Tesla Model S P85D

Lore & Background

When the P85D first rolled onto the Forza Horizon grid, it was a statement. The franchise had always leaned on the visceral language of internal combustion—backfires, gear-shifter clacks, the smell of unburnt hydrocarbons—and dropping a car that produces none of that into the same livery as a Lamborghini or a Nissan GT-R felt like a deliberate provocation. The answer, of course, was that the provocation worked. Players who loaded up the P85D for the first time discovered that the 'quiet' car could actually out-accelerate many of the supercars in the same class, and that the silence made the speed feel almost illegal.

In the world of Horizon, the P85D sits in a unique cultural niche. It is the car the player picks when they want to show off not horsepower but engineering philosophy: that the future of performance is not about making the engine louder but about making the delivery of force more immediate and more efficient. Community builds around the P85D often lean into a clean, minimalist aesthetic—matte finishes, subtle aero kits, and a cockpit that looks more like a spacecraft than a showroom. It is the Tesla of the grid, and its fans treat it with the same mix of pride and quiet superiority that the real-world brand cultivates.

The P85D also became a symbol of how the Forza franchise evolves alongside the real automotive industry. By the time later Horizon titles arrived, electric and hybrid vehicles had become a normal part of the roster rather than a novelty, and the P85D's early inclusion helped normalize that shift. It proved to a generation of players that a car could be the most exciting thing in a garage without a single exhaust pipe.

In Their Own Story

The rain had just stopped over the coastal highway, and the asphalt still gleamed like black glass. You dropped the P85D into third gear—well, there is no third gear, just a seamless, endless pull—and the rear tires bit into the wet surface with a faint, almost polite hiss. No engine note. No revs building. Just a magnetic shove that pressed your spine into the seat and turned the world into a smeared watercolor of headlights and neon. The oncoming V8 roared past, a wall of sound and heat, and you barely felt it. You were already gone, already a hundred meters ahead, the only sound the soft whine of spinning rotors and the whisper of rain on a carbon-fiber roof. The P85D does not announce itself. It simply arrives first.

Reader's Guide

Full model: 2015 Tesla Model S P85D. Class: S (sedan bracket in the Horizon open-world titles). Stock snapshot: roughly 490 hp of combined electric output, a curb weight in the mid-4,000-lb range thanks to the large battery pack, and a handling rating that sits comfortably in the upper tier of its class—sharp turn-in, stable at speed, but not quite as twitchy as a dedicated track sedan.

Tuning levers. The biggest lever is the motor/efficiency upgrade path, which shaves a second or more off your 0-60 and extends your top-end speed. Because the P85D is already torque-rich, you gain more from reducing unsprung and overall weight than from raw power. Swap to lighter alloy wheels, a performance brake kit, and a weight-reduction package to claw back kilograms. Suspension travel and anti-roll bar settings matter a great deal: the stock setup is comfortable, but tightening the front and rear bars and lowering the ride height by a modest amount transforms the car from a grand tourer into something that actually wants to be driven hard. Tire choice is the single biggest handling multiplier—staggered or symmetric performance compounds will change how the car rotates in a corner. Differential tuning (locking or semi-locking) helps with traction out of slow, technical sections without sacrificing the already-excellent AWD stability on straights.

Trade-offs. Every kilogram you remove helps acceleration, but the P85D's battery pack is a fixed, heavy mass low in the chassis that actually aids stability. Over-tightening suspension on a heavy car can make it nervous over bumps, and too much aero downforce at low speed will drag you down in the corners where you need speed. The electric drivetrain also means you do not benefit from a traditional gear-ratio re-map; your 'gearing' is effectively fixed, so all your acceleration gains must come from power and weight.

Build philosophy: treat the P85D as a precision instrument—trim the fat, sharpen the edges, and let the instant torque do the talking.

Did You Know?

• The P85D's dual-motor layout means it has no traditional transmission; the 'gearing' is a single fixed ratio, so all acceleration tuning in Forza revolves around power and weight rather than gear ratios.
• In the real world, the P85D's 0-60 mph time of roughly 3.2 seconds was, at its 2015 launch, faster than several supercars that cost three to four times as much.
• Because the battery pack sits low in the floor, the P85D has an unusually low center of gravity for a sedan, which is one of the reasons it handles so well in the Horizon open-world environments despite its weight.
• The P85D was one of the first electric vehicles to be given full parity with combustion supercars in a major racing franchise, helping normalize EVs in the genre for a new generation of players.