So when I looked up the options under car controls there was a little slider under which you could adjust the suspension. I asked the sales rep what that does and he said nothing right now but in the future you would be able to go from a tight to a loose suspension (so a tight drive to a floaty drive). I thought this is pretty awesome but was disappointed that an option appeared in the interface that is basically redundant until some future update. I thought back to what the rep told me and now I am not so certain he said it does "nothing". I think he said something along the lines of right now it raises and lowers the car but nothing really..and in the future it will allow you to choose between a a tight or floaty ride. Does anyone know about this setting toggle I am talking about?
As for the fishtailing - It was raining and we were about to take the exist offramp on to the free way. We accelerated sharply and this caused some fishtailing. It was not actually beyond our control but it did make me think briefly I was losing control of the car. That made me think the car doesn't quite have stability controls yet that override the driver in those situations.
There is an air suspension control that allows you to set different heights of the air suspension 'Very High', 'High', 'Standard', 'Low' and 'Jack'. These are user selectable, but the car will automatically select the height settings depending on what speed it is traveling. The Low setting will kick in at highway speeds. Most of the rest of the time the car is in Standard height. High and Very high can be used at low speeds so you can get in and out of a steep driveway or if you are traveling at a slow speed over a rocky road. But once you exceed certain speed thresholds (I don't remember exactly, but I think it's something like 12 miles per hour and 19 mph) The suspension will lower. The control does not tighten the stiffness of the suspension. Perhaps they will do that in the future, but for now the control only adjusts the height of the car.
I have a Performance Model S and I can make it fishtail in the rain around Seattle if I want to, but if I drive the car hard, the stability control does a masterful job of keeping the car from getting wildly out of control. You can manually turn off stability control, but I would not recommend doing that with the Model S. It has a tremendous amount of torque and you can get into trouble really fast if you turn off stability control.
But if you drive the car normally, it is one of the most stable cars around, even in the wet conditions we have here in the Northwest. I personally have tremendous confidence driving the Model S around Seattle when it downpours and we get those pools of water in the tire ruts on I-5, I-405 and I-90 around here. I have not once felt the car hydroplane or feel out of control when driving on the freeway at speed in the rain. Also when driving on wet cloverleaf onramps, I've never felt like the backend was going to slip out if I drive the car smoothly in the turn. If you lift off the accelerator or are jerky with it, the car may seem a bit unstable for a moment (especially if you are not used to having regenerative braking kick in) but it returns to being stable quickly. I do have the 21" tires on my car.
The fishtailing you experienced could also be caused because the tires on your car were not broken in yet. If you only had 50 miles on the car you test drove, I would think the tires still have some of that slippery coating that many new tires have. Also some of the cars that have been delivered have had high tire pressure (50 psi or higher) vs. the 42 PSI that the factory recommends (for the 21 inch tires, I'm not sure what the 19 in tire pressure is). Owners who have reported instability in their cars have sometimes found it was a tire pressure issue. Since the car is fairly new, they may have not checked out the tire pressure yet. When cars are carried on car carriers, they often will over-inflate the tires to help keep the cars more stable on the carrier. The stability control on the Performance car I have is a great blend between letting me be aggressive and keeping me from getting into trouble. But because the car has so much torque, you have to learn to trust the system when the car starts to slip. When you do punch it on an entrance ramp onto the freeway and the road is wet, you will get some wheel slip, but the Traction/Stability control kicks in quickly and all you have to do is keep the accelerator depressed and it will keep correcting for you automatically and limit your rate of acceleration to keep the car relatively stable.
But what you experienced in your test drive was what you experienced, so you'll have to weigh what people here on the forum are telling you with your own experience. I will say that I've had my car since November, have over 8,000 miles on it driving in the worst part of the Seattle winter with lots of rain and wet conditions and the Model S is the most solid and confidence inspiring car I have ever driven. Even with the 21 inch tires, it rides like a dream, handles like a sports car and is stable enough so my wife doesn't yell at me when I drive 'spiritedly'!
). The lack of AWD was really noticeable. The car tended to fishtail slightly and it had a hard time self correcting. Tesla should really get an AWD model or at least one with stability controls.
