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Tesla Model S P85D Destroys Ferrari in Street Race

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12 years ago

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“What you got in there?” is heard from the Ferrari in the next lane over. Looking over is the driver of a Ferrari 575 Maranello unaware that he has just pulled up to a rare sighting of one of the first Tesla Model S P85Ds to hit American soil. “691hp” says Allen Wong, a young entrepreneur in his 20’s who made his fortune through a series of successful iOS apps.

Allen, who incidentally drives a Lamborghini Aventador as his other daily driver, has just agreed to an impromptu test of acceleration with the neighboring 12 cylinder Ferrari. “Yo yo, go!” is heard as the ubiquitous vocal cue to signal  for a drag race.

Not to much surprise, the 691HP dual-motor Tesla Model S P85D raged with as much ferocity off the line as any Tesla does. It’s Ozzy Osbourne ripping the head off of a live bat. The P85D has just made minced horse meat out of the legendary brand.

Allen describes the acceleration of the P85D as “the border between fun and frightening”. According to Allen’s Facebook page,

I got a chance to drag race a 691-hp Tesla Model S P85D against a Ferrari and a Lamborghini today, and this is what it felt like…

 

First impressions: The acceleration is ridiculous. I daily drive an Aventador, and I thought I got used to fast accelerations. But no, the Tesla Model S P85D hauled some serious ass. As a passenger, you do not get a chance to get ready for it at all. My internal organs were glued to the back of my body. I’ve done the P85+ test drive before, and it was already pretty fast. But this P85D is on a whole other level.

 

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We pitted the car’s acceleration against other cars. It pretty much beat everything at the car show (Ferraris and R8s didn’t stand a chance). So I had to pit it against my Aventador, which does 0-60 in 2.8-2.9 seconds. Tesla P85D does it in 3.1-3.2 seconds. Right off the bat, the Tesla got ahead. It gets a good maybe half a car length ahead before the Aventador grips fully and starts hauling. So we decided to make it fairer and only accelerate the Tesla when the Aventador grips and starts moving. That’s when we truly got both cars to start moving at roughly the same time.

 

Drag Race Results (Note: This was completely casual and not in anyway in ideal, scientific conditions – the Aventador was not doing launch control): The Tesla pulled ahead in the beginning by about the hood length. But Tesla never got a chance to pull away. Instead, the Aventador kept up and was slowly cutting the difference between them with each gear shift. By the 50-60 mph, the Aventador caught up. By the 85 mph mark, the Aventador was half a car length ahead and the Tesla was only at 70-75 mph. So from around 0-60, the Aventador and Tesla P85D were pretty much neck and neck. But from 0-30 or so… the Tesla beat the Aventador. This gives you a general idea of how ridiculously fast the P85D is at the jump.

 

More observation: It feels different as a driver. Since I can anticipate the acceleration, I don’t get the same scare/thrill that I get as a passenger. It’s to a point where I actually enjoyed being a passenger rather than a driver. But after about a dozen of those 0-60 accelerations, I felt like I had to puke – probably the first time I felt this way in many years. It was a different feeling than what I got from an internal combustion engine car, because when you hear the engine roar, you can kind of anticipate the acceleration that comes after it. But since the Tesla is silent, there’s no warning. I think I almost got a concussion from my head suddenly banging into the headrest because of how little anticipation the car gives you. At one point I was in mid-sentence when my driver floored it, and I had trouble getting the words out of my mouth. It really takes your breath away (literally). The acceleration is at the border between fun and frightening.

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Gene has been obsessed with cars since before he could legally sit in the front seat. Writer, researcher, unofficial CS support, accountant, native suit guy when needed, and overall stick poker. He approaches every story the way he approaches a road trip: with too much enthusiasm, not enough planning, and a surprisingly good outcome. gene@teslarati.com

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Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

Published

7 hours ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

3 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

6 days ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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