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Tesla Plaid Drags Shelby Mustang GT500, Absolute Destruction Is the New Normal

Years have passed since EVs have proven their worth in various conditions. Yet it’s still highly entertaining to see one duke it out with some of the mightiest ICE representatives on the quarter-mile.
Tesla Plaid Drags Shelby Mustang GT500 on DRACS 14 photos
Photo: Drag Racing and Car Stuff / YouTube
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Just to show the world today is spinning much faster than yesterday, let’s recall a bit of history out of memory. Tesla Inc.’s Model S flagship all-electric “sedan” (technically a five-door liftback) has been around since the summer of 2012.

Now it’s almost a decade old, and that would make it easy to be considered obsolete if not for the constant upgrade process. As such, after various updates, we are now being sold a Plaid version with an all-wheel drive and more than 1,000 ponies. Something that was considered hypercar territory back in the days of the Bugatti Veyron.

That’s an incredible way to push the boundaries in less than a decade. Yet, people still call them “golf carts on steroids” for some reason. On the other hand, Ford’s Mustang Shelby GT500 has been around way longer, since the 1967 model year. Sure, it hasn’t lived without interruption, but it still had decades to achieve the best ICE improvements possible.

A contemporary GT500 now comes with a howling 5.2-liter supercharged Predator V8 that’s good for no less than 760 ponies. Still, it’s a few hundred short of a Plaid and only comes with RWD. It seems that one of the best muscle cars ever built, which has decades of progress behind it, has way less power than something that’s not even a decade old. That’s how fast the new-age automotive world moves!

Possibly to put everything into the proper perspective, there’s a traditional quarter-mile skirmish between a Tesla Model S Plaid and a stock 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. They’re both squeaky clean, and white, complete with neatly contrasting black wheels (and stripes for the Blue Oval). We are telling you all that because the new normal is absolute destruction. It quickly ensues, and the GT500 loses badly via an 11.4s ET versus Tesla’s 9.46s pass.

It does get a shot at redemption next, but it’s only going against a lesser Mustang sibling...

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About the author: Aurel Niculescu
Aurel Niculescu profile photo

Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution.
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