For enthusiasts who tend to gravitate toward European brands, Dinan has become one of the go-to outfits for aftermarket performance. Founded in Cupertino, California in 1979 by Steve Dinan, over the years the company has grown to become an industry leader in tuned performance for BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and other luxury makes that hail from across the pond. The company got its start developing turbo kits for iconic Bimmers like the E30 3-Series and E24 6-Series before later expanding into areas like ECU tuning, aero components, and suspension hardware. Recent years have seen automakers like Volkswagen, Mini, and Toyota added to the roster of supported brands, and their latest offering now brings Tesla into the fold.

Dubbed the Hyper Kinetic HB003, Dinan’s new wheels for the Tesla Model 3 and Model S not only ratchet up the visual drama, they also offer distinct performance benefits to a platform where aftermarket modification options are currently pretty limited. “Integrating Tesla into the mix over the past year made a lot of sense to us,” says Dinan brand manager Nathan Fette. “The Tesla Model 3 and Model S make up a significant portion of the EVs that we’ve seen at Holley High Voltage, and a lot of folks who’ve made the switch to one of those vehicles have come from luxury brands like BMW and Audi, so there’s a lot of built-in recognition and trust. And since the Tesla electronics are locked down to a degree, powertrain tuning isn’t necessarily the top priority for these owners. The areas where these platforms can really benefit the most right now are in the suspension, chassis, and aesthetics, and those are aspects that we already specialize in.”

In the past, Dinan has partnered with BBS, Forgeline, and other premiere wheel manufacturers to develop new products. This time around they’ve teamed up with Halibrand, a company whose innovations in street performance and motorsport date back to the 1940s. “In a way, I think we envision these types of vehicles as the next era of muscle car performance,” says Holley Performance Wheel Product Manager Darrin Djernes. “While there’s not a lot of things you can do to Teslas at this point in time, wheels are one of the ways that you can easily change the look and make the car more personalized while also improving performance.”

Inspired by the styling of the wheels on the Model S Plaid prototype that Tesla took to the Nürburgring back in 2019, the Hyper Kinetic HB003 provides a more performance-focused vibe to the car right out of the box. “The offsets that were chosen kind of fill up the wheel well and flush things out a little bit so you don’t have those big fender gaps that you have with the factory wheels,” Djernes explains.

The Dinan wheel also features a flow formed manufacturing process that makes the wheels both stronger and lighter than their factory counterparts.

“Essentially you have a forged barrel from that flow forming process,” he tells us. “And that added strength allows us to use less material than would be required with a cast piece.” The result is a wheel that weighs about five pounds less than a factory Turbine wheel. That reduction of rotating mass not only improves braking and handling, it also minimizes any potential penalties in range due to changes in rolling resistance and aerodynamics. Despite their more aggressive offset, these wheels have been designed to provide plenty of clearance once they’re bolted on, and that means that owners won’t run the risk of the wheels rubbing against the fenders or suspension components – even on lowered vehicles.

Dinan and Halibrand engineers also had other platform-specific considerations to take into account during development of the Hyper Kinetic HB003. “Traditional ICE performance cars typically don’t have the low center of gravity that these EVs do, and they usually don’t weight as much,” Djernes notes. “Those are characteristics that we really needed to keep in mind during the design phase because these cars can apply a lot more load to the wheels. Achieving that higher load rating ultimately came down to running finite element analysis in Solidworks and other programs that can simulate those cornering loads. Those simulations allowed us to add or subtract material from the wheel design in strategic ways. The goal was to achieve a balance between the weight reduction benefits that we wanted and the strength we needed in order to hold those loads.”

Dinan has also eliminated the guesswork that wheel buyers would normally face by developing these new vehicles specifically for the Tesla Model 3 and Model S platforms – not only in terms of compatible offsets, but also the wheel diameters, width, and bolt patterns. And while each wheel comes with both Dinan and Halibrand center caps, the factory Tesla center caps will pop right on to these wheels, too.

The Hyper Kinetic HB003 are available with gloss silver or gloss anthracite finishes in 19 x 8.5-inch, 19 x 10-inch, 20 x 8.5-inch, and 20 x 10-inch sizes for 2017-and-newer Model 3s in offsets of 20mm, 30mm, and 39mm. The same offsets are also available for 2012-and-newer Models S in 20 x 8.5-inch, 20 x 10-inch, and 21 x 8.5-inch wheel sizes.

This wide variety of sizing options allows owners to choose whether to run a factory-style "square" setup with equally-sized wheels at each corner, or a wider set in the rear to further increase the car’s performance. “This also lets owners to choose whether they’d like to stick to the stock size and potentially use their factory tires, or go taller and wider, the latter of which would increase the contact patch for more grip,” says Djernes. “And that also increases the options you have for the types of tires that you can use.”

Fette tells us that these new wheels are just the beginning of a larger campaign to support Tesla platforms with a wide range of performance products. “We’re looking at this as the first piece of a larger cohesive package. We currently have suspension components in development for the Model 3, Model Y, and Model S, and we’re working on some other things as well. We like taking a holistic approach, where everything in the package is designed to work harmoniously with one another. And the wheels are a fundamental part of that.”