Anybody hear anything about aftermarket modified electric replacement motors for any of the Tesla cars yet?
You will likely first see attempts to "tune" existing drive inverters, as motors likely have some reserve. Probably also reconfiguring the thermal protection, etc.. In principle, the existing motors have some headroom. There is a question of actual need though. This will be more of a topic for less potent electric cars, where tuning will be as big or bigger than wit ICEs. In some cases also allowing to use greater capacity of the battery, say in a Volt, currently allowing some 60% of actual battery capacity to be used, pushing that to over 80, should the driver need that, while taking some of a hit in terms of battery life. But AC drive trains have lots of safe reserve, if the temperature does not exceed the temperature barriers beyond which the separator layers in motor winding would begin to melt. Typically that is above 180 or 200C...
You never NEED to trick out your car, but at the same time, you really do. I bet in about 8 years, you'll find 9 year old used Model S with serious aftermarket drive train mods because, why not?
In time, down the road, modifications on this car will be a joy. Kind of like custom roms on Android phones. Many will allow unprecedented (but possibly dangerous) software tweaks and then abundant hardware tweaks, in terms of batteries, motors, aftermarket 4by4 upgrades, etc.. It will be fun and these cars won't be obsolete for much longer periods tan ICE models.