Tesla is offering a new performance version of its Model Y crossover for the European market. The new variant is aimed at boosting the company’s sales on the continent, which have been in free fall for most of the year thanks to growing competition from China and brand damage from Elon Musk’s fascist antics. The Model Y Performance, which will go on sale in September, looks to be a step above the base model in most categories. It will be quicker, accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h in just 3.5 seconds, as compared to 4.8 seconds for the regular Model Y. It will have longer range, with an estimated 580 km (360 miles) based on the more generous WLTP standard. And it will have 460 horsepower, up from the 265 hp available in the rear-wheel drive model. But the big question hanging over this new variant is whether it will help turn around Tesla’s fortunes in Europe. The automaker’s sales [plunged a staggering 42 percent in July](https://www.theverge.com/news/767280/tesla-down-byd-way-up) as buyers flocked to Chinese brands like BYD. This continued a trend we’ve been seeing over the course of the year, with Tesla’s sales dropping each month in the EU since January. Meanwhile, BYD’s July sales were up 225 percent. The drop in sales coincided with Musk’s move to the right, including his support for Germany’s right-wing AfD party. Read more: [https://www.theverge.com/news/767959/tesla-model-y-performance-europe-range-specs-sales](https://www.theverge.com/news/767959/tesla-model-y-performance-europe-range-specs-sales)
Narrator: No. No, it won’t.
Why does it have more range instead of less?
They just keep making variants of the same thing. It's not just Elon being a fascist that's the problem, it's this exact thing. Nothing new. Nothing good. Nothing special.
All the teslas “pull to the right” super hard when you are driving them these days
This is basically exactly the comment I was going to post, and I am sorry I only have 1 up vote to give.
Europeans remember the nazi thing, this vehicle will NOT save the company.
Was anyone asking for a faster SUV? This is what happens when engineers pretend to be product managers.
Naaah
What even is the point of crazy acceleration on an SUV? Why would this make people buy it?
Nice
No. It can’t. Musk still hasn’t learned that trying to sell fear and hatred of diversity in Europe, while trying to sell cars in Europe, too, doesn’t work. He injected himself into Scotland’s business, siding with infamous racists, just a couple of days ago, getting himself rebuked by the Scottish government for misrepresenting the facts to whip up hatred.
Grins and giggles sell cars.
I no longer have a MYLR. We are a two Rivian family now. I am glad we have that acceleration. It’s been used more than once to get out of a potential accident.
It’s the only „Upgrade“ that they can bring to market without bigger investment. It reeks of desperation.
Is Elon still involved? Then no, no it won’t help.
The brand is dead.
Quicker acceleration. AYFKM.
Def not. Elon was cool in Eu, but nowhere near national hero status like in US. His political activism changed it forever. If it was not enough, many Europeans try to avoid US brands now if there are good alternatives. Hello Trump. Now, when the brand is, seemingly, permanently damaged and there are so many alternatives, Tesla will loose its market share. For Tesla to recover Elon either must come with a major innovation(s) or step aside. Unfortunately there is nothing serious on the horizon. FSD/AV is not considered serious at this point.
Oh yeah. They could have forgotten him DOGE but not reference to Hitler. It just proves that he is out of touch with the EU market. Better have a local marketing team to advise him what to do
Tesla is already extremely fast. Being faster doesn't seem like a rational fix
The product isn’t the problem. The guy running the company having Nazi-adjacent ties is the problem. Europeans generally have strong opinions about Nazis.
True, and the current one is already stupid fast. Knocking another 0.2 seconds off the already fast 0-60 time isn’t exactly going to start lines out the door to buy one. Also, it’s not an SUV. It’s a street crossover car. It’s a station wagon, but a little taller.
Fuck Tesla and anyone considering it at this point
Or product managers who are trying something, anything to overcome their boss’s horrible public image. The remedy is clear. Fire Elmo as CEO, and maybe they’ll slowly start selling cars again in a few years… if they survive.
So the €45,000 version didn't exactly fly off the shelves in Europe... and now there's a €62,000 version. What could possibly go wrong?
Why would it have less range unless they put a smaller battery in it? Nice thing about EVs is power does not take away from efficiency. I will still never buy one until Elon is gone (and they install an instrument cluster).
I honestly don’t think any innovation in the world is going to overcome the resistance to the brand being involved with the alt-right bullshit Elon is doing in Europe, UK, Canada, or the US. The fix is to get rid of Elon, and maybe in a few years Tesla might start to not stink like Elon, and maybe the buyers will come back... maybe.
The performance model literally can’t save Tesla’s crap sales. Most people don’t get the performance to make any significant jump in sales
Of course not. Majority of the Tesla owners couldn’t care less for the performance difference. Most will care about the cost delta.
Ah for € 62,000 euros I bet the HUD is standard! It's crazy Tesla doesn't offer HUD at all, a lot of mid range and some lower price range cars offer them now.
A fallacy. Having more power than you need will put you into trouble more times than it will save you by 'accelerating out of trouble'.
No, it can’t. Too many new EV models from European and Chinese car companies coming over the coming quarters. The Germans have especially interesting EV portfolio news in 2026+: BMW Neue Klasse, Mercedes C series etc.
There is a reason Teslas have the highest fatality rate in spite of doing very well in any crash test. They are fast and heavy. Your "acceleration to avoid an accident" response is just as likely to eventually cause an accident as well. I've driven many high performance (> 500 hp) cars on track and on street for reference, including several Tesla performance models (street only). They are hilariously quick but the understeer at speed is frightening and, other than the optional CC brakes on the Model S Performance, the brakes are garbage. Acceleration is a valid avoidance strategy in some cases but speed kills regardless of the vehicle and there is usually a better option involving braking and manuevering. Be safe out there!
Larger wheels. All performance models have lower range
While it isn't going to hurt, it is difficult to imagine it is going to have more than the most minimalistic impacts in a positive sense, because, the problems Tesla is facing is most markets has nothing to do with "not enough performance."
Tesla has never really done marketing, and they always relied on Elon to drive interest, until he decided he wanted to "send his heart out" while on stage kissing Trumps ass. I am sad about Tesla as a brand (because I did like them), but hope Elon loses everything, and faces a future of negative repercussions.
« I’ll buy a Tesla once it becomes faster » nobody in Europe
To be fair most CEOs are out of touch with reality. This is why they have PR teams, boards and employees. Elon is just a shit CEO, which is odd since up until certain point he was building massive wealth.
Come on you cant greet nazism and then expect a model update would fix things… Tesla is doomed in europe until Elon is fired. But Elons mates just gave Elon a couple billions to stay in company so… short the stock guys
Cool story
Cool story
Elon is/was marketing. In fact it was super smart marketing… until he broke it. He didn’t pay anything for ads, saving potentially billions. Now Tesla started billboards. If it is not a marketing stunt to brag about FSD on Twitter, ads will cost hundreds of millions, eroding the bottom line
Exactly, but referring to Hitler is outrageous for any Western country. What was he thinking about in that moment? Crazy.
"the nazi thing" is SUCH a branding disaster XD Bro sells electric cars. Why would he think that the persona to sell a fundamentally progressive product in a highly progressive continent would be *arch-fascism?*
The problem wasn’t ever performance. It was always branding and Elon has branded it as Nazi EV. FSD might have been enough but they are so far away from that.
They are optimizing for the thing that nobody cares about. I see Teslas while driving every single day. You know what I don't see? People peeling off when a light turns green or accelerating like crazy when merging into a highway from an onramp. They drive their car as if they are driving any other car. The Venn diagram of 'people who want an SUV-sized car' and 'people who want a super fast car' shows almost no intersection. This won't do shit for sales.
Because everyone knows, when buying a family SUV, the only thing that matters is 0-60 time... Not
There’s also the glaring design flaws like the electronic doors, camera only autonomous driving etc
It did work in the past for Elon and Tesla multiple times and therefore I don’t disregard this route (major innovations with Wow factor). Although again this time is different and seemingly Elon doesn’t have any trumps in his sleeve any more
I rented one once and I loved the speed, but not much else.
Meh, slightly.
Check the model 3 long range awd vs performance. Non performance version has 16% more range officially
Yes, I was considering buying a Tesla yesterday, and my only hesitation was that the existing ones just don't accelerate fast enough. /s
It wasn't a story.
No. An apology for the forbidden arm gesture and publicly rescinding the support for right wing parties would be in order.
Lol wouldn't need to accelerate out of a potential accident if you weren't speeding around putting yourself in the way of potential accidents 😂 be real. There's a right way and a wrong way to ride a 4 ton brick
Them leaning into the model x design is such a bad move. The curves look so fucking ugly
I'll take one if it's free :)
It was cooler than yours.
Theres a reason they show Tesla’s beating a Porsche on a drag strip. Put a few turns in and you’ll find out how useful that torque is.
If I was speeding I wouldn’t need to accelerate. I’d already be going fast, sport. 25 years of defensive driver training both as an MP and in the civilian world. I know what I am doing behind the wheel. And there are times where someone is coming up behind you WAY too fast and the best way to avoid getting hit is by punching it a little. Those horses and extra torque saved my life more than once.
You must be the type to pull up a few feet whenever cars approach from the rear 😂 it's never that serious and you're exaggerating the "life saving" bit.
But shithead fascists kill brands
The acceleration gets old fast after your third tire purchase in less than a year.
Betteridge's law is hard to break.
Boom!
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Public school fail.
Same for us- we sold our Tesler trash once Elon went Nazi. I’ll never support them, again ✊
Nazi CEO… FSD promises for…. 8 years?
You’re like Farva from Super Troopers. You’re close to saying something at a 3rd grade level and then set the stage right again.
Elon is an oxygen stealer - he needs to go to mars now.
And in Europe? How much is "1 second faster" worth when already less than 5?
Yeah
I mean most average car owners in Europe don't want or need massive acceleration/speed and insane range. Most just want a small & economical EV which can do their regular daily commute and doesn't cost the Earth. But yeah, even if such a car was one of Tesla's offerings nobody will buy it in large numbers while Musk is still in charge.
I gave them another upvote. And or for you for good measure.
Gotta give some pushback here. I have never, ever been rear-ended by another car. I have to think the vast majority of rear-endings occur when: 1. the driver in front is completely stopped at a light and the person behind isn’t paying attention, or 2. Something up ahead causes all cars to immediately slow down/stop (like an accident with other vehicles, or obstruction up ahead like unexpected debris in the road or animal/person running across the street). Neither of these instance would protect you from being rear-ended by jumping on the accelerator. If someone comes flying up on you from behind while driving on the highway they’re not just going to just ram into you. Unless they’re blind or irretrievably stupid.
they sell 2 cars effectively, they make these "editions" ... product differentiation gone mad.
When I was in Sweden this summer I met some extended family who had fairly new Teslas, a year old or a couple of years old. They were either not happy with Elon's politics, or they didn't care, but the reason they bought the cars in the first place is that they were cheap EVs. You get a lot of battery for your money. None of them would give a shit about performance. They're shopping in the value segment. If you want performance, and you care about performance, there are tons of competition, that segment is much tougher to compete in, but of course Tesla just assumes that their cars are the best always and everyone will love their cars no matter what.
I just checked, in Sweden this new Model Y performance costs just as much a Polestar 4 Long Range Dual Motor. (~720k SEK) The Polestar has slightly better range, more horsepower, but does 0-100 in 3.8s instead of 3.5s. It also looks much, much, better from the outside, and has a much, much, nicer interior. It has a real shifter, a separate instrument screen, a HUD, and driving assistance that's 100% on par with Tesla's Basic Autopilot. And it's (sort of) a Volvo. Why would anyone pick the Y over that? Spend ~780k SEK and get a BMW i4 M40. 600 horsepower, same acceleration, same range, and an actual luxury car. And Tesla thinks that they can compete with their plasticky stripped "minimalist" interior?
The cybertruck was the shark jump.
Why do they think a brand turned into a Nazi-mobile is going to do well eight months later in Europe?
They're at the same stage where Blackberry realise that no one bought the poorly-designed 'Blackberry Storm' and decide to just keep making variations of the same old keyboard devices, until they eventually sell the naming rights off to a Chinese company (TCL in Blackberry's case).
Furnish the interior and customers might give it a real look. Every other car has more than 2 buttons inside the vehicle.
Poor acceleration and range is not why Europeans have stopped buying teslas.
I know performance drivers are far fewer than value drivers, but what’s the competition ? Because I came from a bmw m3 and the m3p was on a league of its own
”Saved your life more than once”? I don’t buy it.
> what’s the competition ? Polestar 4 LR AWD matches the performance and price pretty much exactly, the BMW i4 M60 does as well, although it's not a SUV. The Volkswagen ID.5/ID.4 GTX are cheaper than the Tesla, but do 0-100 in only 5.4s oh noes. They all have the same or more features, they all have better interiors than the Tesla, and they definitely look better on the outside as well. Oh, and then you have the Chinese, BYD Seal Excellence, Zeekr 7X Privilege AWD, or a NIO ET5. They're all cheaper than the Tesla, but same range and acceleration.
For the many good people working in Tesla plants and supply chain, I hope they do okay. For fElon Musk, I hope not. There has to be some karma for being such an absolute asshat.
If the refresh didn't help this won't. I only wish people in the U.S. had the same resolve as people in most of Europe.
WHO would want to buy that turd
I gave them another upvote. And to you and you too for good measure.
Musk destroyed Tesla’s immense good will for his own political, ego and power greed.
Elon is a fascist exploiter of the people, and has a botched penis implant. Boycott anything he does, and ignore him. Then jail him for all the fraud and crime, then deport him.
Who the fuck needs all that accelleration? This is getting stupid.
As someone two weeks ago stated: imagine being the CEO of product that is largely bought by left leaning people and going full nazi? Doesn’t take a journalist to figure out what this will do to sales.
They are bad enough at driving that they have had to accelerate out of potential accidents more than once
For a very, very small portion of the buying public is this a "car features" thing. Early EV adopters are already all in here and you now need to convince new buyers. You can do this with price and you can do this with features, but when you have a brand image issue it works against you. And this is not something like... buying a TV from a company people hate (and the TV is in your house and very few people see it) - this is you showing your purchase to the public. A $30K car (MSRP) with 500 miles of range and 15 min 20%-80% charging would go a long way to removing the stain of the Tesla/Musk brand for some people, but short of Elon leaving the company, there's a problem here. Bottom line, there just are enough people who are waiting on the sidelines for a faster EV.
*BMW i4 M60
> The problem wasn’t ever performance. ehh, I mostly disagree with that. Early electric cars were plagued with terrible range, slow-ass charging, and stupidly slow acceleration. From those three things, they were basically stillborn. There's a segment of the population that doesn't think about acceleration in a car, but I'd argue it's very small. Most people just want it to feel like it goes when they want it to, and the remaining like to accelerate fast. That all being said, their problem not certainly isn't acceleration - nor has it been for years.
> I know performance drivers are far fewer than value drivers, but what’s the competition ? The competition for the base Tesla's is almost any car with a reasonable engine. Go look at the wiki article for the Model Y and you'll find the standard range models are slow as hell and you need the AWD models for anything 'fast'. There are a ton of EVs faster than most Tesla's. > Because I came from a bmw m3 and the m3p was on a league of its own The BMW is faster than a lot of Tesla's, but is crushed by the Plaid models in straight line acceleration.
I’m only talking about the performance models since that’s what this post is about. When I got the m3p 2 years ago, there was nothing really comparable at all in the price bracket. Even the bmw i4 was lagging behind. And not just in straight acceleration, the m3p (and myp) had really good car balance for handling, similar to a mid engine car. To date, I know a lot of new competitors have risen, especially in china. So I was curious what’s the new performance competitors in the sedan and crossover space
Why are car companies so obsessed with increasing acceleration for EV’s that already have almost instant torque? EV’s already can accelerate faster than most cars out there. They should be hyper focused on the only thing that matters: range.
The cars aren't the problem.
Would you ask the same of legit performance SUVs like Lambo Urus or G wagon or Cayenne, etc?? Just from a performance point of view, this isn't a problem for me.
Yeah, sadly in the Bay Area you see thousands of the Nazi facelift Teslas now. Yes, they definitely bought it after he went crazy.
It has a small spoiler which will provide 2 pounds of downforce at 330 mph. It is also made of carbon fibre which will shave 40 grams from this 2.2 ton car and another 400 grams when it inevitably falls off.. Please take my money!
Range: Bigger battery (super expensive). Reduced drag/Raindrop shape (limiting design choice/bodyshape) Small tires (drive aweful) Were far into the diminishing returns. Basically not much you can do. Better acceleration: draw more current. Cheap AF. Better acceleration it is then.
Ofcourse it wont. Only a small percentage the Tesla buyers are interested paying the premium that a performance model costs.
Out of the 210 Teslas registered in Sweden during august (down from 1348 teslas last year, a nice 85% drop) 141 were Model Y. So the poor suckers who still buy Tesla at least seem to buy the latest model. I guess that means all in on Tesla stock?
Not unless they fundamentally reengineered the entire car and tripled the cost…
Login is required to comment.
Login with Google