for nothing. This is the way to test all the engineering efforts, it also leaves that knowledge in the company for future and further improvements, which directly influences the design and execution of the Model 3.

But I have to agree that waiting for an affordable Tesla car is getting anoying, and they do need to create an income stream from a lower priced model for creating a sustainable company, and take advantage of the wow factor that still surrounds Tesla and evertything they make.

But they have also innovated in other areas like the house batteries, which for me was a surprise (for me it seems odd that Tesla makes batteries for the average household) but they are generating other income streams, so it seems that Teslas agenda is not only the Model 3.

I'm pretty sure they're working as hard as possible on that, but the key to reducing the costs is the battery packs and that won't happen until gigafactory comes online. Other manufacturers will face the same cost issues but won't own their own gigafactory

Should that happen, my guess is that they would be quite happy to sell their batteries to everyone else.

Its easier to expand downwards. e.g. Take Porsche...they have a bullet proof brand so they can sell a Cayenne football mom SUV fairly easily...just costs a bit of brand dilution.

Doing the opposite (SUV to sportscar) would be a tough sell no matter how (objectively) good the sportscar is.

The incumbents have already beaten them to the mass-market segment. The Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt are both affordable, competent (if unexciting) electric vehicles.

Perhaps this is a side-effect of all of the R&D that's going into developing other cars and the drive-train for the Model 3?

> Seems like they took inspiration from the branding on the Chromebook Pixel LS (Ludicrous Speed)

More likely, both Google and Tesla took inspiration from the movie Spaceballs.

It's not a software upgrade

  One catch: unlike most Tesla Model S tuning enhancements, this one isn’t 
  a software update — and it’s not free. Why? Because Tesla had to make new, 
  physical hardware to make this possible. Specifically, they had to make a 
  fuse that didn’t melt when you pulled ridiculously high amperages over it.

  The fuse upgrade will be a $10k option for new buyers, and cost $5k (before 
  installation) for existing P85D owners.

Not only s/w this time.

That's basically what insurance companies do. You're saying the equivalent of, I hope those programmers don't forget to declare their variables, or else their code won't work!

Surely less accidents. A common metric with road cars is 'TED' or Time Exposed to Danger, measuring how quickly you can accelerate to overtake a vehicle - the less time you are in the other lane, facing oncoming traffic, the better. Obviously very low 0-60 and 60-100 acceleration times are better, and make for lower TEDs.

Well that's a pretty silly way to look at this. No one needs a car that can go faster than 85mph, but pretty much every car on the market can break that limit. What makes this different?