Tesla Model S P90D on ice

Let’s be honest, driving any car in deep snow has little, or almost no, relevance to the majority of Australian drivers, bar those handful of places in New South Wales, Victoria and Tassie where you can strap a couple of planks to your feet before invalidating your life insurance.

That said, if you were offered the chance to drive a 568kW Tesla Model S on your very own wintery playground in the Austrian Alps you just would, wouldn’t you?

Of course, there is a serious side to Tesla’s kind invitation of icy high jinks.

The US car-maker claims its new all-wheel drive system — available on the P70D, P85D and P90D versions of the Model S — is as sophisticated as any other manufacturer’s mechanical system. To prove it, it found a bunch of hacks some snow and just enough space to demonstrate how effective it is.

Parachuting into Austria’s Innsbruck airport would have been the logical choice but, alas, the gods of aviation didn’t bless me with a suitable flight so Munich airport in Germany it is, 220km away from the event.

Not that I mind, because right now I feel like I’ve won the great hire car lottery — instead of being handed the keys of a Fiat 500L, I find myself climbing into a pre-battered Mercedes-Benz E 220d.

Despite its battle scars and 30,000 clicks on the clock, the German sedan instantly feels at home as it reaches its 210km/h speed-limiter (reduced for winter tyre running) on the clear, empty Autobahn that leads us south-west to the Austrian border.

It’s at speeds like this, pulling just 2600rpm in top (ninth) gear with impeccable stability and refinement (once the road and wind drowns out the Benz’s outdated 2.1-litre diesel), that it’s easy to feel like I’ve been catapulted into the future.

Put it this way, I’m not missing the Hume right now.

As the border approaches and traffic builds, the E-Class sat-nav gives the main German-Austria border crossing the Teutonic two fingers and orders me to peel off onto the quieter Fern Pass.

With the temperature hovering around -8C and light snow already falling, I begin to think we’ve made a terrible mistake but am rewarded with snow-free roads, open mountain passes and snow blanketed picturesque Austrian village after village, lit up to greet the millions of skiers who make their annual pilgrimage to these parts.

Pitztal, where we’re heading, is named after its glacier that allows skiers to break their limbs from September through to May. Located in the Austrian State of Tyrol, the Alpine region was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until post-WWI when the whole region was carved up with parts given to Italy, Germany and Switzerland.

I’ve visited the Italian part once before. It’s a beautiful but a confusing place to spend time. Everyone in the mountainous region claims they’re Italian but they all actually speak German. Compounding the head-scratching is the fact that everywhere you go has two names; a German name and an Italian one and you’re never quite sure if you’re in the right place.

Mercifully, we’re staying on the other Austrian side of the mountain range and, apart from their love of speed cameras, I pull up to my hotel that lies on the doorstep of the glacier, in one piece. It’s now snowing and a balmy -10C.

The next morning, it’s clear a good 5cm of snow has come overnight. But a long line of pre-heated, de-iced Teslas await. The huge 17-inch portrait-shaped touch-screen is no longer the shock it once was and is as easy to operate as ever, not that I care as I turn the seat heaters on full-roast mode.

The last Model S motoring.com.au drove was the P85D that came with mighty 520kW/967Nm twin electric motors. Tesla being Tesla, didn’t rest on its laurels deciding what the world needed was an even more powerful version. Hence it replaced the P85D’s 85kW/h lithium-ion battery cells with more energy-dense 90kW/h batteries (a $4500 option).

This helped boost power to 568kW/1000Nm. If that’s not astonishing enough, if you opt for the new ‘Ludicrous Speed Upgrade’ ($15,000) that boosts the lithium cells' flow rate from 1300amps to1500amps… More amps equals more go -- and the ludicrous Model S has set 0-60mph times of just 2.8 seconds in US magazine hands. All that with a range boosted to around 500km.

On the snow field that stretches ahead of us, this level of performance seems unwise, even if you factor in the huge 21-inch Pirelli Winter Sottozero rubber fitted. Of course, I shouldn’t have been concerned.

Despite all that torque available, with stability control engaged it’s possible to drive the majority of the lap with the throttle pedal welded to the floor. Driving like this I’d imagine those tin engines are dishing up around 50kW and maybe 100Nm. If anything this level of traction is a little too effective.

It’s incredible to think that at one point the US car-maker’s engineers considered a mechanical set-up, shuffling power forward using a traditional torque tube. Instead, Tesla saw the light and pensioned off its mechanical idea for a set-up that mounted a motor on each axle. Both new motors are significantly smaller and more efficient than the old single rear-mounted motor from the original Model S.

This, perhaps surprisingly, helped Tesla unlock significant efficiency gains despite an overall increase in weight. That’s because at highway speeds the rear motor ‘torque sleeps’ and is deactivated to allow the smaller front motor drive the car.

The next lap, to try and liven things up (we are on snow, after all, with plenty of run-off), I activate something called Slide Slip control, that’s been developed for ice and snow and loosens the ESC to allow for some wheelspin.

The P90D comes alive. Instantly, you can feel a whole lot more of that 1000Nm being deployed.

Without any trick centre diff, or even a connection between front and rear axles, it’s here, once again, that the trick software does its stuff. Both front and rear axles do have their own mechanical limited-slip diffs. With some neat torque vectoring it’s possible to finally hold the smallest of slides before the system decides you’ve gone too far and catches the drift by ceremoniously cutting power.

It’s at that point the enthusiast in you pines for no intervention at all to ride the drift out, but for most people the system is well judged in the snow.

Driving on soft snow, incidentally, isn’t as alien as you might expect with many parallels to the dirt roads we’re more familiar with Down Under. On modern winter tyres there’s always more grip than you’d imagine, but that sort of thinking is bound to get you into trouble because the breakaway is every bit as sudden.

Unfortunately, snow also has a nasty habit of turning to ice. At that point there’s little or no chance of even complex electronics saving you.

Speaking to a Tesla engineer in between laps of the excellent playground (the area is actually owned by BMW to show off its own all-wheel drive tech to customers), I ask him why it isn’t possible for P90D customers to turn off all the stability systems and go drifting.

His reply is perfectly logical. Company owner, Elon Musk, challenged his engineers to make the world’s safest car and that’s just what he got. There’s also the added challenge you sense, that making and handing over a car with this level of performance to an untrained driver without a safety net would pose its own unique set of problems.

Do you really want to witness a near five-metre-long, 2.2-tonne sedan with 1000Nm doing circle work late at night at your local Bunnings? Probably not.

Speaking of which, what I am missing is the opportunity to feel how much quicker the new P90D is compared to the mind-numbingly fast P85D I drove last year.

The answer is almost impossible to comprehend. Even on winter tyres and with the temperature gauge now indicating -8C, the traction dished up from a full throttle launch is phenomenal. The Tesla feels every bit as quick as that sub-three-second 0-100km/h time which means you’ll need a McLaren P1 or LaFerrari in full-attack mode to humble this spacious, comfortable sedan.

What the Tesla isn’t, not quite yet, is a sports sedan. Push harder on some of the roads we found and that heavy kerb weight blunts it dynamically. A Porsche Panamera Turbo, BMW M5 or even Mercedes-AMG E 63 are all more willing and engaging companions on your favourite road but all wouldn’t see which way the new P90D went along the fast sweeping roads we’re on.

Back playing on the snow and the Tesla is a serene way to go sideways. It’s impossible, without a loud V6 or V8 intruding, not to spend your time listening to the snow crunch satisfyingly under tyre. Curiously, you hear the slide before it happens, as the pitch of the tyre changes shortly before it snaps.

It’s a rude shock to climb back into the freezing hire car at the end of the day, skid hopelessly out of control from the car park and be bombarded by the gravelly sound of a cold diesel engine slowly warming up.

At Autobahn speeds as the speedo locks onto a steady 210, but what once felt like the future no longer feels so special.

Forget the exhilaration of driving on snow and even the sensation of travelling almost twice our national speed limit (legally); experiencing the Tesla Model S P90D on any road in real-world conditions really does feel like a taste of things to come.