Here's Why the Tesla Model 3 Performance Is the Best Tesla Yet

this is a new

tesla

model

3

performance

which means it is the sporty version of the entry level

tesla

model

3 sedan the model 3

performance

is the

best

tesla yet and today i will show you why i borrowed this model 3 from a viewer

here

in orange county california and i'm going to start with a brief description since you probably know the model 3 is the latest vehicle from tesla it's an entry level sedan with a starting price of around 35 000 .now I've already reviewed the model 3. I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on one almost exactly two years ago right after this car first came out so why am I reviewing it again because the performance Does the model 3 make some substantial improvements over the normal model? 3.

The most obvious is power. The regular model 3 has 280 horsepower. This one has 470 horsepower, which leads to a 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds, which is faster than a BMW M3 and almost as fast as the Faster higher performance version of the BMW M5 but the price is now

here

near the M5, Model 3 performance starts around 56,000 which is a steal given its speed and performance also has more range than the regular Model 3. an entry level model 3 has about 220 miles of range but it can travel about 310 miles before you have to charge it up and there are a few other upgrades as well that i'm going to show you in this video so today i'm going to take you on a tour of the Model 3 Performance I'll show you all the cool quirks and features of the

best

Tesla yet, take it out on the road and drive it and then give you a dug up score and for more of my thoughts on Model 3 Performance do Click the link below to visit autotrader.com oversteer, where I've also put together a list of the cheapest electric cars currently for sale on autotrader at the right time for model 3 performance quirks and characteristics now that I've done a very long and detailed tour of the model 3 when it first came out i am not going to cover every single thing on this car instead i will focus on things that are new and exciting and i'll cover some other quirks and highlights but i'm going to start with the new stuff and for model 3 performance one of the most interesting new items is the track mode now no one is denying that the models of more powerful tesla are really fast but have had some issues on the track and that's why model 3 performance has track mode in the center display which is all knowing and can select track mode and it does a couple of things, one is that it improves cornering by adjusting the braking in the suspension and actually helps improve handling for when it's on a race track track mode also helps improve cooling because one of tesla's issues has been that their cars seem to be built more for straight line acceleration and overheat when going to the race track, but if you put it in track mode you have slightly better cooling so you can get a few more laps out of you Model 3 performance and the next feature I love about this car is the sentinel mode.

Now if you look around this car, you can see that there are cameras everywhere. You have a camera on the sides. You have a camera on the front windshield. a camera in the rear and they're not just to help you see when you're reversing but they can monitor what's going on around you more cars should have this but right now only tesla has it and it works really cool . turn the car off lock it walk away forget it but the cameras stay vigilant hence the name sentinel mode so someone approaches the car like this crazy you can see the cameras detect it and the lights flash to let them know. it's being monitored but it goes further the screen also changes to show the car is in sentinel mode and your actions are being logged so if you look inside to see if there's anything valuable you can steal the first thing you'll see is that screen saying hey you're being recorded and obviously that's going to make this car a much less desirable target when you drive away, sentinel mode still records for another 30 seconds or so and then eventually shuts down and continues to watch in case Somebody else comes up with a couple of interesting things. things about sentinel mode if it detects anything other than movement on the outside of the car like breaking glass for example, it will actually send an alert to the owner's cell phone saying "hey you better look at this something's up and another cool feature when you return to the car after sentry mode has been active one of the first things to show up on the screen is a little alert that lets you know how many times sentry mode noticed someone approaching your vehicle pretty well and then another fantastic feature of this car is something called dog mode let's imagine you want to run to a store and leave your dog in the car obviously if it's a little hot you can't do that because it will become real long ago hot in the car but you can go into climate control in your tesla and turn on dog mode and then the climate control will keep the interior nice and cool even though you closed the auto and drove away and will continue to cool the interior until it hits a 20 percent charge, so it can do this for hours. here people will see your dog and freak out thinking it's going to die because it's getting hot inside you because they don't know dog mode is on but that's another brilliant use of the screen in this car when dog mode is on activated and you walked in the car and walked away the screen actually says my owner will be back soon it shows a picture of a dog and it actually shows the current temperature inside the car so in theory if someone gets scares thinking your dog is here maybe they'll look inside and see that and they won't be so worried and another awesome new feature is something called tesla theater which allows you to turn your screen into a real theater you walk into the tesla theater and you can see that you can select netflix you can select youtube and you can watch stuff while sitting in your car now it's important to note that this only works in the park so you can't watch netflix or youtube while driving which which is probably best for safety but you can think of a million ways this can be useful for example if you are in your car waiting for something or someone you can just go to the tesla theater and watch a couple of videos of youtube or a netflix show or a movie while you're sitting and waiting that's a really cool idea now those are some of the most useful new features on the giant tesla center screen there are also some less useful but still cool features one of the what is tesla arcade look at this you go to this little arrow button on at the bottom then you look up and to the right there is something called tesla arcade you press that and you can select a game to play and you can choose from many games different arcade style that you would have played like back in the 80's and that's so so cool just to give you an example of how it works I'm going to pick asteroids and if you pick asteroids you can see it explains how you play right and it says you use the wheel that's true all check this out now i'm on asteroids and you can see i'm using the wheel to move my little spaceship you press the left button on the wheel to speed up your spaceship you turn the wheel to turn your spaceship and it's just the best thing obviously i'm not very good at this while trying to film with one hand and steer and shoot with the other hand but lets see how good i am when i have both hands available And the answer is yes. it's still not very good now it's wo Third, not only do you have 80's style arcade games to choose from here, there's also a racing game called Beach Buggy Racing Two, you go into that and then you pick a character and pick a track and then you can race in a Beach Buggy. in your tesla and of course the way you do it is to use the steering wheel and pedals to drive around your race car while sitting in your tesla once again of course this can only be operated when parked but if you are bored you are waiting for something or someone or you just want to go to your garage for entertainment you can do that and you can race in your beach buggy racing game inside your car and here is an amazing thing about it while moving the steering wheel in game the car wheels are moving in real life too so you are moving the steering wheel to control your beach cart on the screen but you can see the wheels of this model 3 are actually moving when i steer steering wheel so there's a little bit of real life in the video game here it's absolutely crazy and speaking of cool fun features on this car there are quite a few other new easter egg features that n or you would find in no normal rational car to access them you go into a little item called the toy box you click on the toy box and then all these icons appear and you can see them we'll do it individually there's one with fire you press that and then everything The screen turns into a fire in a fireplace which looks great but it also turns on the heater in the car so it gives you a warm physical experience and you have this nice warm image of a fireplace on your screen infotainment and then another picture in the toy box is elon musk's tesla roadster being driven through space for some reason we click on that's the drawing program and you can see that you can use this to draw on your infotainment screen i'm typing my signature phrase but you don't just have to wr you can also change the color of what you're doing and then you can draw something for example right now i'm at you drawing a nice picture of a dog that has been possessed by satan.

I think I will now sign my masterpiece. I don't know when this will actually come in handy but if you want to draw on your car infotainment screen you can do it here and then another one of these items in your toy box is this planet that would be Mars and if you click in it. turns your navigation screen map into the surface of mars and turns your rover into the mars rover now i mentioned that some of these funnier little upgrades aren't particularly useful this is probably the best example of that since you know you don't you're actually on mars so you can't really see anything on your nav map, not particularly useful but a cool little thing to show your friends and then another cool item in the toy box, there's a scream cushion in there and that's a fart. so you click t The whoop cushion goes into fart mode and you can make the car play various fart noises.

The first thing that happens here is that you can position them so that, for example, you want it to look like one of your rear passengers is farting. noises, you can put the focus of the sound there and that's where the fart noise will come from, which is kind of funny. You can also change the type of fart noise that comes out with this little dropdown menu. There are quite a few options. a listen and another cool thing with the fart mode is that you can also set the fart sounds to happen on demand so when you press the left steering wheel button you will hear a fart sound but i actually prefer the another option that comes on when you turn your turn signal on so every time you turn your turn signal on you get the fart sound which is also just ridiculous but kind of funny though my favorite thing about this whole thing fart mode experience is the fact that what do they call it emissions test mode i think its absolutely funny and i also think its kind of a jab on volkswagen that volkswagen emissions test mode is this cheat system to improve his tesla emissions is just a joke on a screen next to a couple of other cool items in the toy box one is this reindeer he puts it on like a christmas mode you press it then the picture of the car on screen it turns into santa's sleigh and plays christmas music that's especially not very helpful but i guess it's kind of cool last one is cowbell mode which is probably the weirdest if you put it on so when If you are driving using the autosteering system, you can press the autosteer lever four times in quick succession and then the screen.

It will show your driving environment like Mario Kart rainbow road and play lots of cowbell sounds. This is very strange, but here it is in practice and another interesting new feature is a karao. ke system in the infotainment system that tesla calls karaoke and you can select a song and then you can sing while the words are displayed on the screen like you have karaoke in a bar its absolutely ridiculous that this exists and again not particularly useful but anyway done there is and another cool feature if you go into this bottom screen that allows you to choose from various optionsdifferent, one of those options is to call, which of course you can do with a bluetooth phone that has been paired.

What's interesting here though is if you hold call it changes the call description to today today which I guess was alexander graham bell's favorite phone greeting and mr burns used to say it in the simpsons you can hold it again and it comes back to call but you can switch between the two and your call icon can say today today if you want and then another new feature in this debatable utility car is something called smart summon now the way this is supposed to works is if you're in a parking lot and you're far away from your car at the other end of the parking lot you can actually summon it to leave your parking space and come towards you now in the past it would pull out of the parking space but several vehicles do this now, it will actually drive around obstacles and come towards you to meet the car so you don't have to walk all the way I walk to your parking space now there are several videos on the internet of this being used and not going so well the car is crashing into something the car is not seeing an obstacle that I am talking about right now without having used it I will next , you can see the results right here as you can see the car turned in the wrong direction but before I blame Tesla I should note that the phone I was using had the gps showing the wrong location which would have affected uber as well or google maps or any other app that uses your location it was really a phone issue which was still fun once the phone got my correct location the call worked fine and i even went to the other side of a row of parked cars and the tesla it came to me though as you can see it doesn't do it very gracefully it still works I guess and the next one another cool feature on this car is an improvement to the system autopilot ema called sailing on autopilot.

It's no secret that Tesla has a great autopilot system that will do a lot of the steering and driving for you, but now if you have autopilot navigation it will do more than that as well, for example if you have the system navigation on, it's coming. until an exit the car will automatically change lanes towards the exit and then take the exit if you have regular autopilot you need to turn on your turn signal then the car will move and you have to tell it to go towards the exit but if you have navigated on autopilot it will do all of that for you which is a really awesome step up in the already awesome world of tesla autopilot and then another improvement to the tesla autopilot system is the graphics that appear . ar on the screen to show you what's in your neighborhood in the past it was these kind of amorphous blobs that looked like cars and trucks and lane lines now you can see it's dramatically improved much nicer top quality and better detail on this screen which is a good look and next is another improvement made since i last checked a tesla is a new supercharger system now one of the benefits of owning a tesla is you can go and find a supercharger near your house and it will charge your car much faster than anything you can get in your house well now there is a new supercharger system tesla calls v3 and it is much faster than your current one it can add 75 miles of range to your car in just five minutes so you can fully recharge it in something like 15 or 20 minutes, which is obviously really impressive.

Another benefit of v3 SuperCharging is that you no longer have to share your charge with the vehicle parked next to you, each v3 station will have dedicated chargers for each individual vehicle, and then some non-tech upgrades to the model 3 since the last i checked one relates to the back seat some reviewers complained that the back seat was too flat on the model 3 so tesla added a little bit more padding and some sort of ridges and you can see it's not quite as flat as it used to be, which should make it a little more comfortable on longer rides.

Another update that happened here is that the interior now no longer uses leather. back in the day i guess they used synthetic leather for the seats but the steering wheel still had leather on it well that's gone so now the interior of this car is 100% leather free and i have to say you can't tell if you really look on the seats if you feel them touched sit on them it looks like leather obviously this decision was made with animals in mind to try and prevent cows from being used for their leather and I'm sure there will be some people who say that i can tell the di difference and i want that cow stuff back but i cant really it feels very similar looks very similar could you tell me this was real or fake leather and i would have no idea now what most things are new with the model 3 but I also want to go over some of the more interesting quirks and features on this car since it's been like two years since I reviewed it and since there are so many quirks and features, to yeah i'm going to start in the giant center. infotainment screen that controls everything now if you press the little car icon on the bottom left it opens up all your controls and the first default screen that comes up is your quick controls this is where you will see how your headlights your mirror adjustment the steering wheel positioning adjustment and screen brightness adjustment pretty standard stuff what is not standard is how these things fit well look at this you go to mirror adjustment and it tells you that you can use the steering wheel controls to adjust the mirrors and in fact, you can.

There's a little button on the steering wheel that you can use to move the mirror up or down, left or right and position it exactly how you want it done and you can do the same. thing with the mirror on the other side now that's not particularly exciting except you go to the steering wheel adjustment and guess what now you can use that button on the steering wheel to adjust the position of the steering wheel to be multipurpose you move it up or down here and the steering wheel goes up or down you move it from left to right and the steering wheel goes in or out so the little button on the steering wheel can change what it does depending on what you're doing right now if you have the radio on or you're listening to music it's the volume control, you move it up or down and then it will change its volume, but that's a great idea, it allows you to reduce the number of buttons on the steering wheel because they can have different functions depending on what you're doing at any given time, now continue in the infotainment system and go into the driving tab.

One thing I love is the names of the driving modes. You have sport and chill instead of just sport and normal normal is called chill because when you want to chill you put it on chill and another cool item in the driving tab if you go to the bottom you can see there is a configurable item called creep if you turn it on it will allow the the car creeps when you take your foot off the brake like most cars with an automatic transmission if you turn it off the car won't creep its amazing that that's configurable that's something we've all gotten used to in cars automatic. for a long time on this thing you can choose whether or not you want it to move and then another cool thing here on the model 3's giant center screen is the fact that it has an internet browser and it's actually quite big. well i'm going to go to my own website right now and you can see it loading i'm in a basement so it takes a little bit of time but if you give it time look i'm crushing an audi. way one of my greatest achievements you can use this internet browser however you want to go to various websites on your model 3. and then here's a crazy feature on the infotainment system if you go into the weather tab and go to this little button looks like bacon lift up the heated seat controls now the heated front seats have easier controls than these there are little menu items you can touch that are always available on the screen so you don't have to navigate to this screen every Sometimes you want to turn on the heated front seats, but for the heated rear seats you have to go in here and here's a crazy thing: this car has a heated center rear seat.

I've never seen that before. Heated rear seats either side but one heated area. The middle seat is crazy, I've never seen it and you can control all the seat heating using this little screen menu. Another cool thing about the heated seat controls in this menu is that there's a full off button, so if a passenger gets out of the car and walks away and their heated seat doesn't turn off in the back, they don't even have to. a button to turn it on or off then you can just press everything and it turns off from this menu which can be very convenient and Next I want to talk about the general operation of the infotainment screen and specifically the fact that it's a screen Very quick, very responsive and when I first drove this car two years ago I was amazed at how quickly it responded.

It touches, as you can see, moving the map basically everything, but it's important to mention that in the last couple of years, other automakers have caught up with this responsiveness. It doesn't have the advantage it once had in this area, it's still a great infotainment system very intuitive, but other carmakers have made great strides to catch up and personally I think a couple of other brands have even better infotainment technology that tesla now from I'm talking about the map. One cool thing here is if you look at the map you can see the location of all the tesla superchargers and you can see some are bright red and some are dim red.

So why is that the reason? is that it shows what superchargers are within the current range of this car which is obviously really cool those are the ones you can actually use which will help you plan your trip if you want to go somewhere that Las Vegas can't get right now, but I can make you feel like a baker now, since we're on the subject of where things are on this screen. I have to say, as much as I love this all encompassing display and relatively minimal interior, I wish there was a hi ds-up display on this car, the speed you're traveling at is displayed on the top left of the screen, which is as close to your field of vision as possible but still not smack dab in the middle which is where you write to want it it would be nice if this car had a little notice screen right in your field of vision showing some important items , your speed, maybe if your turn signals are on your windshield wipers, maybe what song is playing that kind of thing i think would be an improvement for this interior and something else that would be an improvement for this interior would be cooled seats the model 3 doesn't offer cooled seats in any capacity on any trim level no matter how much you pay and it's the same story with a heated steering wheel no matter what you spend, it's not available.

It seems strange to me. This car has a built in racing game that you can control a cartoon beach buggy with the steering wheel and yet they can't give you. cooled seats seems so ridiculous but in fact that is the situation and now i want to talk about how to get in now if you are the owner of this car you sync your phone to the car and the car recognizes your phone when you approach you just open the door and walk in now no key needed because this is not my model 3 it doesn't answer my phone so the owner gave me this little thing that looks like a credit card that says tesla on it that you can use as a key if you come over to the car.

You see, right now it's locked, the mirrors are folded, but you hold the little Tesla key up to the B-pillar between the doors and it unlocks and then you can get the same deal if you walk away, you just want to lock the car. hold this little key card in this area it will lock the doors and then you can drive away and then once you've unlocked the car with the key card and you're in you can't just get in and start driving instead there's an extra step: you have to take the key card and put it in the center console in a specific area between the center storage and the cup holders and then you can put the car in drive and drive away and you can see on the infotainment screen that it actually tells you to do it, it basically says you can't go anywhere until you put the key card in that spot and then it will recognize you and shoo away another interesting quirk of the model 3 as it is an electric car it doesn't make any motor noise which means it could frighten or surprise pedestrians orcyclists who don't.

I don't hear it coming as it's quiet from the outside, as a result Tesla adds a little sound to this car at low speeds to make sure people can hear it coming and won't be surprised. The sound is very unusual. Listen and so. Those are the quirks and performance characteristics of the tesla model 3. Now is the time to take it out on the road and see how it handles well. you know one of my problems with the model 3 it's even the performance model now it's faster than anything it's like the speed of an m5 competition super cars are that fast but it still looks like some kind of little piece of shit , you know, like someone's electric car, you know it's like all that special stuff, so as a result you underestimate it a little bit, you walk in and you're like, yeah, whatever, but then, oh my gosh, it's like wow, that's, that's the surprise of the year for sure i mean you get a mclaren which is mclaren is a little faster than this and it's like yeah well i was waiting for it because it looks like a crazy card it sounds like a crazy car, oh my god what is this oh my god crazy the direction is pretty good too Put it in a sporty direction.

It is in sport acceleration mode, not relaxed. The direction is actually not that bad. It's fast. Is m3 fast? sporty like this now dynamically pro probably not on the same level as the m3 its taller so i would imagine the center of gravity might be how low it has all those batteries down so it may not be True, but I will say that the steering, steering precision, and steering quickness are truly impressive. I really wish there was a heads up display. one of the big complaints about the car some people say they love it and don't care but i think it would be nice if you could see right in front of you that's the speed i'm going maybe if your headlights are on your turn signals I spin whatever yeah it's not that bad I can't believe it they actually have been able to turn this into a pretty sporty little car oh my god well this doesn't suck at all it's more skinny bodied no question . which m3 does or something like a very high performance european rival but not by much and i really think the precision the quickness of the steering can actually be quicker than i didn't expect this at all i just assumed there's so much crowd of the tesla people and i just assumed it would be good but there is no way it would be that good and the tesla people would love it even if it slapped them in the face while driving but actually this is pretty good , i'm not like a tesla obsessive person i just like cars and this is a really cool one that wouldn't get old i mean it would get old it would make you sick after a while but it wouldn't get old i can't believe how fast it is and i can't believe how good which is corners again the styling is what really makes me think of the m3 i think i would still prefer just because it looks so cool when it looks like an electric car it doesnt look fun or fast or anything so i guess what e maybe the roadster is the car for me and that's the performance of the tesla model 3. team its easy to see why this is the best tesla yet and now its time to give it a double score starting with the weekend categories and styling for me this is one of the biggest drawbacks of the model 3 its just too boring and family friendly and gets a 5 out of 10.

Acceleration does 0-60 3.2 seconds and gets a 9 out of 10. Handling is very sharp, not very sporty but great for a sedan and gets a 6 out of 10. the fun factor It's good but not crazy, it's a lot of fun to hit the gas and even go around corners, but with such a generic interior and exterior, you lose a bit of zest to European rivals and ultimately get a cool factor of six out of ten and these are everywhere in the major cities. Tesla makes a mistake by not improving the appearance of the performance version. compared to the base model, so it looks basically identical, won't stand out, and scores a 5 out of 10 for an overall weekend score of 31 out of 50.

Next are the daily categories and features. This car has some amazing technology among the best in the industry but then it's wrong to sing simple things like cooled seats and a heated steering wheel as a result it gets a 9 out of 10. Comfort is average for the class and it gets a 7 out of 10. Quality is mixed Interior just isn't that nice but reasonably well put together and reliability isn't at the top of the list but that's ok it gets a six out of ten practicality is average for this segment slightly better thanks to its two trunks and gets a six out of ten finally value and this is where it shines this car costs a lot less than a bmw m3 but is quicker and has better tech the value score is excellent easily and eight out of 10 added up in the score dug is 67 out of 100 which places it here against relevant rivals in this segment and in other electric cars the performance of the model 3 is excellent although you can see that it loses out to the bmw m3 cs and the audi rs3 and weekend scores those cars are just hotter and better looking the model 3 also loses to the jaguar i -pace and model x for daily scores a Those cars are bigger and more practical but overall in this segment for the money no car does it better than the performance of the model 3 it's the best tesla and it's a fantastic car too.