Mike K
Member
True, although you'd probably be swapping the whole drive unit. Inverters are matched to their motors, and the P85 has both a different inverter and a larger motor than the 85. Considering how fast Tesla's swapping DUs, it would be simplest to do that, rather than to try to separate the siamese twins that make up the inverter and motor.
Not quite. All three of the original cars use the same motor. The 60 and 85 use the same motor and inverter with the 60 being software limited to lower horsepower because of the battery's current limitations. The P85 also uses the same motor but has a larger inverter.
So in theory all you need to upgrade a 60 to an 85 is the battery and a firmware update (and this has indeed been done at least once). And again in theory, all you need to do to convert your 85 to a P85 is swap out inverters and get the firmware updated to tell the car it has that inverter.
Now Tesla has a vested interest in not doing this or at least not doing it for a reasonable price. If they offered the retrofit for anything less than the difference in cost between a new 60 and a new 85 or a new 85 and a new P85 they would cutting into their own sales of the higher models. Plus if the price to upgrade was the same after purchase as it is when you're buying many people would just buy the base car and then upgrade it later, if at all. This would needlessly burden the service centers with a load of retrofits.
I'd like to think that with the original P85 no longer in production Tesla would be more apt to offer this upgrade at a reasonable cost but again that would eat into their CPO sales of the P85s. So I don't think we're going to see any upgrade path from Tesla any time soon and if we do it will be substantially more than if you had outfitted your car with the same gear from the factory. The idealist in me wishes they'd offer the upgrade paths. The business man in me realizes that they pretty much can't without cannibalizing some aspect of their current business though.