Tesla Model S Plaid: It’s beyond Ludicrous!
The new Model S as currently shown on Tesla’s website
And we thought there was nothing beyond Ludicrous speed. The name we are looking for is Plaid speed.
The new Model S was announced at the end of September during Tesla’s latest Battery Day Event. During this yearly event, stockholders and the general public get an update on how Tesla are performing and what the company is up to.
This event, like many events led by Elon Musk, is, as you can imagine, quite exciting as something ground-breaking is usually to be expected. The advances Tesla is making in battery cell technology, and, the speed at which they move as an organization is mind-blowing. Just like their new Model S Plaid.
What’s Tesla’s secret?
How does the Model S get to achieve such incredible speed and battery performance? It’s all about the new battery technology.
These are Tesla’s main goals and battery innovation that make the Model S Plaid a reality:
More affordable cells
Scale battery production
New cell design and a new cell factory
New materials used
New cell and vehicle body integration
There is no doubt that the car also has to have good aerodynamics to achieve such acceleration and track speed. But, the ’secret sauce’ is in Tesla’s completely new structural battery pack, made out of new 4680 lithium-ion tablets cells.
These cells have five times more energy, 16% more range and six times more power. When I first read this from Tesla’s website, I had to read it twice.
Amongst many advances in the cell technology that contribute to Model S Plaid’s sheer speed and performance, Elon compared one of the new advances to what was done in the aviation industry.
Essentially, the battery cells themselves will serve as structural elements of the car, much like the fuel in Airplanes which now use the wings as the fuel tank. Originally, fuel tanks had additional structures which had to be bolted down to the Airplanes, making it much less efficient, heavier, and ultimately more expensive to build.
But, Tesla has an advantage because of the better center of gravity this will provide the Model S. And, an overall increased ’stiffness’ in the chassis which will make the handling comparable to a race car. Conveniently, this structural advance also makes the car safer. In the event of a side collision, there is now a longer distance between the side of the car and the battery structure.
A single alloy makes up the cars rear, vastly reducing the number of car parts
The need for speed.
Tesla tested their new Model S at the world-renowned Laguna Seca racing circuit. The Model S Plaid has managed to complete a fast lap of the circuit in 1:30:3, with Elon claiming that it will eventually go around the track 3 seconds faster, making it the fastest production car, ever.
Stats that would make any hypercar owner jealous.
To bring this number to life, it puts Model S Plaid ay the same lap time as the Mclaren P1 and Porsche 918 Spyder, both considered “hypercars.” And for a bit of fun, let’s compare a few stats:
We shouldn’t ignore the fact that these “hypercars” weren’t really produced in mass like the Model S will be. Only 375 McLaren P1s were produced and 918 units of the Porsche 918 left the assembly line in Stuttgart.
A new standard in car manufacturing?
Technology advances happen in all industries, there is no denying that. Every industry has organizations that improved their products and innovated in the last few years, that’s natural.
But when we think about how much they “leap” in technology advances, not many companies can say they have achieved what Tesla has in the car industry. It’s a trademark by their leader who has come from a revolution in digital payments (PayPal) and is doing similar things in space travel (SpaceX) and transportation (The Boring Company) to name a few of his endeavors.
In such a competitive industry, most companies would be happy with 0.5% improvements in each major area. But, Tesla is bringing improvements in major components to their cars at the tune of 500% increases. That’s because they aren’t trying to make the same technology better: They are re-inventing.
They are creating their own elements, re-thinking battery technology and how their already ultra-modern giga factories can be even more efficient. For instance, Tesla is re-inventing alloy and using a machine in their factory that is able to create the entire rear of the car chassis as a single piece of alloy, reducing the number of parts required to build that component by 370 parts. Traditional alloy would not work as it wasn’t flexible enough to be molded in the way Tesla envisioned.
This new body mass reduction and fewer parts, combined with the revolutionary battery engineering changes the game in terms of mass production of cars.
With the efficiencies in logistics, vast reduction in size of their factories, and advances in battery technology, we start to see how this company will continue to build not just faster, better and cheaper cars but become the new organizational standard for car manufactures of the future.
The only question now is… What comes after Plaid?
Its hard to say, because, much like Star Wars parody movie Spaceballs, where Ludicrous and Plaid speed come from, Tesla brakes for nobody.
Spaceballs One from the movie Spaceballs, MGM, 1987