We’ve all been there: you’re driving a new car, you pull up to a stop, your buddy is behind you, and you think “yeah baby, I’m gonna rip this just a little.” It turns out the driver testing out the new Tesla Model 3 release candidate in new videos published on Wednesday is no different, because buddy, he did not have to haul ass outta that stop sign as fast as he did.
The videos, first published by Electrek and Teslarati, are stitched together iPhone videos of a Tesla owner named Wayne, who has been stalking the Model 3 release candidate around the Tesla headquarters this week. But the important part here is that Wayne, driving a Tesla Model S P85D, has to accelerate just a liiiittle bit faster than a normal driver would have, because the Tesla Model 3 and BMW in front of him are letting it rip a little.
It’s a subtle moment in the video, but near the end, the three-car convoy (Model 3, BMW chase vehicle, and Wayne in the P85D with the camera bringing up the rear) pulls up to a stop sign near Tesla HQ. The Model 3 takes off first, and Wayne gets it in a perfect horizontal shot as it zooms away (all three cars appear to do textbook “California rolling stops” at the sign, don’t think we didn’t see that). Being real here, the test driver isn’t like, flooring it, but you can also tell despite the jerky stitched-together video from Wayne’s iPhone burst mode that the Model 3 has no problem zipping away from a dead start. The BMW behind it kinda gasses it to catch up, and Wayne zips around to follow, catching the Model 3 just as it ducks back into the Tesla HQ parking lot (probably to get away from nosy fans with cameras, like Wayne).
The scene starts at around nine seconds into this video:
Elon Musk famously said “At Tesla, we don’t make slow cars,” during the Model 3 unveiling last year, and so far, that definitely checks out.
