Tesla Model S Plaid (2020 - 2025) used car model guide

Very little differentiates the look of this top Plaid variant from a standard Model S Dual Motor derivative - which with this post-2023-era car meant it shared all the final visual changes made to update this long-running design. Plaid identifiers include a bespoke lower front splitter, while at the rear, there's a revised rear diffuser and a subtle spoiler on the boot lid. There are big 21-inch wheels too and on the Plaid, they come with red brake calipers.
There aren't really any Plaid identifying changes within this post-2023-era Model S's completely updated interior, which unfortunately seats you on the wrong side of the cabin thanks to this car's left hand drive-only production format. Tesla offered original owners of this '23-era-onwards car the option of fitting a weird yoke-like steering wheel, a tiller cut in half like the tiller from a space ship - though a conventional wheel was also available as an alternative. The 17-inch landscape-format central screen was introduced as part of this final set of Model S updates. The brand stuck with a separate instrument screen; on smaller Teslas, drive instruments are confined to the near side of the central monitor.
In true Tesla fashion, the cabin's very minimalistic - even more with the brand's deletion of the column stalks that had previously been provided for indicating and gear changes. Instead, the Model S guesses your intended direction of travel and requires you to confirm its prediction by tapping the brake pedal. Or you can just use a provided slider on the side of the centre screen. As for the wipers and indicators, well they're controlled with capacitive buttons on the steering tiller - the car uses its cameras and a steering angle sensor to know when to cancel the indicators. Which seems a very complicated way of fixing something that didn't really need to be fixed.
In the rear, the standards of head and legroom on offer are unremarkable for a car in this class, but what is impressive is this car's ability to comfortably look after three fully-sized adults. Headroom's good, even for six-footers, but the rear seat squab is set quite low in relation to the floor, which doesn't deliver an ideal seating position. There's no third row seating option, as there was previously on a Model S.
Out back, you get a simply huge 793-litre boot, extendable to 1,645-litres with the inflexibly-orientated 60:40-split rear bench flattened. There's also an 89-litre 'frunk' for the charging leads under the bonnet.

Lots to look for here: the Model S reliability record isn't anything like as good as the smaller Model 3. We've heard of broken exterior door handles (they're retractable and sometimes get stuck), various body work problems and issues with the exterior lights (the auto high dip sometimes stops working). You shouldn't have any problems with the drive battery, but it will start to lose some of its charge capability over time. Check the charging system thoroughly - and that the charging lead locks and unlocks properly. Checks for cabin squeaks and rattles, peeling interior materials and premature wear of the vegan upholstery. Look out for phantom braking on the test drive.
Obviously, you need to thoroughly check the workings of the big centre touchscreen as it's the 'brain' of the car. We've heard of software glitches. What else? Well Tesla's own (recommended) windscreen washer fluid is expensive. And quite a few owners complain that the tyre life isn't as long as it should be (they often need replacing every 20,000 miles), which is a problem because replacements are expensive. Check the rubber on the car you're looking at and if it's worn, try and get the seller to deal with it before you buy. Some owners have had to replace the boot lid motor and latch assembly; others have had to replace both front drive shafts and CV joints. Others have had water leak issues. What you might not have to replaced is the brake pads; cars with nearly 100,000 miles covered on original pads aren't uncommon. Otherwise, it's just the usual things to look for: parking knocks and scrapes and any damage to the interior caused by kids. And of course insist on fully stamped-up service history.

(approx based on a 2023 Model S Plaid - Ex Vat - see autopartspro.co.uk) Rear brake pads sit in the £18-£28 bracket. Front brake pads are in the £25-£30 bracket. Front brake discs sit in the £72-£79 bracket; rear discs are in the £41-£80 bracket. An air filter is around £19-£60. A pollen filter's in the £5-£16 bracket. An ABS sensor is around £22-£29. A rear shock absorber can be anywhere in the £25-£68 bracket. Wiper blades sit in the £5-£8 bracket.

If like Elon Musk, you're the kind of person for whom too much is never enough, then only the top tri-motor Plaid version of this Model S will do. Musk once promised us there'd be an even faster Plaid+ variant (subsequently cancelled) and it's hard to imagine how fast that would have been because this ordinary Plaid is in every way extra-ordinary against the stopwatch. An extra motor added onto the rear axle boosts total power output to an astonishing 1,020hp, split roughly 30/70 between the front and rear axle. There's a 421hp motor at the front and two 414hp motors at the rear, these altogether generating a scarcely believable 1,420Nm of torque on tap. As a result, Tesla claimed a 0-60mph time of just 1.99 seconds, which at the time of this Tesla's launch made this the world's fastest-accelerating production car. Top speed is 200mph. The only car with four or five seats from this era that can get remotely close to this kind of pace is Porsche's Taycan Turbo GT - and that's vastly more expensive.
For this kind of acceleration, you need to engage the car's provided 'Drag Strip' drive mode, which sets the car into what Tesla calls its 'Cheetah Stance', lowering the front to combat front end lift, giving the front motor the best chance of getting its torque to the tarmac. You'd hardly ever bother with that unless you were engaging in tyre-smoking test track heroics, nor would you usually concern yourself with the provided 'Track' mode settings car offers to vary handling balance, stability assist and regenerative braking. That 'Track' section has settings for drifting, post-lap cooling and brake temperatures, plus a dashcam for recording your circuit exploits.
Even in its more ordinary public road-orientated sporty drive modes, this car remains frantically fast. Engage 'Plaid' and 60mph flashes by in 2.7s; in 'Sport' (which you'll prefer because it gives you a bit more throttle travel to play with) the sprint time is 3.7s - which is still quicker than say, Ford's fastest production model, the Mach-E GT. It's a bit of a different story if you stick to the more normal 'Chill' drive setting you'll need to get anywhere near this Model S Plaid's quoted EV drive range figure of 373 miles (21 miles less than the ordinary Dual Motor version). With 'Chill' engaged in a Model S Plaid, 60mph takes 7.3s.
Stick to the fast modes and the reality of this car's performance is difficult to accurately share: there's a rollercoaster-like 'strap-in and hold-on' vibe, with instant urge that means overtakes don't really need to be planned - they just happen. And when the road opens up and your right foot flexes, the horizon streams towards you as if on fast-forward, reminding you that the Model S Plaid long held the coveted Nurburgring Nordschliefe lap record for an electric production car. But as we suggested earlier, ultimate speed isn't the same thing as ultimate driving engagement, an area where it was clear that Tesla still had work to do to match longer-established brand rivals like Porsche in this segment. But this Plaid model showed that Musk and his men were getting there.
Ride quality in this updated design was massively better than in early Model S designs, even on big 21-inch wheels, a crucial improvement because for all its speed, this is a luxury conveyance first and foremost. To achieve this in this updated post-2025-era Model S, Tesla standardised air springs and completely redesigned the suspension, changing it from a four-link to a more sophisticated five-link set-up. The resulting damping isn't quite class-leading, but set the car in its supplest 'Comfort' drive mode and it cruises over tarmac tears and speed humps in its default 'Medium' suspension height setting. Most of the time you'll leave the air springs in their automatic setting, which is linked to GPS data, so when the car knows it's on a highway, it'll lower itself to reduce drag. But you might want to intervene too - say if you're visiting someone with a steep driveway. In that situation, you can raise the ride height to suit - to a 'High' or 'Very High' setting. Better still, the car will remember the adjustment you've made and log its GPS location, so that if you ever return to the same driveway, the ride height will automatically be raised once more as you approach. Via the centre screen, you can even access complicated suspension compression and rebound data.
Earlier, we talked about this car's hushed refinement: well that's impressive but we should also point out that six-figure segment rivals (Porsche's Taycan Turbo for instance) do better. And cars like that also offer a much better braking set-up, mainly because (amazingly) back in 2023 Tesla still hadn't yet got round to developing a stopping system that blended regenerative and friction braking together - the kind of thing you'll find in virtually every other modern EV from this period. Instead, with a Model S (even this very fast one), the disc brakes are only worked by the pedal; regen only activates when you lift off the throttle and won't helpfully cut in to assist should you be forced to slam on all the anchors. And trying to arrest 1,020bhp merely with a set of conventional steel discs is, we'd suspect, a recipe for steaming brakes in fairly short order, should you take to the track with this car. Talking of brake regen, unlike its rivals, Tesla never bothered with offering its customers lots of options for varying the strength of brake energy harvesting, but there's still a screen-selectable 'one-pedal' setting that maximises it - with so much speed retardation that the brake lights flash to warn following motorists. You might also be interested to know that a Model S can tow up to 1,600kgs; an incorporated 'Trailer Mode' will help here. There's also a provided 'Slip Start' system to help free the vehicle in snow, sand or mud.
This post-2023-era car's completely redesigned drive battery was not only big, at 100kWh, but also offered triple the amount of thermal capacity of earlier Model S designs, so could deliver 15% more energy for sustained performance during spirited driving. It offered longer range too - up to 373 miles for the Plaid version, 21 miles less than the Dual Motor derivative. It requires 15 hours and 15 minutes for full replenishment from a 7.4kw wallbox; or 30 minutes for a 10-80% charge from a DC public rapid charger.

Tesla's aim with this Model S Plaid was to create the world's fastest-accelerating production vehicle. If you're to even approach the level of performance that's on offer here in a car from this period, you'll need to spend vastly more. Which if you're looking at the improved post-2023-era version may be compensation for the disappointing realisation that there's no right hand drive version.
You could argue that this top Plaid variant answers a question that few were asking when it first arrived. But you could also say that of the Model S itself. A car that's became an industry game-changer. In this form, it's a fully-fledged super saloon, with the ability to carry the whole family at uber-rapid journey speeds even when a light dusting of snow falls. Add in the 373-mile range of the later version and you're left with what might just be the most desirable electric super saloon of its time.