Tesla owner credits Model 3’s instant acceleration for helping to avoid a crash

A Tesla owner who almost got rear-ended credits his Model 3 Performance’s instant acceleration for helping avoid the crash caught on dashcam.

Electric vehicles benefit from the instant torque of electric motors.

If properly harnessed, this power can result in surprisingly quick bursts of acceleration at low speed.

Tesla is arguably the automaker who has best taken advantage of this feature of electric motors — making its electric vehicles some of the fastest accelerating production cars in the world.

While this is mostly seen as a selling point for fun and performance, it can be argued that it’s also a safety feature in some specific context.

Quan Nguyen, who owns a Tesla Model 3 Performance, which can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds, claims that his electric car’s instant acceleration helped him evade a rear-end collision in heavy traffic last week.

He wrote about the incident:

I have never appreciated having an instant torque as much as this time. If I had not paid attention to my rear view mirror during this peak traffic hour, it would have been a serious crash. This incident was already worth the money I spent to purchase a Tesla vehicle.

On the video, you can clearly see (at 0:04) that the car jumps forward just as the inattentive driver is about to hit the Tesla:

The driver did end up swerving away at the end, but it looks like the foot or so of space that the quick acceleration of the Model 3 and Nguyen’s quick reaction time might have made the difference.

It’s actually not the first time that Tesla’s instant acceleration might have helped avoid an accident caught on dashcam.

In 2016, a Tesla Model S P85D owner released a video of a near-miss rear-end crash avoided through a quick acceleration.

Electrek’s Take

I think Tesla’s insanely fast acceleration might be too much to handle for some people, and that might explain some of the Tesla crashes we saw in the past.

However, this shows that in the right hands, a quick acceleration can actually be a safety feature.

Having owned two Tesla performance vehicles at this point, I find it hard now when I don’t have this insane instant torque. It’s especially useful when people are driving aggressively on the highway and you are trying to make a lane change.

With a Tesla, you can basically teleport your car to where you want it to be. It’s so satisfying.