2015 Tesla Model S P85D

Tesla Model S P85D may result in feeling butterflies in your stomach, or your stomach in your throat, or the sensation that partially digested butterflies might suddenly stream out of your throat. These are just a few of the reactions reported by passengers after thrill rides in Tesla’s electric rocket. Of all of the fast and slinky cars that pass through our parking lot, the Tesla Model S is the only one that consistently astounds automotive enthusiasts and agnostics in equal measure. We’re big fans of the P85D’s effortless 3.3-second zero-to-60-mph blast—sudden but never violent—but we’re even happier that Tesla seems to be getting average Americans excited about cars again.

Our drivers continue to be impressed with the car’s clever details, like the parking sensors that report the actual distance, in inches, to objects like fences, walls, and light posts rather than just blaring an alert and showing the driver an ambiguous red zone on a graphic display. Parents and kids alike enjoy the rear-facing third-row seats—kids for the novelty of the experience, and parents for the silence that comes after sequestering youngsters back there.


In January, a software update introduced Summon, a new feature that allows the driver to move the Model S into or out of a tight parking spot or garage while standing outside the car, either with no input whatsoever—touch a door handle to abort the self-parking mission—or by issuing commands via smartphone. While providing this foretaste of an autonomous-driving mode that would allow the owner to “summon” the car from a parking lot to, say, the curb in front of a restaurant, Tesla currently asks owners to restrict its use to private property. Here in the Midwest, where our parking lots are often even bigger than our cornfields, that restriction makes Summon more of a party trick than a useful function, but we’re still intrigued by an automaker that doesn’t stop improving a car after it’s been sold. However, Tesla’s tendency to leave these software functions in a seemingly perpetual Beta state also makes us wary that they’ll never be finalized.

WHAT WE DON’T LIKE: The limits of today’s battery technology immediately become clear whenever the temperature drops below 40 degrees. Winter posed a challenge for our Model S even though Michigan saw relatively mild temperatures and minimal snowfall. During one 20-degree weekend in late November, features editor Jeff Sabatini left the office on Friday with an indicated 225 miles of range, the maximum charge on the battery in its standard mode. He drove just 54 miles over the weekend and plugged in once to add 22 miles of indicated range, yet the car’s dashboard readout said he had just 59 miles remaining by Monday morning. That’s 134 miles of range lost to heating the cabin, conditioning the battery pack, and the efficiency reduction all EVs experience in the cold. This is a more extreme example, to be sure, and no doubt affected by the car spending most of the weekend outside and unplugged.

Still, it wasn’t uncommon to see 190 miles of range evaporate in a 130-mile round-trip drive to Detroit during the winter. This is, in large measure, why our observed fuel economy and range don’t approach the Tesla’s EPA ratings. Granted, our car is driven by various staff members, not all of whom have a garage, so it likely is exposed to cold weather a lot more than are most Snow Belt luxury cars. We’ve run plenty of conventional cars under the same conditions, though, without it routinely impeding their ability to perform the primary mission of getting from point A to point B. And the Model S’s cold-blooded sluggishness goes deeper. When the powertrain is cold, the deceleration capabilities and capture of energy from regenerative braking are either reduced or completely unavailable. (The Tesla also has a hydraulic braking system, so it still can, you know, stop.) The touchscreen becomes even less responsive than normal and it doesn’t work for drivers wearing gloves. And the frameless side windows rarely drop fast enough, so they often catch the weather stripping when the door is opened.

WHAT WENT WRONG: Just days before this update was written, a spring rainstorm resulted in water leaking into the cabin through the sunroof. While rain poured from the sky, it only dribbled into the cabin—just a few drops total—during hard left turns. At least the problem appeared at a convenient time. Our car was already scheduled to make the 182-mile trip to our nearest retailer in Lyndhurst, Ohio (near Cleveland), for its 25,000-mile service.


We’ve also asked the technicians to look at the 17-inch touchscreen, which responds reluctantly to our pokes and swipes, like a five-year-old iPhone that has undergone three operating-system updates. It’s especially annoying when using the satellite radio, as changing stations is met with lag that can be counted in whole seconds. Occasionally the radio also displays channel information for a station other than the one we’re listening to, and it often defaults to SiriusXM Hits 1 when we get into the car, subjecting our drivers to a kind of pop-music game of Russian roulette, with the chambers filled with the likes of Justin Bieber, One Direction, and Selena Gomez.

We should also point out that our P85D spec panels now show 463 horsepower for the combined output rather than the 691 horsepower that Tesla claimed when it initially released the car. While the P85D’s two electric motors are capable of producing 221 and 470 horsepower individually (for a total of 691), they can’t both make maximum power at the same time due to limitations of the power electronics and the battery pack. Tesla subsequently revised its claims but nothing changes on the car. Our long-term car is, and always has been, capable of mustering 463 horsepower (it was built before the $7500 option to get 532 horsepower in Ludicrous mode was available).

WHERE WE WENT: It took 11 months for our Model S to cross the halfway mark in this 40,000-mile test. That’s far longer than it typically takes to accumulate miles during our long-term tests, almost certainly because few of our drivers are willing to subject themselves—and their families—to the extra time required for a Tesla road trip. Since our 1600-mile road trip last May, its longest excursion has been to Louisville, Kentucky, a 350-mile journey that took seven clock hours in the Model S, instead of the usual five and a half burning gasoline.

Months in Fleet: 13 months Current Mileage: 23,958 miles
Average Fuel Economy: 67 MPGe Battery Capacity: 85 kWh C/D Observed Range: 180 miles
Service: $0 Normal Wear: $0 Repair: $0