Owner Takes Model 3 To Track Day And Destroys Brakes After Only 9 Miles

So an idiot with money took his Tesla toy to the track and trashed the brakes. And?

Precisely. Last time I checked car mfg put brakes and pads on their vehicles from suppliers. This is a Brembo story, not necessarily a Tesla story. Why would you track a commuter BEV anyway?

Let's have a comparison test with a more appropriate Model 3 competitor than the Cayman, a Hyundai Sonata perhaps, and see which one makes out better. Someone head down to Enterprise at the airport, pick up a Sonata, take it out on "The 2" and report back to us please.

The Model 3 is basically a $60,000 electric Hyundai Sonata

"The Model 3 is basically a $60,000 electric Hyundai Sonata" - Without the quality, one might add.

Why do you guys have to post these troll baiting headlines. Almost any road car driven in this manner would burn through a set of brake pads. Obviously a Cayman GT4 and a Tesla model 3 are not in the same league on the track.

What you say is partially true. The Tesla's brakes, however, were trashed at an alarming rate and a conventional car simply would not suffer so quickly. It still would not be pretty, but the Tesla is substandard engineering.

Lol. I know guys in stock BMW 3-series that do a half dozen track days a year (at least 100 miles each track day), and their cars are totally fine. The tires even last 20k+ miles with all the track days plus commuting. No issues whatsoever.

Owner turned regen OFF.

This was the 2nd person to do this test. The first also nuked his brakes, but the good news is that there were no performance restrictions across any of the 9 laps that he did. The S/X start throttling performance on lap 2 or 3, so this bodes very well for future performance editions of the 3 and eventually the next S/X platforms (and the Roadster).

Another note that 90% of the braking is done through the motor, not the brake pads. There is a regen limit that you are going to far exceed hitting 100+ MPH. The dual motor and Performance versions should have a higher limit for stronger regen/motor braking and I'd imagine bigger brakes. Driving normally, you already never have to replace brake pads on the S/X/3 (I'm at 20% wear on pads after 70,000 miles with aggressive driving).

I'm **NOT** a Tesla fan, but SanJoseDriver brings up a valid point: The Tesla was *optimized* to be a daily-use EV. When you have an electric engine that -- under normal off-track use, performs most of your braking -- it doesn't make sense to employ brakes that would work under (track) conditions, where the engine can't do what it always does while off the track.

The reason why a non-EV, like a Corolla, would not trash its brakes on the track after only 9 miles, is because the Corolla's brakes are the ONLY brakes it has. It does not have an EV engine that normally, off the track does virtually all of the braking.

It's just the car's characteristics. Not knowing that, is like complaining that you experienced brake fade and lots of body roll while driving your family minivan aggressively on the track. Well, yeah. It was optimized for something else.

Why do the brakes look rusty on the sides? Unusual for a new car.

I guess my question is why regeneration was off. Wouldn't you want to generate electricity so as to play more?

pos