Unanswered Questions from the Tesla Model 3 Performance Test on Alaskan Ice and Snow

About a day ago the Tesla Twitter account posted a video of a Model 3 Performance and its supposed traction on ice and snow in Alaska, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk retweeted. Now, I’m usually a skeptic when it comes to ‘showcase videos’, and this was just 10 seconds long.

Now that you’ve seen it too, let’s talk about a few things the video logically leads us to question.

First of all, it’s a 10-second video that shows a Model 3 Performance fishtailing in the snow, but apparently with a good amount of traction.

I don’t know if the driver of the Model 3 Performance was a professional or not, but it didn’t look like the car was being driven by an ‘average driver’ like me. If it were me behind that wheel, I’d have let go of the steering and shut my eyes until I hit something. Wait, no that’s what my wife would have done. I would have just let it fishtail me to the side of the road on that first turn. And maybe, just maybe, thought of lifting my foot off the accelerator. This guy in the video looks like a professional driver, and that’s not fair because that’s not how the majority of us would react in that situation. At the very least, the driver would need to know a little about oversteering, understeering and skid-recovery, wouldn’t he?

The second thing I noticed is that it seems like it was ‘filmed for effect’. It doesn’t look like a random incident caught on someone’s smartphone. Loved the snow-shower-on-camera effect, btw. To be fair, this was a test run so the filming part was premeditated, but I don’t think it really proves anything other than the fact that the guy’s a good driver and he knows how to handle a Tesla Model 3 Performance on snow and ice.

The third thing that popped into my mind is this: why does it look like Tesla is doing something that should have been done prior to releasing the Model 3? Don’t automakers fully test their vehicles on different terrain and in different weather types before they actually put it into production? I’ll admit that the Model 3’s development timelines might have been more, well, more squeezed than cars from other automakers, but this is not a test you do months after the car has hit the road. What if the car had failed? Would they recall everything they sold to people in cold climes? With winter just a few months away, that’s definitely something to think about.

Fourth, not everyone is going to be buying the Performance variant. Can the same kind of traction be expected on the RWD or AWD Dual Motor? That’s important to know because there’s a $15,000 price difference between the currently available base model and the Dual Motor Performance.

And finally (not really), will the car behave like this when Autosteer is engaged? Tesla heavily promotes the various forms of Autopilot, and Musk even boasts that v9.0 will have full self-driving capability, but that evokes my skeptical side again. Extensive testing is required to prove that a car can drive itself in any terrain or weather, especially something as dangerous as ice and snow. But that video, when Tesla drives itself on snow in Alaska, will be insane. Just think of the media uproar.

What about the tires – were they studded or non-studded winter tires?

What difference does it make whether it’s a thin sheet of ice or foot-thick ice?

How would it perform on an icy slope in slow traffic?

The video leaves a trail of unanswered questions, as you can see. Why not just put out the results of the Model 3 Performance test in comparison with another vehicle in the same weight and torque class? That might make a lot more sense.

<<More on Model 3 Performance>>

Model 3 Dual Motor and DM Performance Might Not Have Greater Range

Musk Shares First Look at Model 3 Performance White Seats

<<Sources>>

  1. Twitter (@elonmusk) and (@Tesla)
  2. Autotrader.ca