Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Arnie Papp @ Flickr

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

To coincide with the opening of its newest store in Washington, DC, Tesla asked us if we'd like to spend a few days with one of its latest Model S P100Ds. However, there was just one catch; we'd have to do all the driving ourselves. As one of the newest cars off the production line, this Model S was equipped with Tesla's own self-driving sensors (known in Tesla-world as HW2), but the company is still in the process of pushing out the software necessary to enable Autopilot in these cars. Scratch that plan of road-tripping up to New York—a proper test of the new Autopilot will have to wait.

Autopilot may have been absent, but this P100D did have a rather special trick up its sleeve: an Easter egg that makes Ludicrous Mode even more, well, ludicrous. So, rather than try out the P100D's humongous (for an electric vehicle) range—315 miles according to the EPA—we spent our days finding out just how fast it really is. The answer? Ludicrously fast.

That powertrain tho'

As the name suggests, the P100D is built around a 100kWh lithium-ion battery that's the same size, and uses the same cells, as the P90D but with a new architecture to enhance cooling. "People often don’t understand—they think of battery and battery pack as the same thing—but really, overwhelmingly, the technical complexity, once you get to a large number of cells densely packed, the engineering complexity is very much on the module and pack level, not on the cell level," explained Elon Musk. "You can think of the cell level as being a chemical engineering problem, and the module and pack level as being a mechanical, electrical, and software problem, and with thermal propagation being the most difficult thing to deal with."

Each axle gets its own motor/generator. That's 259hp (193kW) at the front, 503hp (375kW) at the rear—although the maximum combined power output is 680hp (507kW). To get the most out of the car, you need to engage the Easter egg, which involves going into the powertrain settings page and pressing the Ludicrous button for 10 seconds. The display will change to a warping star field—think the view out the front of the Millennium Falcon as it goes into hyperdrive—at which point you can either tell the car "No, I want my mommy!" (in which case it cancels) or "Yes, bring it on!" This begins preheating the battery to a toasty 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), the optimum temperature for the lithium-ion chemistry to work best.

However, depending upon the ambient temperature, this might not happen very quickly; on a couple of occasions the P100D needed around an hour to get sufficiently warm for us to have all the fun.

Please sir, I’d like to relocate my kidneys

Once sufficiently hot, there is no getting around the fact that the P100D is extremely, ridiculously fast in a straight line. Motor Trend timed a P100D reaching 60mph (97km/h) in 2.27 seconds. Although we didn't have a chance to take this Tesla to the drag strip, we have little reason to doubt such times are possible. Once in the Easter egg mode, the main instrument display shows you some performance data from the car, including peak acceleration (measured in m/sec2). Our best? A pretty impressive 11.2m/sec2.

From behind the wheel, it's the way the car helps rearrange your internal organs that really does it for us. Give it all the beans (on a straight, empty road with good visibility, obviously), and you feel the sensation most acutely in your lower back as your kidneys attempt to relocate themselves to the rear seats. Combined with an almost total absence of noise, and the default result is somewhere between a fit of the giggles and howls of laughter.

From a standing start, you can feel all four tires fight for grip for the first few instants, with a little lateral yawing, although nothing as pronounced as you'd experience in Ferrari's all-wheel drive (and 600+hp) FF. It even manages to torque-steer less than a Ford Focus RS, which puts down almost exactly half as much power and torque.

Flooring the P100D once already moving—at 30mph, say—and it's not quite as breathtakingly rapid. Although I should note here that my "butt dyno" rapidly normalizes itself to the level of available thrust in much the same way a heroin addict builds up tolerance to opioids.

There is of course a downside in attempting to go everywhere as fast as you can in a P100D, and that's the matter of range. In fact, we averaged 952Wh/mile over the course of about 30 miles—enough to consume roughly 80 percent of the car's battery and more than three times the EPA rated 300Wh/mile. Note that this wasn't 30 miles of neck-snapping standing starts, but there's an energy hit associated with warming up that battery. But who cares? You don't need to go to the pump to refill the car, and 952Wh/mile doesn't have the same emotional impact as 6mpg, although if we lived in a particularly coal-dependent area, we'd probably feel a little more sheepish about our achievement.

Constantly iterating

Unlike the rest of the auto industry, Tesla doesn't really believe in model years, preferring instead to constantly iterate its cars as new improvements pass muster. You can tell one of the latest Model Ses by the extra optical sensors embedded along the car's flanks (one on each side behind the front wheels and another one in each B-pillar), and our car also sported a much better interior than the last Model S I drove. The center console is now similar to that of the Model X with storage options other than just a cavernous bin, and the little cubby underneath the huge infotainment screen now has a small lip on its leading edge to help prevent its contents trying to race your kidneys to the back seats when you're having fun. The front seats sport a new design; they are both comfortable and supportive, as well as looking quite fetching when covered in black leather.

The infotainment UI is constantly being worked on, and, despite a lack of physical buttons, it won me over by being responsive and legible. You'd think those things wouldn't be hard to pull off, but so few traditional OEMs have gotten that stuff right. Another neat design detail was the automatic headlights; yes, plenty of cars have these, but the P100D's calibration was among the best we've noticed, coming on almost instantly when driving into a tunnel. Other cars we've tested recently were so lackadaisical in this regard that the entire length of DC's 3rd Street Tunnel was behind us before they responded.

Gripes? We have but a few. Although the P100D is stupendous in a straight line, it's still not the most exciting car to hustle down a twisty road, something we elaborated on during our test of a P90D recently. The ride can be a little firm—if Tesla is still on the lookout for talent, we'd suggest poaching whoever it is that tunes BMW's dampers. The paint on the hood had more orange peel than we'd expect for a car with a six-figure price tag. And the infotainment system would only play content from my iPhone via Bluetooth even though it was happy charging from one of the USB ports.

Most of those complaints really are quite minor things, though, outweighed in the grand scheme of things by the car's ability to cause driver and passengers fits of the giggles thanks to supercar-levels of speed without the fossil fuel-associated guilt.

Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin