Elon Musk Celebrates the Production Rollout of the Tesla Model S Plaid

• Elon Musk presided over the rollout of the first Model S Plaid last night.

• The car has crazy performance: 0-60 in 1.99, quarter mile in 9.23 at 155, top speed of 200 mph.

• Sticker price is $129,990

“Basically our product plan is stolen from Space Balls,” said a moon-pie-grinning Elon Musk on stage at his Fremont car factory. “We’ve gone plaid!”

Spaceballs, of course, was the seminal Mel Brooks spoof on the Star Wars franchise that featured a speed beyond light that was called, in the movie, “plaid.” And just like the spaceship commanded by Rick Moranis’ character Dark Helmet, Tesla, commanded by Elon Musk, has made the leap beyond hyperspace directly to Plaid.

The Model S Plaid, that is. Musk took to a stage last night at his Fremont, Calif. factory, where Plaid production is now underway, to celebrate the first Plaid to roll off the Fremont assembly line. And it sounds like a car that even Dark Helmet would like.

With two torque-vectoring electric motors in the rear and one non-torque-vectoring motor in the front combining for 1,020 hp, the new Model S Plaid can go from 0-60 in a claimed 1.99 seconds, the fastest of any production car ever, Musk said. It’ll do the quarter mile in 9.23 seconds, and can hit a top speed of 200 mph.

Despite all that performance, Musk claimed the car has a range of 390 miles and can get 187 miles of charge in 15 minutes at a Tesla Supercharger.

While last night's ceremony was for the first production Model S Plaid to roll off the assembly line, the car had been announced in January.

There is already controversy around at least one of the Plaid's performance claims, the 0-60 time of 1.99 seconds. That figure is achieved with a "rollout" of one foot, meaning the electronic timers don't start until the car has already gone a foot down the track, enough to get it up to as much as six mph by some estimates. Numerous car magazines use a one-foot rollout in testing (cough - us - cough) and some are rumored to use a three-foot rollout. So rollouts are semi-established. In drag racing it’s called shallow staging. So 1.99 seconds makes as much sense as any testing claim.

Another potential conflict with reality was Musk's discussion of all the things you can do while your car drives you around, including watching movies. For the record, your car - even if it's a Model S Plaid - can't do that yet. Tesla's Autopilot is only a Level 2 driver assistance program, according to SAE.

But enough petty bickering. Musk also detailed numerous improvements that come with the Plaid (even though it was not the Plaid Plus, more on that in a minute).

"We've made huge improvements from the original car," Musk said.

For instance:

“Something we're really proud of is the new carbon-sleeved rotors for the motor,” he said. “This is the first time that there's - to the best of our knowledge - been a production electric motor that had a carbon overwrap rotor.”