Boosted Tesla Model 3 Acceleration Test Reveals Surprising Result

A Model 3 performance bargain or bargain Model 3 Performance?

Tesla Model 3 Boosted raced Drag Times

Domenick Yoney

By: Domenick Yoney

Dec 23, 2019 at 3:36pm ET

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Last week, Tesla gave owners of its Long Range, Dual Motor Model 3 the option to boost its performance via an over-the air (OTA) update by forking over $2,000. We've had a preliminary look at how the boosted version performs versus the non-boosted Model 3, but still had questions.

More about the boosted Model 3.

Tesla Releases Model 3 Acceleration Boost: Should You Buy It?

How does it stack up against the Tesla Model 3 Performance? How does it do in the quarter-mile? If you were also seeking answers, then good news: DragTimes has taken out a freshly boosted car and put it to the (instrumented) test. Just for good measure, it also rolled its own Model 3 Performance from the garage and performed some side-by-side contests to help us get a better idea of the two stack up against each other.

Before we dig into the numbers produced by the test, we should point out that DragTimes host Brooks Weisblat brings up a good point: how should we refer to the boosted Tesla Model 3? As you may have noticed, we've been calling it the "boosted Model 3" in this post, but that's pretty non-traditional. In the video (above), Brooks suggests Model 3 Sport, which we kind of like.

According to the V-Box data collecter, the boosted car did the 0-to-60 miles per hour run in 3.9 seconds. That's exactly what Tesla advertises it will do and is a half-second quicker than the non-boosted Long Range, Dual Motor Model 3. The sedan managed to do the quarter-mile in 11.89 seconds at 116.5 mph. Weisblat says his Model 3 Performance recently recorded a quarter-mile in 11.62 seconds at 115.8 mph.

What do you think?

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Looking at the numbers tells us a few things. First, the Performance is still the quicker car, but most of its advantage is at lower speeds. Once underway, the two cars are about dead even.

So, is the Performance version still worth the extra bucks? No doubt there are a variety of opinions about that, and Weisblat shares his own. Of course, our position at InsideEVs is, if you're rolling electric, you've made the right choice.

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