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P85D on my muddy driveway - testing polarizing film on a cheap dash-cam

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Hi all,

The dark blue P85D arrived a few days ago -- just in time for Spring Thaw up here in the tundra. So this is a two for one deal. Partly this is showing off how the car is when driving through spring-thaw mud on a pretty squishy private road. But my main objective was testing a piece of polarizing film taped over the lens of a cheap (A118C) dash-cam -- which worked pretty well.

 
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Hi Dr.K - the P85D just has regular 19" rims with the Michelin all-seasons on it. That's what all the prior cars have had (Toyota Highlander, and a 4WD Chev Slivarado before that).

Polarizing film is really handy stuff, and super cheap. Marcie is a naturalist and we're constantly fiddling with her microscopes and specimen lights to get rid of flare in her pictures. Here's a good example of a lifetime supply for under $20 on Amazon. "Polarizing film" is the search term that will get you to the right place.
The key is the *angle* of the film. So I mounted the camera and turned it on, facing into the sun (*lots* of reflection). Then I held a strip of film up in front of it and narrated the angle as I rotated it. Then I watched the video on a computer and figured out what angle cut the reflections the most, and mounted the film at that angle.
 
Hm. While the dash-cam is going to work fine for it's intended purpose (documenting crashes), the video doesn't really show the road all that well. So here are a couple pictures I took after I drove in on "delivery day." The road wasn't nearly as soft as it was when I took that video, but these photos will still give you a sense of what's going on.

Here's the driveway. The straight track (the one where the snow is closest to you on the left side) is the track the Tesla made driving in. The gnarly wiggly tracks are the ones the Highlander made going out the prior afternoon. My early opinion is that the traction control is much more nuanced on the Tesla -- lots better control. The picture that follows shows how little "splash" there is -- which also indicates how under-control things are. The truck (Chev Silverado 4WD) was the worst -- I used to have mud all over the place, even up on the windshield.

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Now, that's a driveway!

Maybe winter's not quite over and you'll get a chance to see what a beast the P85D is in the snow, too. We've driven through some pretty severe winter conditions in ours, and there's never been an issue with traction or controllability. To be fair, this is with Hakka R2 winter tires on the standard 19" wheels.
 
I got some snow earlier in the week, conducted unreasonable tests (some of which failed), and posted the video just now. I'm running all-season tires on 19 inch rims and managed to find a spot where I could spin the wheels. I was reminded that there's the "slip start" gizmo, which I completely forgot about and didn't try. Unfortunately it was self-shoveling snow. Dang.... Probably have to wait until next year.
 
Thanks for posting/sharing. I was wondering how fast you were going (and then you said, 15 mph) and what the car/tire/wheel looked like when you were done (and you posted the picture). And the still of the road was helpful. I've had my MS for a week, and drove it in rain one day. I did not notice anything different than on a dry road, no slippage.