The dreaded winter mix is coming: snow, ice, freezing rain, and angry and unfocused holiday drivers. If those unpredictable elements have you fearing to venture out on the roads, Tesla wants you to know it has your back.
In a just-released video Tesla explains why its Model S is the perfect winter car.
Taken at face value, the Model-S doesn’t really seem like an ideal harsh-weather car. After all, it has 400+ horsepower and rear-wheel drive – just like an Oldsmobile 442. And, last time I checked, muscle cars weren’t really known for their winter performance.
Apparently, though, the Tesla is awfully popular in Scandinavia and other frostbitten parts of the world. In fact, one man with more than half a dozen Teslas lives above the Arctic Circle. I am assuming that he must be an eco-friendly super villain. Why else would you own multiple copies of the same electric car and live in what I can only imagine is a hollowed out arctic volcano.
This Scandinavian and Icelandic clientele has resulted in Tesla paying a lot of attention to winter driving, as the impressive winter driving footage shows. The reason why the Model S is capable of performing so well in the snow is its excellent weight distribution, thanks to the placement of its batteries and fancy traction control.
As the friendly, bespectacled Tesla engineer explains, even the best internal combustion setup has limitations in its response time because of the inertia of all of its moving parts. An electric motor can respond much more quickly to sensors evaluation of traction. According to Tesla, this traction control means you don’t really need all-wheel drive.
However, as good as it might be, Tesla is still planning on releasing an AWD version of the Model S and a more utilitarian Model X, which, too, will have all-wheel drive.
Even if Tesla’s electric traction control is more capable than other systems, many rear-wheel drive cars on the market also feature 50:50 weight distribution, so Tesla might not stand out as much as the video suggests.
Regardless, this video is more evidence that the Model S, for all of the controversy that has surrounded it, is a truly impressive piece of engineering.
