Tesla has been redefining the automotive industry for quite some time now and the streak continues with the recently launched Tesla Model S Plaid, which is essentially a performance-oriented version of the Model S sedan. The Model S Plaid was officially launched at an event held a short while back at the electric vehicle manufacturer’s Fremont facility in California. Tesla’s bossman Elon Musk reeks of swagger and that was pretty evident at the launch event too as he himself drove in the new electric car.
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The Model S Plaid is being touted as the world’s fastest accelerating car but it is so much more than that.
The numbers
Let us dispose of the numbers first because they are quite interesting. The Model S Plaid has a tri-motor setup, delivering 1020hp of peak power, across the entire rev range, right up to its 321 kph (top speed). All the electric horses combined helps the Model S Plaid register a 0-to-60-mph dash in less than 2 seconds. “It is faster than a Porsche, safer than a Volvo,” is how Elon Musk decided to put it during the event. He also went ahead and claimed that its acceleration will ‘hit you right in the limbic system.’
For a car that goes this manically fast, it also charges up pretty quickly. In the Plaid configuration, the Model S promises a range of 627km on a single charge. Even Supercharging speed has been optimised, says Musk, adding that the new car can obtain roughly 300km worth of charge “before you can finish a cup of coffee”. In other words, it does it in under 15 minutes. This has been achieved by incorporating an all-new battery pack, new carbon sleeper rotors and torque vectoring. Musk also highlighted the vast network of Superchargers it has built across the world for its customers, which has now gone up to 25,000 stations.
PS5 levels of gaming performance
Being a Tesla, it has to be futuristic and the Model S Plaid doesn’t disappoint in this department as well as Musk also demonstrated the car’s ‘PS5-level performance’. The Model S Plaid includes a new Tesla infotainment system, which is powered by AMD’s Ryzen processor and a discrete AMD RDNA 2 GPU.
“There’s never been a car that has state of the art computing technology, state of the art infotainment where this is literally at the level of a PlayStation 5,” Musk was quoted as saying during the event. AMD had revealed last week that it’s powering this new infotainment system in both the new Model S and Model X, with 10 teraflops of computing power. That in itself is nearly identical to the 10.28 teraflops found on Sony’s PlayStation 5, although Tesla’s total compute includes both the integrated and discrete GPUs so it won’t be a full 10 teraflops for gaming alone, the report said.
Also read: Tesla Model 3 Spied Testing In India For The First Time!
Tesla Model S Plaid has been launched at a price of 129,990 dollars (roughly converted to almost ₹95 lakh). The earlier price of 119,990 dollars was hiked by Tesla just 24 hours before the event, along with price hikes for some of its other models too.