A lone camel wanders across the scorching dunes, pausing to gaze at a black sedan parked on rutted tracks in the Dubai desert. It’s a Tesla EV, brought over by the company’s field quality engineers for “extreme heat and durability testing” at temperatures of 50ºC. The company does its cold weather testing in Alaska.
The line-up of cars tested in Dubai include the Model Y, the refreshed Model X and the Model 3, with the last recently fitted out with new LFP cells. The engineers possibly also monitored the performance of the new heat pump, introduced in the Model Y last year, which didn’t do as well as expected in frigid climes.
Based on the images posted on Tesla’s Instagram account, the engineers took on sand, mountain roads and gravel-strewn tracks during the tests, the results of which have not yet been announced.
Testing a car for durability requires it to be pushed to the hilt — be it in extreme temperatures, on treacherous terrain or flung across the bends of a racetrack — to gauge handling ability and suggest potential improvements.
Tesla recently introduced a number of upgrades to its models, factoring in parameters such as ambient temperature, humidity, tyre pressure, cross wind and even phone charging — all of which were presumably tested in the deserts of Dubai.
The Twitter debacle aside, Tesla founder Elon Musk also made news this month when he announced he was raising the price of Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) software in North America, from $12,000 to $15,000 from September 5, after the release of version FSD Beta 10.69.2 for the company’s driver assistance system.
See the video below on The National's test drive of the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo in extreme weather conditions
Check out the brand new Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo
