Plaid front wheels break traction in tight turn into garage

[Ultimate Plaid]

My 2022 Plaid slips the outside front wheels on tight turns at low speeds (1-15 MPH). The same thing happens when reversing in the same direction. As a result, there is a clear tire prints into the garage. Any other Plaid or newer Model S owners having the same experience?

My suspicion is that this is normal and has something to do with the 4 wheel drive and a performance differential in the front wheels. Seems to waste power and pre-maturely wear tires.

Inputs are appreciated.

Ultimate

 

[WilliamG]

Makes sense... Does anyone have experience with all season tires? We don't get the winter precip here so much (unless we get a Nor'easter that drops blizzard level snow), so the more aggressive tread patterns don't add much.

Shouldn't be any issue at all with all-seasons.

 

[btec116]

Yeah others already answered the "why" above correctly (aggressive ackermann with cold UHP summer tires = skipping).
Getting off summer tires in the cold weather and switching to basically any tire more suited to the lower temperatures will help a lot.

Think about compliance, you want your contact patch to be flexible enough not to "skip" across the surface at low speeds. So compound-change will help a lot (like switch to all seasons) and higher sidewall should also help (changing wheels to 20 or 19). Many of us have a second set of wheels to run for the colder months, I know some people hate that, pick your poison I guess...

Or did you mean experience with all-seasons in general? Tesla has released the 21" Goodyears as all-seasons now, but I've never driven them. They should be pretty awesome though, knowing their standards...
AS tires have become very good and cater to different tastes well. If you want to bias towards performance and handling, you'd do well with a set of Michelin Pilot Sport-AS4's (they're kinda the performance benchmarkfor UHP all seasons), on the other end the CrossClimate-2's do awesome in deeper snow (and have a 3PMSF rating on an All season!) but give up driving dynamics for snow grip. They're also N/A in 21" though so that's new wheels too. Finally Conti Extreme Contact DWS06+ are supposed to be almost as good as the PS-AS4's for performance but with a bit mroe to offer in light snow. So kind of in-between the other two. I had a set of the older ones on a five series and loved them.

But any of these tires will be epically better in the cold (say under 40F) than a summer UHP!
Have fun, let us know what you go with!

 

[Andrei D]

If you’re on 21” summers and it’s cooler out, this is normal behavior.

Hi! I have the same issue and I wonder why 21" summers and cooler weather accentuates this issue? I mean, yeah ok, summer performance tires don't do well in cool climate but size is also important?

 

[Tiger]

In my Model 3 simply changing the setting to winter tyre mode on summer tires from service menu gives more oversteer and summer tire mode gives more understeer. Try if you have any luck with that. For this reason, I drive with winter tyre setting all year round, especially noticeable in tight roundabouts.

 

[WilliamG]

Hi! I have the same issue and I wonder why 21" summers and cooler weather accentuates this issue? I mean, yeah ok, summer performance tires don't do well in cool climate but size is also important?

Because you have very little traction on the summers on the edges of the tires, and cold weather means you have even less traction. You’ll have none of this happen once you switch to winters which stay malleable in colder weather.

 

[brooklyn]

I have been caught out in cold snaps with summer tires on other cars and have never experienced this until my MSP, but then again I have never run a tire this wide on any vehicle. Could be whatever compound/formula Michelin uses on their summers, but I just remounted my factory wheels/tires and the skipping is back with a vengeance. Seemed to completely go away running the same Michelin tires in 285/35/20 all around when I had my summers on, but they never saw temps below 50-F.