Huh. TIL.
At least some performance variants of the Model 3 are available with optional different sized front vs rear wheels & tires.
But the default is same size front and rear so radial-compliant same-side swapping is possible on those.
That makes sense. Some people soup them up and pretend they have a Lambo. How much of a difference do you think it makes on a performance 3? Teslas are like Hondas around here. It’s mostly old boring people if anything driving too slow.
Fortunately it’s almost certainly apocryphal, or at least I can’t find a cite for it to try to understand what the nugget of truth might be. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense. German cars are like a weird religion, the reality is that in the '90s when BMW became “the ultimate driving machine,” they were basically broke with the bulk of the vehicles built on the same basic chassis that had existed since the '70s and powered by a reliable but archaic straight 6. Working on a '90s BMW is like working on a '70s American car, it’s weird.
Anyway, the marketing people were really working overtime because in Germany BMWs were just seen as regular old cars but there wasn’t much profit in shipping regular old cars across the pond to sell for regular old car prices, so America only got the high-end models and BMW (and M-B, for that matter) identified exclusively as luxury brands. The next trick was when the marketing folks convinced everyone that rear wheel drive (RWD) was necessary for a “performance vehicle” when the reality was that BMW desperately wanted to produce and sell front-wheel drive cars (cheaper, lighter, more space efficient, generally better in every way to the average consumer) to compete with Japan, but they simply didn’t have the R&D budget. That’s why BMW bought MINI, it unlocked a bunch of FWD engineering for them.
BMW suspension tuning, even on the performance models, is crap, but that’s not unusual – lawyers basically demand it, and ironically the sportier cars often have more neutered factory specs. A lot of performance BMWs have mac struts with long travel and require aftermarket (giant) sway bars just to get the dang things to rotate. They understeer like crazy. Stock for stock a 96 Civic can out-handle a 96 M3. I’m not exaggerating. BMWs are the only cars I’ve seen that consistently and dramatically lift the inside front wheel on every corner. There’s nothing really wrong with this, but it’s not ideal, and the only other model I’ve seen that does this as regularly is the Fox body Mustang, not exactly a benchmark of handling. Source: I race a BMW.
One thing is for certain, the Tesla Model 3 isn’t a performance car. It’s impressive, though, how well they do on track considering their weight and how nothing about them is really designed to be nimble. All credit there goes to the traction control system, which is typical of modern luxury cars. We had problems with people bringing Model 3s to the track with stock brake pads with “plenty of life left on 'em” that would be down to the backing plates by lunch time, because the traction control system aggressively brakes the inside wheels in order to get all of that mass rotated. We’d have to coach people to really pay attention to pedal feel and pull into the pits as soon as the pads started to overheat, which was sometimes after 3 or 4 laps.
Speaking in very high level generalities, a performance car needs handling, braking, and acceleration. Ideally they all match or you get a car that’s hard to drive near any two of those limits since the 3rd one is much more restrictive.
Teslas and EVs in general excel at straight line acceleration. An econobox can give a Porsche a run for its money. But if the EV manufacturer doesn’t invest (and they don’t) in braking and handling, they’ve built a dragster that is easy to crash once the driver lets off the power.
Ehhh, even in performance tires directional tires are the exception, not the norm. Much more common are tires that have asymmetrical tread and must be mounted with the correct side pointing outward. Staggered tire setups are even more rare. Only the directional tires and staggered setups cannot be rotated, and their tread life is generally so short they wouldn’t be rotated before they wore out if you’re using them as they were intended.
This Discount Tire article goes over the different styles.
I watched a video a few years back where a racing engineer described the problem as one of heat equilibrium. A car can only be as fast as its ability to dissipate heat. As a rank amateur, I would follow the pattern of “throw power/braking/handling at the car, wait for something to break (which usually meant it overheated), and then add cooling capacity.” When you look at the cooling capacity of a modern M3, it starts to make sense – I don’t know how many radiators those things have but it’s a lot. And everything has some mechanism for cooling – engine, transmission, differential, brakes, electronics, fuel, and tires.
Something like a Model 3 Performance doesn’t have much heat dissipation capacity, and at 2 tons it desperately needs it.
You mean for racing or just commuting? For a while last year I’d see a lot of videos of M3Ps beating high end consumer sports cars on a drag strip. For reasons already stated, it’s not a fair comparison and doesn’t prove anything.
For racing for sure, but for spirited driving. And not that it’s going to overheat on Mulholland drive, but more so because the engineers have to neuter every aspect of performance in order to avoid reliability issues due to overheating. Every car is a compromise and Teslas aren’t really biased for performance.
Except for drag racing as you say, which is short enough of an activity that heat doesn’t matter. The car will go into limp mode if you try to do a lot of back-to-back runs though.
For commuting none of this matters.
The 3 Series was interesting - branded as luxury, but the price dangled just low enough to (intentionally or not) attract a certain demographic. #yuppies
And they did a really good job of not making it feel like a concession, like you could own a 3 series without anyone accusing you of driving a “poor man’s BMW.” The entry level C class never really shook that baggage.
Eta: and in terms of that stereotypical buyer you mentioned, the Model 3 Performance is a spiritual successor.
then how do you become the first car at the next traffic light…& the one after that? 
I still think of the Tesla Model 3 as being the successor to the 60s era muscle cars. Take a midsize sedan, stuff absurd amounts of power into it, and market it with an emphasis on straight line performance.
I think that was more the now discontinued Model S.
The S played that marketing game, but the similarity I missed mentioning between many of the 60s muscle cars and the Model 3 is the affordability. These are cars that are near and somewhat above the average price for a new car.
A big difference was muscle cars started as variants of sedans that cost a little bit more with a big engine, and ended their run with a bunch of very expensive special editions and low volume halo cars. Tesla did the reverse, with the high end S and its P sub-models, then brought out the affordable option.
Good cite. Thank you.
Which did not address my contention that the issue with side to side swapping was that symmetrical tread radial tires will develop a “set” while in use and cannot be safely swapped later to the other side where they’d be rotating the opposite direction to their acquired “set”.
Further research elsewhere tells me that radial “set” was a big issue back when radials were a new invention and I was a new driver. However that has been conclusively solved in the intervening decades and nowadays there’s no general prohibition on swapping symmetrical tread radial tires side to side and hence reversing their rotation direction. TIL. Thank you.
So I / we got the right answer, it just took more steps than we both thought.
As to staggered tires (different sized front vs. rear), I haven’t owned a *non-*staggered car in ~20 years.
Now I’m not everybody and everybody is not me. For sure many makes and models have all 4 corners the same. Same all around is real common on SUVs & light trucks, and fairly common on sedans that aren’t marketed as “sport sedans”. AWD vehicles are rarely different front to back.
A lot of enthusiasts also ditch staggered wheels as quickly as possible, there’s not a lot of benefit, your wheel choices are limited, tire choices are limited, you can’t rotate, and when you’re dragging your tires to the track a square setup complicates things.
One of the sets of wheels I have for the racecar is a 7.5" square setup, 2 sets of E36 M3 “fronts”. I got them for super cheap from a guy who had collected the 8.5" “rears.” The difference in lap times is minimal.
Hehe, I had never heard that one, so I just avoided addressing it. Thank you for the explanation.
I haven’t owned one with a staggered set up since the late 80s. Even in the world of sports cars, you’re generally getting into the more expensive, high horsepower end of the game when you start seeing staggered setups.
Proletariat econoboxes just don’t fit when your career had you going at (multiple) hundreds of miles per hour.
Hehe, I was thinking more like a MX5 or a BRZ. Always more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow!