Elon Musk is an interesting character. At one end of the spectrum, he's posting memes and trolling on twitter, and at the other end, he is looking to make mars inhabitable for the human race.
Since he's been in the spotlight, Elon has made some bold claims about Tesla, his electric car brand, but it seems that the latest use of "creative marketing" blurs the black and white line between telling the truth and lying.
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Not long ago, the American brand unveiled the Model S Plaid, and Plaid+, which are set to be the two fastest models in the range, and possess more than 1,000hp (735kW) from their tri-motor setups.
With this enormity of power at the wheels, Tesla's claimed sub-two second 0-60mph claims went without dispute up until now, when a popular YouTube scientist looked into the claims.
Engineering Explained did some digging into Tesla's fine print, and found that Tesla's 0-60 times are recorded while not using the first foot of rollout, meaning the car is already at 10km/h by the time the recording starts.
Within this single foot, the Model S is able to knock around 0.2 seconds off its time, meaning that in a real-world scenario, a sub-2 second 0-60 time is still unachievable.
On the Tesla New Zealand site, the Plaid's 0-100km/h time is listed at 2.1 seconds, and considering that it equals 62mph, the same questionable marketing is probably at play here. In a comment Engineering Explained mentioned that this real-world figure is probably closer to 2.3-2.4 seconds.
While a 2.3 0-100km/h time is still blisteringly fast, it hasn't got the same ring to it as a sub-2.1-second time, and rather misleading.