Thought I would give my initial butt dyno thoughts on the ludicrous retrofit. All the threads with the numbers, charts and graphs are awesome but I know as I was waiting on the upgrade I wanted to hear how owners who had it felt about the purchase. I’m going to try to be as objective as I possibly can. But all the assessments of the retrofit are fraught with confirmation bias.
Insane mode P85D is a very, very fast car. We all know the acceleration off the line (0-30) and it is truly amazing – like nothing else that most of us have ever experienced. After that it becomes a fast car and frankly not fast enough to fully overcome it’s inherently heavy natured feeling. It’s not huffing and puffing to get from 50 to 90 but it isn’t a jackrabbit either. It’s a capable road GT.
Ludicrous mode “fixes” almost all of that feeling. It nearly accomplishes the same feeling of thrust from 30 to 50 as it Insane does from 0 to 30. That’s fairly amazing IMO. Each bracket going up is faster than Insane but yields a diminishing feeling of thrust. So 30-50 is a hard pull, 50-70 a little less, 70-90 quite a bit less. Across all these ranges Ludicrous is speedy for sure.
The car feels overall lighter now. It’s lost some of that planted to the road feeling during full throttle. The power is so strong that you feel like you might actually lose control of the car if you weren’t paying attention – a feeling that, in general, you don’t get from Tesla.
The upgrade is hard to assess in terms of value. Depending on how I look at it I can convince myself either way. For me it boiled down to the mere fact that the upgrade is available meant I pretty much had to have it. I couldn’t live with knowing that there was more performance out there that I could have but didn’t. I think I’d be fine owning a 90D knowing full well that I made a conscious choice to do that. The P85D purchase was a decision to buy the pinnacle and knowing there was a little more juice to have meant I had to have it!
Note: If anyone is near Nashville and wants to see how ludicrous performs shoot me a PM. I'm happy to help other P85D owners in making the choice.
Insane mode P85D is a very, very fast car. We all know the acceleration off the line (0-30) and it is truly amazing – like nothing else that most of us have ever experienced. After that it becomes a fast car and frankly not fast enough to fully overcome it’s inherently heavy natured feeling. It’s not huffing and puffing to get from 50 to 90 but it isn’t a jackrabbit either. It’s a capable road GT.
Ludicrous mode “fixes” almost all of that feeling. It nearly accomplishes the same feeling of thrust from 30 to 50 as it Insane does from 0 to 30. That’s fairly amazing IMO. Each bracket going up is faster than Insane but yields a diminishing feeling of thrust. So 30-50 is a hard pull, 50-70 a little less, 70-90 quite a bit less. Across all these ranges Ludicrous is speedy for sure.
The car feels overall lighter now. It’s lost some of that planted to the road feeling during full throttle. The power is so strong that you feel like you might actually lose control of the car if you weren’t paying attention – a feeling that, in general, you don’t get from Tesla.
The upgrade is hard to assess in terms of value. Depending on how I look at it I can convince myself either way. For me it boiled down to the mere fact that the upgrade is available meant I pretty much had to have it. I couldn’t live with knowing that there was more performance out there that I could have but didn’t. I think I’d be fine owning a 90D knowing full well that I made a conscious choice to do that. The P85D purchase was a decision to buy the pinnacle and knowing there was a little more juice to have meant I had to have it!
Note: If anyone is near Nashville and wants to see how ludicrous performs shoot me a PM. I'm happy to help other P85D owners in making the choice.
