Meet the Dark Knight—a Brooding, Souped-up Tesla Model S

The US$104,990 three-motor 2023 Tesla Model S Plaid Edition is among the fastest cars in the world, able to reach 60 miles per hour in just two seconds. It puts out 1,020 horsepower and 1,050 pound-feet of torque.

The Plaid is so quick it leaves its drivers gasping for breath, but can the car be improved? Unplugged Performance, a tuning shop in Hawthorne, Calif., that launched in 2013, thinks it can. So was born the Dark Knight, a tweaked Model S-APEX Plaid that has been extensively reworked to better hug the pavement. It sells for approximately US$230,000, including the donor car. But the many options could make it costlier.

The powertrain stays the same, but the car gets a 19-piece carbon fibre wide body kit that allows it to wear big 21-inch, lightweight forged wheels. Airflow is improved with “bargeboard” bodywork in front of the front wheels, a technique adapted from Formula One. Also directing air is the company’s Autobahn front carbon-fibre diffuser. The car meets the world with a sinister satin-black finish, featuring more exposed carbon fibre.

The car’s centre of gravity is lowered via a kit, and there’s a three-way adjustable rear sway bar and a rear-mounted GT strut tower brace. Also part of the suspension build are a series of billet-aluminium adjustable control arms that cut weight, increase strength, and allow some fine adjustments. For those choosing optimum track performance, there are full-race coilover suspension choices available. The Dark Knight needs to stop, so there are carbon ceramic brakes all around, cooled via a ducting system.

The interior was designed in collaboration with von Holzhausen, a company created by Vicki von Holzhausen (married to Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen) that specialises in vegan leather products, including handbags. The tough-wearing interior fabric is in Serrano red and made from bamboo.

The Dark Knight interior uses vegan leather from von Holzhausen.
Unplugged Performance

Unplugged also makes over the other Teslas, including the S, 3, X, Y, and will also tweak the forthcoming Cybertruck. Brendan Sangerman, who directs marketing at Unplugged, says the Dark Knight is “the ultimate daily driver sports sedan.” Asked why the electric motors are left alone, he says, “You wouldn’t want it to be any faster than it is. Instead, we match the performance of the suspension and braking to the level of performance that the car already has.”

Sangerman emphasises that the Dark Knight is a bespoke product, and that the customer has a wide choice in the interior colours and fabrics. “We want customers to be very hands-on in the process,” he said. “If you tell us you like the interior shade in a specific Rolls-Royce, we can match it. Our parts catalog is pretty extensive.”

Unplugged is located close to the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne. Its first Model S build was shown at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas in 2014, and the company exhibited at the Tokyo Auto Salon in 2016. Unplugged began putting its vehicles to the test on race tracks, and it set some EV records. It also won the exhibition class at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in 2021.

There will always be a market for performance tuners, and Unplugged has found a niche market in making some of the world’s most exciting EVs be just that little bit more intoxicating.

Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.

The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.

In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.

That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.

The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.

As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.

The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.

The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.

“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.

While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.

“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”

That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.

While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”

Meet the Dark Knight—a Brooding, Souped-up Tesla Model S

Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires