I have never before shot a film on a Tesla Model S,
but today I have the quick one, the P 100 D,
and something more analogue to drag it against.
I'm sitting in a Tesla Model S
for the first time in a long, long time actually.
I've only ever driven one of these before.
I've slightly chosen to ignore the hold Tesla thing
because it scares me and I'm not very much into them,
but we have a P 100 D today because everyone's been telling me
that I have to drive one. It's amazing. It's so fast.
So we're here at Bruntingthorpe to go fast.
I have no idea how it works, so just off camera here
is my boss Charles Turner, who is going to tell me
how to turn it on.
Charles, away you go.
-Press the controls button. -Controls button, there we go.
-Okay, first thing we need to do is-- -Wow, look at that.
Yeah, it's good, isn't it? Condition the battery,
so if you press under Ludicrous-mode max battery power
-Where's Ludicrous mode? -Ludicrous mode is up there.
-There. -Underneath it, press that.
-And go max battery power. -Max battery power.
Yeah, so that's done. Get rid of that.
The next thing you need to do is to activate the Ludacris-plus Easter Egg.
You need to hold down the Ludacris icon
in the drive settings for five seconds
and select "Yes, bring it on."
-What? -Press Ludacris for five seconds.
-Right, now what? -It should do something.
Yeah, so I've got a Light Speed.
It looks like the Millennium Falcon going into light speed.
It says here, "Are you sure you want to push the limits?
"This will cause accelerated wear of the motor gearbox and battery."
I'm offered "No, I want my mommy," M-O-M-M-Y, or "Yes bring it on."
"Yes, bring it on."
It's heating and it's estimating it's ten minutes for it to heat.
-Simple then. -Yeah.
It's not the kind of thing you just activate down in Battersea
-in the traffic lights, is it? -No.
Let's go have a drag race. What would you drag race it against?
I'd drag race it against an icon of modern day performance
that doesn't necessarily want to go that fast in a straight line
of its own accord. In other words, it requires some driver input.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 911R.
Three, two, one...
Oh, my lord. Okay.
The zero-to-100-mile-an-hour challenge is over
and the 911 is absolutely roasted.
I'm sorry I couldn't talk, but that's genuinely the first time I've done that
Wow, it explodes off the line.
I mean, it's explosive the acceleration,
and I can see why people are so addicted to it.
Oh, that's great fun. Okay, I'm being slightly quiet and contemplative
because I've not experienced that sort of acceleration
in a saloon car shape before,
but my criticism of the Tesla Model S and its performance variance is that
I think they're one-trick ponies,
and I also think that acceleration in the modern era is about more than
just going from zero to 100.
I want to know whether this thing is fast from zero to 150.
It's absurd, right? So can it get the head for 150-mile-an-hour challenge.
That's 110, and he's pegged me, now, he's pegged me, 120.
He's coming back at me, 130, He's coming back at me, 140.
He's coming back at me, 150 miles an hour,
and it's beating the 911R to 150.
I didn't expect that. Slight change of plan here,
which Neil won't like.
I want to drive the 911 because I've got this old feeling
that I can make it get a bit closer,
and I want to see what this thing looks like from the other car.
I want to see what a, you know, a two-ton saloon car
doing naught-to-60 in two point something seconds looks like.
Wow!
So Charles has had to go and cool the battery down.
It seems to have a very narrow operator window.
It's either too hot too cold.
I had an auntie like that once.
Never quite get the temperature right for her.
It's always too hot or too cold. "Give me a glass of water, dear."
Okay, there's some water to cool down. "Oh, you haven't got a blanket, have you?"
That's the Tesla Model S, like my auntie.
Okay, so here we go zero to 150 miles an hour.
Three, two, one.
Look at it go!
So that's 100, 110. I'm catching him, 120. I've got you.
911R is coming up. I'm at 130. And it's gone!
Yes!
At 135, we just go.
Now I'm doing 170. He can't do that.
So it is just a zero to 120 mile-an-hour machine. That's what it is.
It absolutely nails it to 120,
but then, yeah, the good old internal combustion engine comes good.
Very impressive, dead impressive, you know what, by both cars.
Little grin in that. I'm laughing now. Keeping petrol power alive.
You gotta say though, this thing is so impressive.
I rest my case. people in the car and they make noises when it accelerates
because it's unusually fast.
We've done the drag racing,
and we proved that it's really fast to 120.
We kind of already knew that because the Internet is alive
with drag racing videos of these things munching hyper cars and super cars
from rest to 120. What I want to know, is it any good on the road?
The ride's not bad but I've got a bit
of vertical movement that I wasn't expecting
so it gets itself quite airborne. This is a bumpy road though
There's a little bit of noise in the cabin.
This is the other thing in not having engine and transmission noise.
If you hear a little creek or something from the dash, you really notice it.
£130,000 for this model. This is the mack daddy.
This is everything. So this is all the performance and all the range.
Doesn't feel like that inside here at all. The big screen is most impressive.
You'll see it in a minute. I'll put my hand over it.
It is double the size of anything I've ever seen in another car before.
It's very much next-gen, so I can see the autopilot thing spotting me
exactly on the road. It's got the two cars in front of me
positioned perfectly. It knows what's going on.
I get the feeling it knows things about me that I don't want it to know.
Like it knows some of the bad things I did at prep school.
It's the regenerative braking that's the most obvious thing,
and it leaves you out of sync with other traffic
because when you back off, it regens and gives you a lot of automatic braking
without touching the brake pedal, so when you go to break,
all the other cars coast like a normal car coasts,
but this thing stops faster, so you have to sort of cover the throttle
a bit like you're driving an automatic in traffic.
I quite like the sparseness. At this speed, it is incredibly quiet.
I mean it's quieter than an S class.
In town, I can completely see why people love these things.
Because for the traffic like Grand Prix, it's unbeatable.
And I suppose the lack of noise is appealing in that respect.
And all of this is so sci-fi and so next gen.
I sort of wonder why the exterior looks so conventional,
sort of like a two or three box hatchback
when they had the chance to redesign everything
because they don't have the constraints of a transmission tunnel, do they,
or a normal engine. £130,000.
But you don't have to put fossil juice in it.
But how much do you spend on fossil juice and how much does this thing depreciate?
Those are the numbers I really want to know.
Let's pull out of a T-junction, just put our foot down.
Dear Lord, that was 50 miles an hour in that time.
I can see that people become quite addicted to that
sort of immediate step-off acceleration because it's uncanny.
The thing's heavy, really heavy and that, in combination with four-wheel drive
and just being pushed into the ground by that mass.
I think what people like me want to know is, is it actually any good to drive.
Well, it's fast.
The steering doesn't really have any great life to it,
but I can place it,
and that weight does give it a sort of sure-footed feel on the road.
It just feels squished into the tarmac. That's riding pretty well.
It's quite a bumpy road. Okay, I'm impressed.
Body control's pretty good. It doesn't need to go much faster than I'm going now.
Brakes, it doesn't like stopping repeatedly from very high speed,
but at these sort of speeds, you can sort of throw it in.
Okay, yeah, I'm quite impressed by this.
Do I mind that it doesn't have an internal combustion engine?
Not really for doing this because the cars that I enjoy the most
that are in this class, you know, sort of five, seven series-sized car,
well, engineers have spent the last 30 years trying to make
the powertrain as quiet as possible, and this beats them all
because it's not making any noise.
But in that time, my range has gone from 170 to 150, so I think
we're gonna have a little charge, and then have a bit more thinking
about this very, very clever machine.
This is the flagship Tesla Model S.
That means all the power and all the range.
It costs £130,000, and Tesla claims zero to 60 in, wait for it, 2.4 seconds.
Yes, 2.4 seconds.
It weighs 2,240 kilograms, has a claimed range of 381 miles,
but not if you use all that performance. Top speed is 155 miles an hour
The power is rated as the equivalent of 603 horse power,
torque 713 pounds per feet.
Technically it's so clever, it really does make the brain hurt.
Yet it somehow doesn't feel like an expensive car.
The cabin is completely dull.
Just an some old Merc switch gear, a couple screens and some cheap leather.
So this is a windy piece of road
and I have no idea what it'll be like down here.
This is technical as well. This has been the undoing of a few quite good cars,
so I'm fascinated to know what it's like.
I mean the speed is without any question at all.
So we're through the full travel of the damper a couple of times.
Not too bad. It's got an awful lot of compression damping in it.
You can feel it, so it gets airborne, and then it controls the movement
very quickly, almost too quickly.
And it feels like if it had a second input at that point, it might just give up
because the damper's still dealing with the previous bump.
But you can go really fast in this, and it doesn't fall apart.
It's not a shambles. I feared it might be, but it really isn't.
But if you like going very, very fast from zero to 120 miles an hour,
where you're allowed, there aren't many cars that can do what this can do.
But why is it it doesn't really light my fuse? I don't get excited about it.
I admire what it can do, but it sort of stays there.
The prize of the package is how good it is on the road.
There's something unnatural about the way that it takes these bumps though.
It leaves you with quite a porpoising motion,
and there are two guys in the car with me now, one recording sound
and Nilo in the front, and both of them feel quite ill from the motion.
And you know what, I don't feel too brilliant either.
Brutally effective thing. Brutally. Quite brutal on one's tummy as well.
When we stop, these two are going to be sick.