you keep saying the cars need to be tested at the same battery temps but that’s the point. Under similar conditions one car is running 15 degrees warmer than the other.
Yes. That's true. One possible reason is described above in my original post:
but hurts discharge rate and performance when combined with above factors.
Not trying to argue but isn’t that the variable we are trying to solve for? Based on my limited understanding of track mode, I don’t see how it matters
Yes, and I said they would likely still be different, and that there was no defending it. And I also listed all the other reasons I could think of for why this might be the case. There may be others.
As far as Track Mode is concerned, if you're doing 0-60 runs, you're definitely going to be in Track Mode, but it's obvious from above that without Track Mode for the Performance 2021 vs. LR 2021, the Performance is worse at low SoC (for this particular test, where the battery temperatures are different, except at 10% SoC where they are the same, where the LR is way better). So apples to apples the Performance does worse in that particular case. And technically it wouldn't be "fair" to turn on Track Mode when doing that comparison. But it doesn't mean one can't try.
And no, I don't know whether Track Mode would resolve this problem (I tend to think it would help but it may not be optimized to optimize performance in the cold - normally hot weather is more the concern that Track Mode tries to address). Just saying it's something to try, if you want to try to avoid the heat sucking. Worth a shot to see what happens!
Also definitely turn off climate control!
Hopefully Tesla will fix it, and as I mentioned, this is likely due to the difference in cell composition and the heat pump. Fundamentally I'm sure the performance of the 2021 is similar or superior, or will be, once cell restrictions are lifted (which it is pretty reasonable to expect, though there are no guarantees in life, and the chemistry may well be fundamentally different enough in the cold that it's not quite as good - we don't know - but I wouldn't judge it based on existing test results). Maybe the 2021 will always be worse in the cold than the 2019, but there's no way to know right now how much worse. At least it will be more efficient.
You can try to eliminate the temperature from the equation by turning off the heat pump and turning on stator heating, as mentioned above - but as we can see on the 2021 LR to 2021 Performance comparison at 10% SoC, at very low SoC it's not looking promising.
TL;DR - there's a reasonable chance that there will be programming changes coming to the Model 3 Performance 2021 to make it do better in the cold, but no one knows, and you should also review
@MasterC17's comparison, as he owns/has owned both cars and has telemetry data.
EDIT: Another thing that should have been included in these videos is the minimum voltage that's allowed during each run on each vehicle. Some have speculated that's one of the reasons the power dropoff is so catastrophic. I don't have the patience to dig up all the videos with the other vehicles or watch them all, but I saw something like 265V-270V on the LR (I think - can't remember which vehicle) when I was watching this morning.
The voltage sags due to the current draw and there's a limit to how much is allowed. If this sag limit is a lot higher on the Performance (for whatever reason Tesla's engineers have decided) it's going to result in pretty catastrophic power pulling because the current allowed will be substantially lower.