SILENT REVOLUTION

Traditionally known for loud tastes and louder exhausts, the global tuning community is quickly realising the performance potential of electric conversions. Alex Grant asked some of the pioneers what excites them most about the technology.

- Alex Grant

Nicknamed “the AMG of Tesla”, Unplugged Performance was founded in 2013 by the team behind world-renowned custom house Bulletproof Automotive. Inspiration was literally on its doorstep; the company is headquartered next door to the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California, where the carmaker’s prototypes are designed and built.

“Tesla, as a platform, appealed to us because it was a new chapter in automotive history,” explains founder and president, Ben Schaffer. “We wanted to redefine what car enthusiast culture and the tuning world can be with electric cars as a new platform. It has evolved quite a lot for us in the past seven years but, in principle, we want to keep excitement and car culture alive well into the electric age.”

The company doesn’t alter the powertrains, instead optimising the rest of the car to make the most of that performance. It offers a range of aerodynamic body parts that either reduce drag to improve efficiency, or maximise the silhouette for downforce and grip. Components are available individually or as a full build, in conjunction with a growing range of suspension and brake upgrades, alloy wheels and weight reduction programmes to build on factory spec.

It’s an effective solution. A street-legal Model 3 with the Unplugged Performance Ascension R package, a similar concept to Porsche’s track-focused GT 911s, recently outpaced a McLaren F1 around Japan’s Tsukuba Circuit, without the benefit of the low-interference Track Mode V2 traction control update. Schaffer says the company’s one-make TeslaCorsa race series is designed to encourage other workshops to develop the platforms too.