The Joy of Electric Vehicles: A Conversation with Tesla Engineers and Designers

As I sat down to discuss my experience with Tesla's Model S, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and enthusiasm. The car's sleek design and impressive performance had left me wanting more, and I was eager to learn about the inner workings of this revolutionary vehicle.

"I have to say, it really is everything that my Model S is just not as fast, maybe not not fast, not as big, not as big," I began, "but that's okay. Because a lot of times when I get the lesson model of a lot of cars, it's just it really is a lesser model." The Tesla engineer and designer chuckled in agreement, nodding their heads as they shared their thoughts on the matter.

"For me, it feels like quality doesn't feel like a cheaper version of a big car," I continued. "Yeah, Fremont's really been doing a great job. I mean, they do a really good job because a lot of times when I get the lesson model of a lot of cars, it's just it really is a lesser model." The engineers and designers smiled at each other, clearly pleased with their work.

"But this one doesn't feel like that," I said with a grin. "I actually love the size of this. Would you like to buy them all for free?" The room erupted in laughter as the engineers and designers shared a hearty "yes" from everyone present. It was clear that they were proud of their work.

"I always buy a car based on performance when this came out," I revealed, "the fact that it happens to be environmentally friendly is just an added bonus." The room nodded in agreement, with the engineers and designers chiming in about the benefits of electric vehicles.

"Yes, you can't make something anymore that doesn't have some environmental impact," one engineer said. "But if you want to go green, you can get a car like this and realize that you don't need gas right necessarily." The room fell silent for a moment as I considered these words.

"But with the solar panels and all of that, it is almost an unlimitless source of energy," I continued. "We got a giant Fusion reactor...I know all that...everything is a tradeoff. It's just the less of a tradeoff right?" The engineers and designers nodded in agreement, their eyes lighting up with excitement.

"The amount of energy it takes to make a gallon of gas get it out of the pump it out of the ground you get a ref...it's not even close," I said, chuckling. "When you go the other way, the amount of batteries you need to power one gallon of gas...it's like oh my God, you need a room full of batteries." The room erupted in laughter once again.

"I think that it all comes down to efficiency again," one engineer said, his voice filled with conviction. "Because even as you throw 1,000 volts into the mix, knowing best case is 35 KW an hour...if you have a 50 KW hour battery, it takes less than an hour to fill." The room nodded in agreement, their faces set with determination.

As our conversation came to a close, I couldn't help but feel grateful for the opportunity to speak with these talented individuals. Their passion and dedication to their work were clear, and it was evident that they were dedicated to making Tesla's electric vehicles the best they could be.

"Would you like to know when my Roadster is going to be done?" I asked one of the engineers, a sly grin spreading across his face. "I've been waiting for that thing for five years...back to work FR both of us as well." The room fell silent once again, with all eyes on me.

"It'll be worth the wait," he said finally, his voice filled with conviction. "It should be about the fastest thing out here now. It gets better and better with age..." He trailed off, leaving me to wonder what secrets lay hidden beneath the surface of this revolutionary vehicle.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet me see what we got I mean I don't think there any car $40,000 underr was ready that has this kind of power and when you step on tell me never ready for it it really is everything my Model S is just not as fast maybe not fast not as big not as big but that's okay but it still feels like quality doesn't feel like a cheaper version of big car any secrets you can give away welcome to the episode of Jay lon's garage the car are featuring today 2024 Tesla Model 3 you know Tesla is one of the most popular products on our website everybody El has a lot of questions so rather than get like a marketing guy or somebody from PR which I don't they have a Tesla we got the chief of design and chief engineer Lars and France come on in guys see this way you get it right from the horse's mouth see these are the guys designed it engineered it he how are you to see again now I see some subtle changes but there probably more than that what have we done to this new model 3 well the new model 3 is really just an improvement over the previous one it's been about seven years since the model 3 was introduced and the original model 3 was really the idea was around making a smaller and more affordable Model S model S was great but not everybody could afford it so we want to take all the great attributes that came with a Model S and just shrink it down slightly and make it much more affordable which we did and so since then it's been a great selling car and uh super fun to drive as L Lars can tell you but we wanted to mature the car a little bit so we've improved the front end we have much narrower headlights it's much simpler in the front it's actually through all that work we've been able to improve the aerodynamics of the car too and in the back you'll notice that we've updated the tail lights and the whole rear end is new and there's um you know some really great elegant line lines of uh Lighting in the back there and there's no split lines in the trunk as we get around to the back you can see that and what is the coefficient of drag now with this model it's 219 so 219 yeah it's pretty slippery it's actually our best aerodynamic car now very good and that cost a dual motor so the range in this is what about over 300 miles yeah that's right yeah and from an engineering Point what what have we done well I mean engineering this you know at Tesla we like to whenever we get a chance we try and make everything new and better and really this is is engineered from the ground up we did a lot of safety improvements it was already a great car from a safety standpoint um but we improved side crash by really looking at the data we have in the field taking that back and then looking at the accidents that happen most often and uh increasing that so side crash will be better IHS has a new test coming out that we're probably going to score top ranked on which is probably the only sedan that'll be able to do that really um yeah um and then you know pron mentioned all the The Styling updates but when we did that as well we also try to go look at how do we make the car lighter more efficient so we got the arrow updates we have new tires we have new Wheels those are all more efficient we added a a full new interior which we haven't even talked about which has new screens um ventilated seats and a bunch of other features but we also made it ride better uh and and it's much quieter inside more cabin isolation well the thing I find the most fascinating is the range because any other electri vehicle you buy they tell you only charge it to 80% so if the range is 300 you going 260 or 270 now these batteries maybe I have it wrong you can correct me you can charge these to 100% every day all day correct yeah so in our rear wheel drive vehicles we have lithium iron phosphate batteries those go up to 100% every day all day in uh our long range Vehicles like the dual motor we do have nickel based batteries and then we'll say somewhere between 80 and 90% depending on the charge and then of course you can go supercharge at full when you're r on a range a road trip right right oh okay well that's that's that's interesting and that's really just about cycling lithium iron phosphate tends to last longer over the years we've gotten pretty good at even our our our standard nickel batteries you know they only lose 5 six% after you know 10 years you know I had my other Tesla seven years and that was the first gen so I think the range is like 228 and then it was 221 maybe at the worst 219 yeah so you lost 3% yeah but it that was over a lot of miles and a lot of you know and that happens with fuel economy too right in a gas carard to down but one thing we try to do at Tesla is whenever we make new tires we always make them slightly more efficient so if you're if you you know 50,000 Mi 40,000 Mi you got to replace your tires you get the new Tesla Tire you get that range back because you got a more efficient tire on the car all right same same with the wheel design we're always looking at how we take the wheel design and add you know just get a little bit more efficiency out of it because believe it or not wheel the wheel design can have a big impact in overall range so we can gain a couple miles of range just by the way that we designed well here's a question from the design standpoint more efficiency is better cooling or does one fight the other for example you you've got disc brakes so you want to cool the brakes especially in Arizona or a hot place like this are there certain wheels that cooler brakes better but if you make the wheel more aerodynamic does it is it less cooling to the wheel you know what I'm saying well I mean there's two kinds of air flow there's under the vehicle air flow and there's outside the vehicle what France is talking about with efficiency that's really getting the air around the outside of the tire even in most Wheels like that are completely open the wheel is spinning quite a bit it creates like an air dam to get to the brakes to cool the brakes you really want to come from underneath the car we still have that but of course in a in a Tesla you barely use your brakes um with regenerative braking and now we uh you know one pedal driving you don't ever really get to the point of touching the brakes you know what's so funny on my plaid i' be on the LA freeways maybe this is just La freeways and I would hear this just kind just kind of a weird noise and I thought do I have a I got out and I'm looking am I rubbing a tire or something am I too low I couldn't figure out what it was and then I drove a couple other cars and it was the same noise and I realized it's the freeway I think it's the rain brw TIR the tires kind of sing as you go down the road but it sounds sounds like there was that one like the fly movie help me you know it sounds like you hear this noise and I thought why is my car doing but it wasn't the car it was it was I think it's the grooves no there was a few years ago someone paved a certain section out in a desert so when they went over it it played like Bin's fifth or something I can't remember but it'll be like really yeah it was pretty cool you have to look it up seems like a worthwhile yeah totally how much thought and effort went into that okay very nice is this a new color this is a new color it is yeah cuz I don't think I've seen many red Teslas there's not a whole lot well we've had a red but we just wanted to improve it um and when you see this in the the daylight it really comes to life um really shows off the form of the car a little bit better and it's exciting sporty color so yeah we're excited the thing that drives me nuts I meet people all the time and they go I mention Tesla and they go well I like American cars it's the most americanmade car you can buy it's made I don't know if it's 100% but percentage wise higher than any other vehicle yeah built in the United States mod wise number one this one's number two yeah people think it's a foreign car I don't know why because it's electric I don't know why that is it's it's just a perception that people get for whatever reason but it it's because it's not in Detroit I suppose people think oh yeah it's not American okay but good I'm glad we settled that one okay now what is the horsepower of this horsepower oh man I got to convert that well it's got two Motors right front and rear well convert it from what from kilowatts you always have to convert it from kilow um with two Motors front and rear 340 680 so 3 95 I think 395 horsepower 395 400 horsepower yeah it's pretty quick car all right cool and it's less than $40,000 that's right yeah right now it's $ 38990 okay or you know starting price before incentives 38990 that's my No matter it's not 9.99 no matter how high tech no you still have to go with that 99 like gasoline it's $499.95 a again or $5 a again yeah it's and we have a a great lease program at 29 a month now so okay very good uh are these no these no these cameras have always been here yep cameras are are there um we really you know approached the front end and the rear ends to really give it a a new look and then spent a lot of time in the interior um to really improve the interior new material story a different design we added ambient lights it's a bigger screen in the center now um a screen in the rear for the passengers and the rear seats so um yeah really all new interior as a designer what is the most efficient aerodynamic design you've ever built practical or impractical I mean how low can It Go I mean it starts to get you know in the High Teens is actually really challenging where it actually starts to look like it's you know designed in the Wind Tunnel yeah this might be one of the lowest or most efficient cars that I've ever been a part of because it's what what you say was Point 2 29 219 I mean that's yeah all right it's pretty low that's that is pretty you have to look at all the details to do that I mean of course we were talking about the wheels before that but the how the air comes in through the front Scoops goes around even here we have a little lip at the back of the the hood that not only helps aerodynamics but improves wind noise because there's no buffeting that comes up over the hood as the air slips up and over better of course the advantage you don't have down force in this correct well you know they go pretty fast too so we we do have to balance the front and rear lift which is always a fun game when you're trying to be slick in a straight line you know at higher speeds you tend to to get off balance front like I've got a t87 tatra over there and that's got some down that's 27 but has no downforce it's just the straight lines yeah yeah I mean it's just strictly so at high speed it floats a little float a little bit yeah yeah so I mean I mean that's the real tradeoff trying to keep it on the ground and and try there was a car called The comparo a little oh it was kind of like an aadum out of England the downfalls only came into effect after 125 mph so if you're going you're more likely to get thrown off the road at 90 than you are at 140 oh I see you know so which is really rather odd you know so I imagine that's always a fight isn't it trying to yeah well one of the one of the great things is that we have aerodynamicist as part of the team they're they sit right next to the designers they're working on this program with us as if they were designers as well so they're kind of using their craft and helping us um come up with the overall design and they're always a lot of these guys come from the Formula 1 world where they're really just concerned about downforce so now they're they're figuring out lift balance downforce and um efficiency you know drag efficiency and so it's you know a good challenge for them and we all kind of get together on a daily hourly basis and just work through the ideas and so this has liquid cool batteries it does yeah so where does the cooling enter for the batteries it actually comes in down here in the same spot there's a little vent right below the the the almost like a traditional radiation yeah and we have active Grill shutters there you that can open and close oh they open and close so depending on how much cooling we need if if we want more more aerodynamic or aerodynamic situation we'll close them up right if we need more cooling we'll open them um and so that's so that does that automatically yeah like if you're out a supercharger they'll open so you can get thermostatic okay kind of like like the doen that has the grill it opens yeah yeah same same I mean it's a little more subtle but yeah yeah yeah no yeah very well I just always wondered about that because then you have you're so aerodynamic you're getting no cool cool air into the radiators yeah unless we need it and what do you use for coolant do you use a a nonwater glycol Mi yeah basically it's just standard Automotive non glycol coolant um okay you know the same coolant goes into the battery system that's shared with the motors and then we have our super manifold up front which can with an octo valve on it eight different ports that go through one valve and we can move the coolant to any of those places with the heat pump that's in this car we get really good low range efficiency because we're able to take heat from wherever it is whether it's in the drive units and put it to where we need it whether it's the battery or the cabin and that's what that octo valve does you know I was reading about that is really fascinating because that's a real engineering thing I guess the heat pump I mean it it's a whole different way of going about it can you explain a little bit for people don't quite understand a lot of people when they hear heat pump they might think we're pumping Heat and the car will only get hot but the heat pump is meant to both cool and heat the vehicle and it it it interlinks the systems of the powertrain so the battery and the drive units it's also the cabin and it does that by pumping heat from wherever it is to where it needs to be so if you want to cool something down you can actually think of that as taking heat out of somewhere right um and the cool thing about our heat pump is and a lot of heat pumps don't work really well in cold temperatures because they need some heat to start moving around before they can really function efficiently but we actually have a 12 Kow compressor in there and that in of itself creates heat when it's moving right and so we use that compressor's heat to to kind of self start itself in cold temperatures and get you know even that heat moving at you know- 30 -40° and that is unique to Tesla isn't it yeah I mean a lot of other companies you know have used heat pumps but they haven't figured out a way to integrate all those heating systems in an efficient way so a lot of times they'll have a separate electric heater for the battery or for the cabin that you know wastes electricity and energy when you're using it we really wanted to integrate that all into one and that's that's where where our heat pump is truly unique yeah the the thing I found unique to Tesla wood was the heated seats because not being an internal combustion engine which just has so much heat you got to get R you he you you you just heat this cuz I've run it without the temperature on the dash but you 70 68 but the seat is really hot but I'm really hot but I'm not using I'm not using a lot of energy yeah actually our heating system works together so we heat the seats the steering wheel and the cabin air and with the automatic uh temperature selection if you put 70 or 72 we'll find the right balance to keep you warm whether it's the seats or the air yeah and actually now in the new model 3 we do that with cooling as well this car now has ventilated front seats so when you have the air conditioning or the cooling on you can do that as well I mean the real trick is making an under $40,000 electric car high-end stuff is actually easier to build because money is No Object people want to buy it they buy it but trying to get it down to cuz I know you guys been working on that for a long time and this is sort of the result of well I think it's it's finding it's finding the right balance a car that's attractive that you want to own that's fun to drive and Can Go the Distance and that's you know what I think model 3 really delivers that is a pretty you know unique recipe when you this is the least expensive Tesla that is correct right now this is the least expens well this is dual motors so there's technically the re drian what I'm saying is it looks like it doesn't look like a cheap Tesla is what you know a lot of times when they make a electric car that's just you got the big giant Cadillac you a little you know it doesn't I mean it looks like there's like 10 or 15 states with like the federal credits and the state credits you can get this car for under 30 grand yeah I guess that's true isn't it I mean that's like you know there's not that many $ 25 to $30,000 cars on the market but you know if you live in certain States this is one of them which is crazy to think about cuz a lot of people think oh Tesla all look the same it's just you're refining the design but it's the engineering that really is amaz like like on the cyber truck the batteries on that cyber truck I understand that cyber truck is 4,000 lb less than the GMC Hummer which is electric and it's because the batter is whole model three I mean that's that it's two tons lighter because just because the batteries are lighter that's so you guys are kind of leading the way in Battery Technology isn't that I mean well battery efficiency too I mean to do the same thing they have almost twice the battery pack size so they're carrying around all that extra cost and Mass right it's just not exciting here's a new battery yeah it's really exciting looking I mean it's about efficiency if you can get more efficiency you can charge faster because you need less energy to go the distance and then the less Mass means like the suspension can do better work the drive Dynamic is better it's more spirited driving so like you it's the old mass bagets mass problem right okay yeah well very good now what's on the inside that we're that we're missing anything what's new newor you want to hop in and check it out when we take it for a ride and we can talk even better we can talk inside okay um I I this is my first time in a model 3 so is this a new screen the same screen yeah basically what we did was we took um the original design and we really updated it it's so it's all new wrap around we added ambient lighting now it didn't have that in the previous car uh a center console with inductive charger so you got two chargers right here two Chargers 72 Watts um each side and we have a upgraded 15.3 in screen here which is just faster brighter slightly bigger than the previous outgoing one there's an 8 in screen in the re got my own screen so Lars has his own screen now and kids love that CU can watch videos and control seats and like if you needs more room he can he can move me around get more leg space I see you can adjust it from the back oh that's funny it's a fun you know kid thing but we brought you know like uh nice ultra suede and textiles into the interior just improve the overall Ambiance and up to the level of design you also notice uh especially when you start driving that we've removed the stocks so now all your indicators are on the wheel okay um so just again like the simplification and you know getting rid of excess controls kind of follows the Tesla Mantra right right okay because not open Noe fixed glass fixed glass but it's does it change it doesn't change but it's all set so that um you know it's protective so you're not going to get a sunburn or anything okay and all the glass is acoustic now that means it's all double pain so we have an outer soda lime and then we have a PVB layer that's dampens any noise from outside you can see we're in here and I know the gang's outside filming us but it's really tough for them to hear us and us to hear them now what are we doing here with so now we're changing the ambient lights so if you like you know you're in a blue mood you can you know change the the vibe of the Interior very California yeah you can you know pink for Valentine's or valent call Valentine's Day extortion day as you call it exactly um or you know a nice clean white but basically set the moood of the Interior right right really customize the car to whatever you want it to be you know we have heated and cooled seats now so you can pick you know heated on you know cold day or standard on the model one well you have heated seats but now we've added uh ventilated seats so you'll you know you you'll feel yourself cooling down oh I can feel it yeah yeah so it's pretty quick and I've got he heated seats back here too which now can control from my screen which is nice which was never there before right and I can control the air flow back here all on my own as well so even the basic model is pretty loaded is where yeah you get all this stuff yeah you get you know a ton of speakers I think there's 17 speakers in this car great sound system okay but we were able to move that subwoofer out of the rear corner of the trunk yeah and uh we made the trunk bigger and kept a sub and put it in a place where it was more efficient so the only difference between this and the base model this is a dual motor mhm Y and the base model is a single rear motor okay and how many horsepower is that one approximately uh it's it's about half it's a little over 200 little over 200 horsepower so okay you got one motor versus two Motors so yeah right right ready to go for a ride yeah let's do it okay let pretty much standard Tesla Fair here we go so you've taken a lot of the features from the S and just put it in yeah again like you when you think about you know how great the model S is we wanted to bring all those great attributes into this car as there's how quiet it is in here it is very quiet in here yeah one of the things we really focused on was was making the cabin quiet but also like really improving the ride and rolling plushness model 3 has always been like really fun to drive super you know responsive and engaging almost it is responsive and it's smaller I mean it feels Dy but in a good way you know yeah almost like you know like a go-kart but like an extension of your mind like ear I mean I'm not I'm not getting swamp you know I mean it's not this it's very good and so you know we we wanted to keep that from the old model 3 while really improving the ride to make it more accessible and more comfortable for more people so we use a new kind of shock absorbing technology called FSD not uh full self-driving but frequency selective damping yeah and what that does it's a it's a passive system not like adaptive damping like in your Model S but it really focuses on isolating um different frequency ranges so when you're on bumpy roads we let the dampers open up and we make sure we get nice and you know uh free flowing wheels so you get a comfortable ride but when you put that steering response in we can actually separate that input frequency and make sure you get damping Force to get a nice quick response and this wheel is smaller diameter wise than an S correct yes smaller than an S yeah I like this wheel yeah feels like same size as the outgoing feels like a sports car wheel yeah and the steering Rock um is faster as well yeah that's right overall ratio is about 11 to1 super quick and it's electric power stearing up that's right electric power steering fully redundant for autopilot does this have a comfort touring sport or is it just one setting no so the the long range dual motor and the rear wheel drive are just passive with that new damp damping technology I talked about but it's very quiet it's as quiet as the S you mentioned take that as a compliment that this is Gorilla Glass is that a brand name or is that a type of glass what that gorilla is a brand name but it's actually ion exchange so when you put the glass in the salt bath it gets chem chemically toughened right and so it's chemically hardened glass so you're able to make it much thinner which is which is um means we can make it lighter right so we have a soda lime on the outside for stiffness and you have that PVB layer and then you have the grill on the inside and that's depending on where we put it um when we want that weight advantage that that's when we use it I don't think let me see what we got here who I mean I don't think there's any car in the $440,000 underr I wasn't ready for that that has this kind of power no I mean it really yeah I mean that that's always been our kind of driving you know force in in vehicle Dynamics and response is that you know the electric motor sort of defined everything you hit the accelerator pedal in it goes right and we wanted that same feeling to come through in the steering which you mentioned earlier um and also braking when you get on the brakes it's it's really instant and and that way you know sort of Define the whole character of of the Driving Experience from the one electric motor but with one pedal driving you're not really needing the brakes that much you didn't even use the brakes right now right right I mean the brakes last forever I they do last forever I rarely touch the brakes then we put a a special um surface finish on the brakes to make sure they don't rust uh it's called for nital carbiz yeah they last forever and Russ is really just an aesthetic on the brake isn't it I mean it doesn't it doesn't affect the braking you just grind it right off pad soon as you hit the pad right you know I remember going to the Roadster Show one day and a guy had a hot rod and he had Chrome plated rotors oh man that's I said what have you ever stepped he goes no we don't step on The Brak we push it in the what is that it's it's not a car now it's not right it's a artistic piece yeah it's a stupid you know this really handles nice it feeling feels very sporty yeah I mean the model 3 is probably it's our smallest car so it's got the lowest you know polar moment of inertia so it can be that quick turning and quick response and what are you looking at about 4200 lb for this something like that yeah it's uh yeah we did the math I think earlier it's 1825 kilos so that's just over 4,000 lb 4, yeah so probably the same weight as a any other midsize American San really with the lightweighting we try and get all over the vehicle to kind of make up for the you know for the battery but you're right it's it's not much heavier than any other to out there well for me at this point with Tesla it's all about what's under the skin and you know it just the engineering is moving so quickly I mean we try and pay attention to all the little details that you might not otherwise get um you know you guys well that'd be a standard feature and most electric cars the fact that you will now have batteries you can always bring to 100% with without worrying about you know yeah I mean I think that really just depends on the battery manufacturer or the vehicle manufacturer's choice of battery um lithium iron phosphate the lfp or R iron battery is um you know has better cycle life um and that's good for people need to use it a lot um and then the nickel really gives you that energy density so you know we still picking choose and I think a lot of other manufacturers are doing the same thing one of the things when we're trying to improve the know the the driving road noise in a vehicle is we always want you to think you're gr faster than you act or right than you actually are um and so when you're going 60 70 mph you're actually going 80 or 90 mph right cuz it's quiet and you don't really feel that well you know how they came up with a speed limit of 65 mph no it used to be 55 right no no well no that's when the highway system come out they took people out in brand new 1955 cars through towel over the spedometer and said to average citizens tell me when you feel uncomfortable and it's 65 or 70 people will go oh this feels fast enough and they pull it off 6 and they did that hundreds of times and that's how they came up with 65 wow so it doesn't really apply anymore because modern cars are so smooth and efficient that you know 100 is the new 65 that's right you you drive a car from 1957 at 70 mph you're going 70 but but oh this this feels a little you know I got I got a 63 carvette split window with fuel injection and a 70 you go wow this feels like 100 you know you know this feels almost as good as my Model S at more than half the price actually it's almost a third of the price I think my plaid was 130 when I got it I mean cheaper now I did yeah we've been really trying to bring prices down so we pl's cheaper now like you said um but I mean we always want to just give people the best experience we can at the price we can make it it's not bring prices down and bring the experience down too you want to have the best experience for the best price what do you think of the steering Jay I like the steering very much I mean it feels very light very responsive it's a great thing about electricity it can fool you you know it doesn't seem like a more than 2ton vehicle right well it's about that balance of like effort gain as you turn and you want to feel some of the weight but but you don't want to feel like you're working hard come out the car sweating after driving and you can change you know the the the steering feel too so you're kind of in Comfort mode now right put it in standard it should feel you should feel a little bit tighter and then sport you should feel really oh so you do have all those features here yeah so in this car you can do acceleration chill and standard and then steering the three modes we also have a new feature that we just been rolling on maybe a few months ago which is um you can apply the regenerative brakes right uh the actual the actual brakes when regenerative braking is low so if it's cold or if you charge to full and there's no capacity for regen we now fill that in with the brake pedal so the car feels the same all the time you know one of the things that's really hard to do from a driving Dynamic standpoint is to get that steering to feel responsive and to have a road like this which is looks smooth but is actually quite choppy yeah um not jiggle what I I call it the belly test doesn't jiggle your belly cuz those those frequencies are at the same you know of the road and that steering response are at the same frequency about 4 to 6 Hertz and that's where that frequency selective damping really helped us out because but very firm no cowl shake or anything that yeah it's really hard to make that break that compromise and we step on got to tell me never ready for it one of the other new features in this car um is we added blind spot indicators so that was a big ass so when someone comes up in your blind spot there's a little red light in your speaker there you see it right yeah I see you all there there see a blind spot over there and also the the if you turn on your turn signal the camera will turn uh red on the side of if there's a car there um so that's a cool new feature yeah and then you know in the effort for safety we also this is a first well I guess it was the first car and then cyber Tru to have a far side airbag we're talking about side crash yeah there's actually an airbag on the inside between you and fron right so if we got hit from the side an airbag would come up between the two of you and prevent your heads from hitting and you know like at Tesla the government you know is always mandating safety but we're really trying to go beyond what they were doing um so you know in Europe they made some regulations about that kind of airbag being installed but before we put it in we wanted to make sure it was actually preventing head-to-head contact and that's when we look at our real world crash data base that's you know getting data from all of the Telemetry from our vehicles so we deployed it and we put it worldwide so everyone gets the same safety um because we believe it actually does if you heaven forbid get in that kind of accident help prevent injury but obviously the best crash is no crash is why we have all those auton breake lights come on on regen is that yeah okay so you take you f off the the gas and it's amazingly quiet do you think the uh track package will become standard on the Plaid they should have done that too yeah I mean you mean with the carbon ceramic brakes with the big brakes I mean you know there's a lot of people that buy a plaid that don't ever really need that um right right and I think that's really true of like all our branding is like we really want to give you the choice um no drama at all yeah I mean the most impressive thing is it's under $40,000 right it really is everything my Model S is just not as fast maybe not not fast not as big not as big but that's okay but it still feels like quality doesn't feel like a cheaper version of a big car yeah Fremont's really been doing a great job I mean they do a really good job because a lot of times when I get the lesson model of a lot of cars it's just it really is a lesser model yeah this doesn't feel lesser it just feels smaller well he did it then that was if you're someone who likes the big car performance but without being a big car because it's hard to park and all that this I mean it's really perfect I actually love the size of this would you like to buy them all free there J well I tell you this with the triple engine in it would be a killer it' be lighter than the S be faster it'd be hard to fit though you know my whole thing I always buy a car based on performance when this came out the fact that happens to be environmentally friendly oh well that's all good but my main interest is still the speed in the handling and I think most people like that they're selfish they want to have everything yes you can't make something anymore that doesn't you know yeah if you want to go green you can get you know under you almost 10 something miles per gallon equivalent but if you want to go drive crazy you can drive crazy too well you get in a car like this and you realize that you don't need gas right necessarily you can have all the things that we've kind of gotten accustomed to and grew up yeah and with the solar panels and all of that it is almost an unlimitless it's limit this energy we got a giant Fusion reactor you know how much get lithium I I know all that I I I get all that everything is a tradeoff it's just the less of a tradeoff right even in my garage you know if you think of my garage of the Earth how many cars can you get in there before you're choking to death right you know what I mean yeah you know the amount of energy it takes to make a gallon of gas get it out of the pump it out of the ground you get a ref the oil you know yeah but when you go the other way the amount of batteries you need to the power of one gallon of gas it's not even close yeah I mean it's like oh my God you need a room full of batteries there is so much you know gasoline with the exception of the P it's almost the perfect fuel it doesn't freeze it makes power it's just eventually poisonous you know yeah or or disappear yeah how far far away do you think we are from essentially a two or 3 minute fill up for electric yeah so DC fast charging that's a big thing um especially in countries that are starting to adopt more and more electric vehicles like China has you know 25 30% of their vehicles are electric Norway is getting up there and you know we are always trying to improve supercharging um I think that it all it all comes down to efficiency again because even as you throw 1,000 volts you know in with 350 Kow you know best case in an hour like that's 35 KW an hour um or sorry 350 KW an hour so if you have a if you have a 50 KW hour battery it takes 17th of an hour if you can put all the energy in at one time and really like the key to fast charging is making it more and more efficient so you have less batteries to fill right well guys thanks for bringing this by I think it's fun I think people enjoy hearing the actual engineer and the actual designer of the car talk about it we I always read the comment section and they really like that as opposed to just marketing stuff you know so it's really good you come by and you got this new one it's been redesigned and you tell us what it is and I got to admit it's a lot of fun to drive and for under 40 Grand it's a great car yeah really yeah thanks for having us thanks guys I appreciate it thank you my friend always welcome anytime and and let me know when my Roadster is going to be done will you I've been waiting for that thing for five years back to work FR both of us as well but it's going to have incredible performances yeah it'll be worth the wait any secret you can give away no no okay all right I'll wait we'll see but gets better always gets better it should be about the fastest thing out here s to yeah gets better with age you know gets better with age all right I wish I did anyway thanks you guys thanks for watching I hope this like this bit little bit of te Tesla technology and we'll see you next weeklet me see what we got I mean I don't think there any car $40,000 underr was ready that has this kind of power and when you step on tell me never ready for it it really is everything my Model S is just not as fast maybe not fast not as big not as big but that's okay but it still feels like quality doesn't feel like a cheaper version of big car any secrets you can give away welcome to the episode of Jay lon's garage the car are featuring today 2024 Tesla Model 3 you know Tesla is one of the most popular products on our website everybody El has a lot of questions so rather than get like a marketing guy or somebody from PR which I don't they have a Tesla we got the chief of design and chief engineer Lars and France come on in guys see this way you get it right from the horse's mouth see these are the guys designed it engineered it he how are you to see again now I see some subtle changes but there probably more than that what have we done to this new model 3 well the new model 3 is really just an improvement over the previous one it's been about seven years since the model 3 was introduced and the original model 3 was really the idea was around making a smaller and more affordable Model S model S was great but not everybody could afford it so we want to take all the great attributes that came with a Model S and just shrink it down slightly and make it much more affordable which we did and so since then it's been a great selling car and uh super fun to drive as L Lars can tell you but we wanted to mature the car a little bit so we've improved the front end we have much narrower headlights it's much simpler in the front it's actually through all that work we've been able to improve the aerodynamics of the car too and in the back you'll notice that we've updated the tail lights and the whole rear end is new and there's um you know some really great elegant line lines of uh Lighting in the back there and there's no split lines in the trunk as we get around to the back you can see that and what is the coefficient of drag now with this model it's 219 so 219 yeah it's pretty slippery it's actually our best aerodynamic car now very good and that cost a dual motor so the range in this is what about over 300 miles yeah that's right yeah and from an engineering Point what what have we done well I mean engineering this you know at Tesla we like to whenever we get a chance we try and make everything new and better and really this is is engineered from the ground up we did a lot of safety improvements it was already a great car from a safety standpoint um but we improved side crash by really looking at the data we have in the field taking that back and then looking at the accidents that happen most often and uh increasing that so side crash will be better IHS has a new test coming out that we're probably going to score top ranked on which is probably the only sedan that'll be able to do that really um yeah um and then you know pron mentioned all the The Styling updates but when we did that as well we also try to go look at how do we make the car lighter more efficient so we got the arrow updates we have new tires we have new Wheels those are all more efficient we added a a full new interior which we haven't even talked about which has new screens um ventilated seats and a bunch of other features but we also made it ride better uh and and it's much quieter inside more cabin isolation well the thing I find the most fascinating is the range because any other electri vehicle you buy they tell you only charge it to 80% so if the range is 300 you going 260 or 270 now these batteries maybe I have it wrong you can correct me you can charge these to 100% every day all day correct yeah so in our rear wheel drive vehicles we have lithium iron phosphate batteries those go up to 100% every day all day in uh our long range Vehicles like the dual motor we do have nickel based batteries and then we'll say somewhere between 80 and 90% depending on the charge and then of course you can go supercharge at full when you're r on a range a road trip right right oh okay well that's that's that's interesting and that's really just about cycling lithium iron phosphate tends to last longer over the years we've gotten pretty good at even our our our standard nickel batteries you know they only lose 5 six% after you know 10 years you know I had my other Tesla seven years and that was the first gen so I think the range is like 228 and then it was 221 maybe at the worst 219 yeah so you lost 3% yeah but it that was over a lot of miles and a lot of you know and that happens with fuel economy too right in a gas carard to down but one thing we try to do at Tesla is whenever we make new tires we always make them slightly more efficient so if you're if you you know 50,000 Mi 40,000 Mi you got to replace your tires you get the new Tesla Tire you get that range back because you got a more efficient tire on the car all right same same with the wheel design we're always looking at how we take the wheel design and add you know just get a little bit more efficiency out of it because believe it or not wheel the wheel design can have a big impact in overall range so we can gain a couple miles of range just by the way that we designed well here's a question from the design standpoint more efficiency is better cooling or does one fight the other for example you you've got disc brakes so you want to cool the brakes especially in Arizona or a hot place like this are there certain wheels that cooler brakes better but if you make the wheel more aerodynamic does it is it less cooling to the wheel you know what I'm saying well I mean there's two kinds of air flow there's under the vehicle air flow and there's outside the vehicle what France is talking about with efficiency that's really getting the air around the outside of the tire even in most Wheels like that are completely open the wheel is spinning quite a bit it creates like an air dam to get to the brakes to cool the brakes you really want to come from underneath the car we still have that but of course in a in a Tesla you barely use your brakes um with regenerative braking and now we uh you know one pedal driving you don't ever really get to the point of touching the brakes you know what's so funny on my plaid i' be on the LA freeways maybe this is just La freeways and I would hear this just kind just kind of a weird noise and I thought do I have a I got out and I'm looking am I rubbing a tire or something am I too low I couldn't figure out what it was and then I drove a couple other cars and it was the same noise and I realized it's the freeway I think it's the rain brw TIR the tires kind of sing as you go down the road but it sounds sounds like there was that one like the fly movie help me you know it sounds like you hear this noise and I thought why is my car doing but it wasn't the car it was it was I think it's the grooves no there was a few years ago someone paved a certain section out in a desert so when they went over it it played like Bin's fifth or something I can't remember but it'll be like really yeah it was pretty cool you have to look it up seems like a worthwhile yeah totally how much thought and effort went into that okay very nice is this a new color this is a new color it is yeah cuz I don't think I've seen many red Teslas there's not a whole lot well we've had a red but we just wanted to improve it um and when you see this in the the daylight it really comes to life um really shows off the form of the car a little bit better and it's exciting sporty color so yeah we're excited the thing that drives me nuts I meet people all the time and they go I mention Tesla and they go well I like American cars it's the most americanmade car you can buy it's made I don't know if it's 100% but percentage wise higher than any other vehicle yeah built in the United States mod wise number one this one's number two yeah people think it's a foreign car I don't know why because it's electric I don't know why that is it's it's just a perception that people get for whatever reason but it it's because it's not in Detroit I suppose people think oh yeah it's not American okay but good I'm glad we settled that one okay now what is the horsepower of this horsepower oh man I got to convert that well it's got two Motors right front and rear well convert it from what from kilowatts you always have to convert it from kilow um with two Motors front and rear 340 680 so 3 95 I think 395 horsepower 395 400 horsepower yeah it's pretty quick car all right cool and it's less than $40,000 that's right yeah right now it's $ 38990 okay or you know starting price before incentives 38990 that's my No matter it's not 9.99 no matter how high tech no you still have to go with that 99 like gasoline it's $499.95 a again or $5 a again yeah it's and we have a a great lease program at 29 a month now so okay very good uh are these no these no these cameras have always been here yep cameras are are there um we really you know approached the front end and the rear ends to really give it a a new look and then spent a lot of time in the interior um to really improve the interior new material story a different design we added ambient lights it's a bigger screen in the center now um a screen in the rear for the passengers and the rear seats so um yeah really all new interior as a designer what is the most efficient aerodynamic design you've ever built practical or impractical I mean how low can It Go I mean it starts to get you know in the High Teens is actually really challenging where it actually starts to look like it's you know designed in the Wind Tunnel yeah this might be one of the lowest or most efficient cars that I've ever been a part of because it's what what you say was Point 2 29 219 I mean that's yeah all right it's pretty low that's that is pretty you have to look at all the details to do that I mean of course we were talking about the wheels before that but the how the air comes in through the front Scoops goes around even here we have a little lip at the back of the the hood that not only helps aerodynamics but improves wind noise because there's no buffeting that comes up over the hood as the air slips up and over better of course the advantage you don't have down force in this correct well you know they go pretty fast too so we we do have to balance the front and rear lift which is always a fun game when you're trying to be slick in a straight line you know at higher speeds you tend to to get off balance front like I've got a t87 tatra over there and that's got some down that's 27 but has no downforce it's just the straight lines yeah yeah I mean it's just strictly so at high speed it floats a little float a little bit yeah yeah so I mean I mean that's the real tradeoff trying to keep it on the ground and and try there was a car called The comparo a little oh it was kind of like an aadum out of England the downfalls only came into effect after 125 mph so if you're going you're more likely to get thrown off the road at 90 than you are at 140 oh I see you know so which is really rather odd you know so I imagine that's always a fight isn't it trying to yeah well one of the one of the great things is that we have aerodynamicist as part of the team they're they sit right next to the designers they're working on this program with us as if they were designers as well so they're kind of using their craft and helping us um come up with the overall design and they're always a lot of these guys come from the Formula 1 world where they're really just concerned about downforce so now they're they're figuring out lift balance downforce and um efficiency you know drag efficiency and so it's you know a good challenge for them and we all kind of get together on a daily hourly basis and just work through the ideas and so this has liquid cool batteries it does yeah so where does the cooling enter for the batteries it actually comes in down here in the same spot there's a little vent right below the the the almost like a traditional radiation yeah and we have active Grill shutters there you that can open and close oh they open and close so depending on how much cooling we need if if we want more more aerodynamic or aerodynamic situation we'll close them up right if we need more cooling we'll open them um and so that's so that does that automatically yeah like if you're out a supercharger they'll open so you can get thermostatic okay kind of like like the doen that has the grill it opens yeah yeah same same I mean it's a little more subtle but yeah yeah yeah no yeah very well I just always wondered about that because then you have you're so aerodynamic you're getting no cool cool air into the radiators yeah unless we need it and what do you use for coolant do you use a a nonwater glycol Mi yeah basically it's just standard Automotive non glycol coolant um okay you know the same coolant goes into the battery system that's shared with the motors and then we have our super manifold up front which can with an octo valve on it eight different ports that go through one valve and we can move the coolant to any of those places with the heat pump that's in this car we get really good low range efficiency because we're able to take heat from wherever it is whether it's in the drive units and put it to where we need it whether it's the battery or the cabin and that's what that octo valve does you know I was reading about that is really fascinating because that's a real engineering thing I guess the heat pump I mean it it's a whole different way of going about it can you explain a little bit for people don't quite understand a lot of people when they hear heat pump they might think we're pumping Heat and the car will only get hot but the heat pump is meant to both cool and heat the vehicle and it it it interlinks the systems of the powertrain so the battery and the drive units it's also the cabin and it does that by pumping heat from wherever it is to where it needs to be so if you want to cool something down you can actually think of that as taking heat out of somewhere right um and the cool thing about our heat pump is and a lot of heat pumps don't work really well in cold temperatures because they need some heat to start moving around before they can really function efficiently but we actually have a 12 Kow compressor in there and that in of itself creates heat when it's moving right and so we use that compressor's heat to to kind of self start itself in cold temperatures and get you know even that heat moving at you know- 30 -40° and that is unique to Tesla isn't it yeah I mean a lot of other companies you know have used heat pumps but they haven't figured out a way to integrate all those heating systems in an efficient way so a lot of times they'll have a separate electric heater for the battery or for the cabin that you know wastes electricity and energy when you're using it we really wanted to integrate that all into one and that's that's where where our heat pump is truly unique yeah the the thing I found unique to Tesla wood was the heated seats because not being an internal combustion engine which just has so much heat you got to get R you he you you you just heat this cuz I've run it without the temperature on the dash but you 70 68 but the seat is really hot but I'm really hot but I'm not using I'm not using a lot of energy yeah actually our heating system works together so we heat the seats the steering wheel and the cabin air and with the automatic uh temperature selection if you put 70 or 72 we'll find the right balance to keep you warm whether it's the seats or the air yeah and actually now in the new model 3 we do that with cooling as well this car now has ventilated front seats so when you have the air conditioning or the cooling on you can do that as well I mean the real trick is making an under $40,000 electric car high-end stuff is actually easier to build because money is No Object people want to buy it they buy it but trying to get it down to cuz I know you guys been working on that for a long time and this is sort of the result of well I think it's it's finding it's finding the right balance a car that's attractive that you want to own that's fun to drive and Can Go the Distance and that's you know what I think model 3 really delivers that is a pretty you know unique recipe when you this is the least expensive Tesla that is correct right now this is the least expens well this is dual motors so there's technically the re drian what I'm saying is it looks like it doesn't look like a cheap Tesla is what you know a lot of times when they make a electric car that's just you got the big giant Cadillac you a little you know it doesn't I mean it looks like there's like 10 or 15 states with like the federal credits and the state credits you can get this car for under 30 grand yeah I guess that's true isn't it I mean that's like you know there's not that many $ 25 to $30,000 cars on the market but you know if you live in certain States this is one of them which is crazy to think about cuz a lot of people think oh Tesla all look the same it's just you're refining the design but it's the engineering that really is amaz like like on the cyber truck the batteries on that cyber truck I understand that cyber truck is 4,000 lb less than the GMC Hummer which is electric and it's because the batter is whole model three I mean that's that it's two tons lighter because just because the batteries are lighter that's so you guys are kind of leading the way in Battery Technology isn't that I mean well battery efficiency too I mean to do the same thing they have almost twice the battery pack size so they're carrying around all that extra cost and Mass right it's just not exciting here's a new battery yeah it's really exciting looking I mean it's about efficiency if you can get more efficiency you can charge faster because you need less energy to go the distance and then the less Mass means like the suspension can do better work the drive Dynamic is better it's more spirited driving so like you it's the old mass bagets mass problem right okay yeah well very good now what's on the inside that we're that we're missing anything what's new newor you want to hop in and check it out when we take it for a ride and we can talk even better we can talk inside okay um I I this is my first time in a model 3 so is this a new screen the same screen yeah basically what we did was we took um the original design and we really updated it it's so it's all new wrap around we added ambient lighting now it didn't have that in the previous car uh a center console with inductive charger so you got two chargers right here two Chargers 72 Watts um each side and we have a upgraded 15.3 in screen here which is just faster brighter slightly bigger than the previous outgoing one there's an 8 in screen in the re got my own screen so Lars has his own screen now and kids love that CU can watch videos and control seats and like if you needs more room he can he can move me around get more leg space I see you can adjust it from the back oh that's funny it's a fun you know kid thing but we brought you know like uh nice ultra suede and textiles into the interior just improve the overall Ambiance and up to the level of design you also notice uh especially when you start driving that we've removed the stocks so now all your indicators are on the wheel okay um so just again like the simplification and you know getting rid of excess controls kind of follows the Tesla Mantra right right okay because not open Noe fixed glass fixed glass but it's does it change it doesn't change but it's all set so that um you know it's protective so you're not going to get a sunburn or anything okay and all the glass is acoustic now that means it's all double pain so we have an outer soda lime and then we have a PVB layer that's dampens any noise from outside you can see we're in here and I know the gang's outside filming us but it's really tough for them to hear us and us to hear them now what are we doing here with so now we're changing the ambient lights so if you like you know you're in a blue mood you can you know change the the vibe of the Interior very California yeah you can you know pink for Valentine's or valent call Valentine's Day extortion day as you call it exactly um or you know a nice clean white but basically set the moood of the Interior right right really customize the car to whatever you want it to be you know we have heated and cooled seats now so you can pick you know heated on you know cold day or standard on the model one well you have heated seats but now we've added uh ventilated seats so you'll you know you you'll feel yourself cooling down oh I can feel it yeah yeah so it's pretty quick and I've got he heated seats back here too which now can control from my screen which is nice which was never there before right and I can control the air flow back here all on my own as well so even the basic model is pretty loaded is where yeah you get all this stuff yeah you get you know a ton of speakers I think there's 17 speakers in this car great sound system okay but we were able to move that subwoofer out of the rear corner of the trunk yeah and uh we made the trunk bigger and kept a sub and put it in a place where it was more efficient so the only difference between this and the base model this is a dual motor mhm Y and the base model is a single rear motor okay and how many horsepower is that one approximately uh it's it's about half it's a little over 200 little over 200 horsepower so okay you got one motor versus two Motors so yeah right right ready to go for a ride yeah let's do it okay let pretty much standard Tesla Fair here we go so you've taken a lot of the features from the S and just put it in yeah again like you when you think about you know how great the model S is we wanted to bring all those great attributes into this car as there's how quiet it is in here it is very quiet in here yeah one of the things we really focused on was was making the cabin quiet but also like really improving the ride and rolling plushness model 3 has always been like really fun to drive super you know responsive and engaging almost it is responsive and it's smaller I mean it feels Dy but in a good way you know yeah almost like you know like a go-kart but like an extension of your mind like ear I mean I'm not I'm not getting swamp you know I mean it's not this it's very good and so you know we we wanted to keep that from the old model 3 while really improving the ride to make it more accessible and more comfortable for more people so we use a new kind of shock absorbing technology called FSD not uh full self-driving but frequency selective damping yeah and what that does it's a it's a passive system not like adaptive damping like in your Model S but it really focuses on isolating um different frequency ranges so when you're on bumpy roads we let the dampers open up and we make sure we get nice and you know uh free flowing wheels so you get a comfortable ride but when you put that steering response in we can actually separate that input frequency and make sure you get damping Force to get a nice quick response and this wheel is smaller diameter wise than an S correct yes smaller than an S yeah I like this wheel yeah feels like same size as the outgoing feels like a sports car wheel yeah and the steering Rock um is faster as well yeah that's right overall ratio is about 11 to1 super quick and it's electric power stearing up that's right electric power steering fully redundant for autopilot does this have a comfort touring sport or is it just one setting no so the the long range dual motor and the rear wheel drive are just passive with that new damp damping technology I talked about but it's very quiet it's as quiet as the S you mentioned take that as a compliment that this is Gorilla Glass is that a brand name or is that a type of glass what that gorilla is a brand name but it's actually ion exchange so when you put the glass in the salt bath it gets chem chemically toughened right and so it's chemically hardened glass so you're able to make it much thinner which is which is um means we can make it lighter right so we have a soda lime on the outside for stiffness and you have that PVB layer and then you have the grill on the inside and that's depending on where we put it um when we want that weight advantage that that's when we use it I don't think let me see what we got here who I mean I don't think there's any car in the $440,000 underr I wasn't ready for that that has this kind of power no I mean it really yeah I mean that that's always been our kind of driving you know force in in vehicle Dynamics and response is that you know the electric motor sort of defined everything you hit the accelerator pedal in it goes right and we wanted that same feeling to come through in the steering which you mentioned earlier um and also braking when you get on the brakes it's it's really instant and and that way you know sort of Define the whole character of of the Driving Experience from the one electric motor but with one pedal driving you're not really needing the brakes that much you didn't even use the brakes right now right right I mean the brakes last forever I they do last forever I rarely touch the brakes then we put a a special um surface finish on the brakes to make sure they don't rust uh it's called for nital carbiz yeah they last forever and Russ is really just an aesthetic on the brake isn't it I mean it doesn't it doesn't affect the braking you just grind it right off pad soon as you hit the pad right you know I remember going to the Roadster Show one day and a guy had a hot rod and he had Chrome plated rotors oh man that's I said what have you ever stepped he goes no we don't step on The Brak we push it in the what is that it's it's not a car now it's not right it's a artistic piece yeah it's a stupid you know this really handles nice it feeling feels very sporty yeah I mean the model 3 is probably it's our smallest car so it's got the lowest you know polar moment of inertia so it can be that quick turning and quick response and what are you looking at about 4200 lb for this something like that yeah it's uh yeah we did the math I think earlier it's 1825 kilos so that's just over 4,000 lb 4, yeah so probably the same weight as a any other midsize American San really with the lightweighting we try and get all over the vehicle to kind of make up for the you know for the battery but you're right it's it's not much heavier than any other to out there well for me at this point with Tesla it's all about what's under the skin and you know it just the engineering is moving so quickly I mean we try and pay attention to all the little details that you might not otherwise get um you know you guys well that'd be a standard feature and most electric cars the fact that you will now have batteries you can always bring to 100% with without worrying about you know yeah I mean I think that really just depends on the battery manufacturer or the vehicle manufacturer's choice of battery um lithium iron phosphate the lfp or R iron battery is um you know has better cycle life um and that's good for people need to use it a lot um and then the nickel really gives you that energy density so you know we still picking choose and I think a lot of other manufacturers are doing the same thing one of the things when we're trying to improve the know the the driving road noise in a vehicle is we always want you to think you're gr faster than you act or right than you actually are um and so when you're going 60 70 mph you're actually going 80 or 90 mph right cuz it's quiet and you don't really feel that well you know how they came up with a speed limit of 65 mph no it used to be 55 right no no well no that's when the highway system come out they took people out in brand new 1955 cars through towel over the spedometer and said to average citizens tell me when you feel uncomfortable and it's 65 or 70 people will go oh this feels fast enough and they pull it off 6 and they did that hundreds of times and that's how they came up with 65 wow so it doesn't really apply anymore because modern cars are so smooth and efficient that you know 100 is the new 65 that's right you you drive a car from 1957 at 70 mph you're going 70 but but oh this this feels a little you know I got I got a 63 carvette split window with fuel injection and a 70 you go wow this feels like 100 you know you know this feels almost as good as my Model S at more than half the price actually it's almost a third of the price I think my plaid was 130 when I got it I mean cheaper now I did yeah we've been really trying to bring prices down so we pl's cheaper now like you said um but I mean we always want to just give people the best experience we can at the price we can make it it's not bring prices down and bring the experience down too you want to have the best experience for the best price what do you think of the steering Jay I like the steering very much I mean it feels very light very responsive it's a great thing about electricity it can fool you you know it doesn't seem like a more than 2ton vehicle right well it's about that balance of like effort gain as you turn and you want to feel some of the weight but but you don't want to feel like you're working hard come out the car sweating after driving and you can change you know the the the steering feel too so you're kind of in Comfort mode now right put it in standard it should feel you should feel a little bit tighter and then sport you should feel really oh so you do have all those features here yeah so in this car you can do acceleration chill and standard and then steering the three modes we also have a new feature that we just been rolling on maybe a few months ago which is um you can apply the regenerative brakes right uh the actual the actual brakes when regenerative braking is low so if it's cold or if you charge to full and there's no capacity for regen we now fill that in with the brake pedal so the car feels the same all the time you know one of the things that's really hard to do from a driving Dynamic standpoint is to get that steering to feel responsive and to have a road like this which is looks smooth but is actually quite choppy yeah um not jiggle what I I call it the belly test doesn't jiggle your belly cuz those those frequencies are at the same you know of the road and that steering response are at the same frequency about 4 to 6 Hertz and that's where that frequency selective damping really helped us out because but very firm no cowl shake or anything that yeah it's really hard to make that break that compromise and we step on got to tell me never ready for it one of the other new features in this car um is we added blind spot indicators so that was a big ass so when someone comes up in your blind spot there's a little red light in your speaker there you see it right yeah I see you all there there see a blind spot over there and also the the if you turn on your turn signal the camera will turn uh red on the side of if there's a car there um so that's a cool new feature yeah and then you know in the effort for safety we also this is a first well I guess it was the first car and then cyber Tru to have a far side airbag we're talking about side crash yeah there's actually an airbag on the inside between you and fron right so if we got hit from the side an airbag would come up between the two of you and prevent your heads from hitting and you know like at Tesla the government you know is always mandating safety but we're really trying to go beyond what they were doing um so you know in Europe they made some regulations about that kind of airbag being installed but before we put it in we wanted to make sure it was actually preventing head-to-head contact and that's when we look at our real world crash data base that's you know getting data from all of the Telemetry from our vehicles so we deployed it and we put it worldwide so everyone gets the same safety um because we believe it actually does if you heaven forbid get in that kind of accident help prevent injury but obviously the best crash is no crash is why we have all those auton breake lights come on on regen is that yeah okay so you take you f off the the gas and it's amazingly quiet do you think the uh track package will become standard on the Plaid they should have done that too yeah I mean you mean with the carbon ceramic brakes with the big brakes I mean you know there's a lot of people that buy a plaid that don't ever really need that um right right and I think that's really true of like all our branding is like we really want to give you the choice um no drama at all yeah I mean the most impressive thing is it's under $40,000 right it really is everything my Model S is just not as fast maybe not not fast not as big not as big but that's okay but it still feels like quality doesn't feel like a cheaper version of a big car yeah Fremont's really been doing a great job I mean they do a really good job because a lot of times when I get the lesson model of a lot of cars it's just it really is a lesser model yeah this doesn't feel lesser it just feels smaller well he did it then that was if you're someone who likes the big car performance but without being a big car because it's hard to park and all that this I mean it's really perfect I actually love the size of this would you like to buy them all free there J well I tell you this with the triple engine in it would be a killer it' be lighter than the S be faster it'd be hard to fit though you know my whole thing I always buy a car based on performance when this came out the fact that happens to be environmentally friendly oh well that's all good but my main interest is still the speed in the handling and I think most people like that they're selfish they want to have everything yes you can't make something anymore that doesn't you know yeah if you want to go green you can get you know under you almost 10 something miles per gallon equivalent but if you want to go drive crazy you can drive crazy too well you get in a car like this and you realize that you don't need gas right necessarily you can have all the things that we've kind of gotten accustomed to and grew up yeah and with the solar panels and all of that it is almost an unlimitless it's limit this energy we got a giant Fusion reactor you know how much get lithium I I know all that I I I get all that everything is a tradeoff it's just the less of a tradeoff right even in my garage you know if you think of my garage of the Earth how many cars can you get in there before you're choking to death right you know what I mean yeah you know the amount of energy it takes to make a gallon of gas get it out of the pump it out of the ground you get a ref the oil you know yeah but when you go the other way the amount of batteries you need to the power of one gallon of gas it's not even close yeah I mean it's like oh my God you need a room full of batteries there is so much you know gasoline with the exception of the P it's almost the perfect fuel it doesn't freeze it makes power it's just eventually poisonous you know yeah or or disappear yeah how far far away do you think we are from essentially a two or 3 minute fill up for electric yeah so DC fast charging that's a big thing um especially in countries that are starting to adopt more and more electric vehicles like China has you know 25 30% of their vehicles are electric Norway is getting up there and you know we are always trying to improve supercharging um I think that it all it all comes down to efficiency again because even as you throw 1,000 volts you know in with 350 Kow you know best case in an hour like that's 35 KW an hour um or sorry 350 KW an hour so if you have a if you have a 50 KW hour battery it takes 17th of an hour if you can put all the energy in at one time and really like the key to fast charging is making it more and more efficient so you have less batteries to fill right well guys thanks for bringing this by I think it's fun I think people enjoy hearing the actual engineer and the actual designer of the car talk about it we I always read the comment section and they really like that as opposed to just marketing stuff you know so it's really good you come by and you got this new one it's been redesigned and you tell us what it is and I got to admit it's a lot of fun to drive and for under 40 Grand it's a great car yeah really yeah thanks for having us thanks guys I appreciate it thank you my friend always welcome anytime and and let me know when my Roadster is going to be done will you I've been waiting for that thing for five years back to work FR both of us as well but it's going to have incredible performances yeah it'll be worth the wait any secret you can give away no no okay all right I'll wait we'll see but gets better always gets better it should be about the fastest thing out here s to yeah gets better with age you know gets better with age all right I wish I did anyway thanks you guys thanks for watching I hope this like this bit little bit of te Tesla technology and we'll see you next week\n"