The officially usable top speed of the 1,020 HP Tesla Model S Plaid is 175 MPH, electronically limited, and only available in Track Mode. The car has enough power to go well beyond the limiter, so Canadian tuning company Ingenext cracked its software to remove the top-speed restriction and aimed its Tesla at a runway to see how fast it could go.
It turns out the answer is fast. Tesla has officially stated that the top speed of the Model S Plaid is 200 MPH, but no version of the car has ever been released with the limiter removed to hit those speeds, leaving its actual performance a bit of a mystery. Now for the first time, on the 1.8-mile-long, closed runway, it was able to smash through 200 MPH with ease; it hit 216 MPH (and still climbing) before running out of room. This puts it in extremely rare territory for EVs, with only the Lotus Evija and the Rimac Nevera able to claim similar top speeds. Granted, to achieve that speed, a software crack was needed to remove the limiter on the Tesla, and the high-speed Plaid needed bigger brakes plus some Michelin Pilot Super Sports thrown on, but other than that, it was a stock car without any performance modifications to the drivetrain. Notably, unlike the Evija and the Nevera, it has four doors and costs six figures instead of seven.
The video of the run, shared from Electrek, shows that the Tesla accomplished its top-speed run in just 1.2 miles of the 1.8-mile runway (the rest of the landing strip was needed to stop the car). Unfortunately, no GPS or data log was shared with the video, so it’s likely this won’t count as an official top speed record for the car, but it does show what is possible as more software unlocks become available for the Plaid.
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