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Top Gear Fights Back At Tesla
An anonymous reader writes "Top Gear's producer Andy Wilman responds to Tesla's lawsuit: 'We never said that the Tesla's true range is only 55 miles, as opposed to their own claim of 211, or that it had actually ran out of charge. In the film our actual words were: "We calculated that on our track it would run out after 55 miles."' Interesting points, and as far as I can remember also correct. But I'm assuming Tesla is going the get the PR they want on this regardless of any court rulings."
It's about time that Nikolai stands up for himself and goes after the use of some of his inventions. Poor guy - if he doesn't he's likely to end up broke, broken, and dead in a hotel on 34th Street in NYC.
Huh?
I disagree, I used to do some acting, and it could take an enormous amount of time to get a short segment filmed. It's not uncommon for a 5 minute piece to take an entire day to film, or at least several hours. And if you're inside or on a sound stage it's not that big of a deal, but if you're having to restrict yourself to the portions of the day that have light, you're in a much less predictable situation. Even the sun going behind the clouds can make shooting a cohesive scene impossible until it returns.
Most of the rest of it is going to be pretty easy to determine and should largely be settled by the time this goes to trial. If Tesla's employees gave them the estimate that will quickly be determined. And Tesla did eventually admit that the breaks had failed, at least in the way that a consumer would call broken.
A lot of the reporting seems to focus on claim it would only go 55 miles. As far as track cars go, that's pretty good. The Ford GT would only go about 60 before it would empty it's tank. A series earlier, they figured a Ferrari 599 only got 1.7 miles per gallon on the track.
Apart from reliability issues (both Tesla cars broke in various ways), the biggest flaw the cars had was that while the range was on par with regular track cars, when you ran out of fuel in the other cars, you took a few minutes to fill up and could go back out. The Tesla, on the other hand, was done for the day as it took something like 12 hours to recharge.
That was the damning conclusion of the Top Gear episode, and it was entirely accurate. Even if Tesla has improved the recharge time, it's still hours long. Tesla is just trying to distract from that fundamental fact - despite the fact it's marketed as a sports-car, it's not suited to track use. Even if people have no plans on taking it to the track, it's allure is tarnished by that fact.
I would not expect the normal consumer experience to mirror that of the drivers on the TG track. I also would not expect published petrol MPG figures to match the MPG TG gets on their track.
L.V.X., brother mouse
Rubbish. They've "reviewed" plenty of TDi cars over the year, and raced them too. The reality is most diesels are dull old man cars, whereas top gear concentrates on fast sport and supercars. And yes, they did take the piss out of BP's mess. You're a deluded fool if you think BP are behind Tesla's shit. The reality is their car is rubbish, and they tried to sell a rich boy's toy in the middle of a global recession. Had they built it from scratch and not used an old Lotus design, then tripled the price, they may have head some credibility. As it is, they're just a bunch of weenies crying because they have a failed product.
If fools like you thing Tesla got a bad "review", just wait until the court case is over and Clarkson does a real number on them. 350 million views are going to be pointing the finger at Telsa and laughing.
In Tesla's defense, it's not like actually driving the 55 miles would have taken that long. An hour, tops.
What?!? What are you talking about?
FTFA:
The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our heads, but from Tesla’s boffins in California.
Top Gear said that it would run out after 55 miles according to the way they were driving it.; which, Tesla gave them that figure.
So, you're defending Tesla's obfuscation and attempt to hide the truth?
The GP is right: they're suing to shut up the Top Gear people. But, it's just going to be the Streisand effect and it's really going to bite Tesla in the ass.
I'd like to point out that Tesla was founded by PayPal's founder, Elon Musk - I'll leave it at that.
This: "The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our heads, but from Teslaâ(TM)s boffins in California. They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles."
So they are suing the BBC over a claim they themselves fed to the Top Gear producers which was only relayed in the show.
Yeah, really, I can see how Top Gear acted in bad faith here. How dare they trust the information from the manufacturer!
If Tesla wants to be innovative then they damned well better appeal to a broader audience rather than calling Coca Cola champagne.
Tesla is like Segway. They create a luxury product because that makes money and they use the income to scale up and create more mainstream products, like Tesla's upcoming consumer grade sedan. They are the closest thing to an innovative car company the US has left and to my mind instead of bailing out the big players we should have taken the public share in them after the unions refused to take control and handed it over to Tesla and let someone actually doing something smart have a shot at turning the US auto industry around.
No it was not. They clearly said, that this would be the range interpolated from their driving test on their track. Anyone who has ever watched this show knows how they drive on their track and that this can't be a realistic range. I vaguely remember the episode and I believe the "on our track" part was even emphasized.
I don't know your mental capacity, but I am sure that most people got that right.
You might think a 60+ mile per gallon Kawasaki Ninja 250 with a 4.8 gallon fuel tank will have a range of over 200 miles but it seems if I drive around in circles in my driveway it only has a range of a few hundred feet.
Based on my analysis, the problem is that you need a bigger driveway. Clearly a larger driveway results in better gas mileage and should be included with any new vehicle purchase to allow for optimal MPG.
It is great to see the BBC not succumbing to pressure from fools.
I for one would not have been able to use a Tesla as a daily driver once in the last 15 years: between driving to work and travel during the day, 250 miles is not enough range. I would have been stuck someplace I could charge for the night at least half the time. And if anyone tells me I can fully charge an electric car on 120v US standard household current in 30 minutes I will call you a liar at this time in their development.
The cars stopped functioning normally. That means "broken." If you have an internal combustion engined car with 2 of 4 spark plugs fouled and not firing is your car still fine but just operating with reduced power? No. It is broken and needs to be fixed. Next question!
And the brakes were broken, end of story. How easy the fix was is irrelevant: the brakes broke. Done.
As for a previous comment including Motor Trend as an example of "honest" reporting- seriously? That comment alone makes everything else you say suspect by association, man.
If you watch the Top Gear segment remembering who is doing it- an entertainment show that loves fast cars that handle well, you will actually see that they LIKE the car but don't feel it (or any other pure electric) is ready for use by most of the motoring public.
Which is a very accurate assessment.
For the money, a Lotus (which the Tesla was based on) is a far more practical, useful and reliable vehicle and leaves plenty of money left for fuel and purchasing "carbon credits" for those who so desire.
And yes, it goes faster too.
Linux computers, watercooled, photography
Seeing as Topgear is a BBC production, the show itself doesn't come with sponsorship. The outdoor events, perhaps as they're not run by tax payer's money (see TV License).
I assume while it's on the track they're flooring it to autobahn-esque speeds. Standard ranges (the ones you'd find on a car sticker) don't usually assume you're going beyond the posted speed limits.
Wait, i remember them saying something along the lines it had to be pushed back into the garage due to a dead battery. Perhaps it was not 'real' but it still eluded to it being.
I know they do things for entertainment and there is a LOT of satire on the show, but i do hope they get their hands slapped for this as i have seen them do similar to others and some people actually take it seriously.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Stick your dumbass Yankee whining up your arse. One word for you: Halliburton.
No, in a single word, "everything." TG's track is pretty much worst-case scenario. You are never going to drive a car in anything resembling that fashion in real life. It's like the difference between saying "most people will get 4 hours out of their laptop battery," and then someone coming along and running 5 video cameras off it while playing Crysis over a 4G stick, with 5.1 speakers, and then going "Yeah, it'd last about 5 minutes." Their results are still accurate, but hardly fucking useful.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Nobody from Top Gear ever said that the battery went flat.
So Jeremy looking confusedly at the dashboard then cutting to a scene of crew members pushing the Tesla off the track was meant to imply what, exactly?
Without any other clues as to what actually happened, it is up to the viewer to infer that the batteries had run flat.
=Smidge=
A little disclaimer: I'm an environmentalist, I work for an international environmental organization, bicycle commuter, haven't owned a car in over 15 years, and spend my vacations volunteering at animal rescue facilities.
I've been reading a lot of "the Top Gear guys are petrolheads who only care about big petrol engines" and such comments. One thing a lot of people seem to be forgetting about this case is that, on the same episode where they tested the Tesla, they also tested the Honda Civic Electric Fuel Cell. And guess what? They had nothing but high praise for the Honda.
One may argue that they didn't push the Honda nearly as hard as they pushed the Tesla, but that is because they were holding each car to the candle of what each manufacturer claims. Honda claims their car is just a Honda Civic. Reliable user-friendly everyday transportation. So that's how it was tested it. Just like every other reliable user-friendly everyday transportation vehicle they test on the show. The Tesla on the other hand describes their car as a supercar. So they did the tests the same way they do all other supercars. On the track at high speeds. The Honda succeeded as reliable user-friendly everyday transportation. Yet the Tesla failed miserably as a supercar. That is all there is to it.
So no, this has nothing to do with Clarkson being a petrolhead. Yes, he is a petrohead and an ass. Vey funny, but an ass nevertheless. I highly disagree with most of his opinions about just about anything. But I think both tests were spot on.
...and one of the reasons they used their track, and track driving for this range estimate is that the Tesla is marketed as a... wait for it... sports car. Furthermore, the Tesla is based on a VERY popular car used for track days.
The verdict is that the Tesla is not very good at fulfilling its intended purpose and will give an owner who wants to play on a track less than an hours enjoyment, provided that he brings the car to the track on the back of a lorry and takes it out that way too.
So, if the car is driven hard, then range goes down. That's just normal. What makes it so bad for the Tesla is that topping up the tank takes the rest of the day.
Drive to track - 50 miles
Drive from track - 50 miles
That's almost half the Tesla's range at economic driving speeds.
That leaves maybe 25-30 miles of trackday fun.
Drive normally (and normal in a sports car is not te same as normal in a minivan) and range will probably not be 250 miles to begin with. Batteries also degrade pretty fast. All in all, the Tesla is probably great fun, looks great, but isn't even practical as a sports car.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfV2hw_2Xo
FWIW, I see no sign that Top Gear ever mentioned BP ("British Petroleum") in connection with its poisoning the Gulf of "Mexico" last year, but plenty of evidence of BP's ongoing sponsorship of that show.
Not sure how you managed that. The BBC is publicly funded, paid for by the TV license (mandatory for anyone owning a television in the UK). They do not charge a subscription, nor do they accept advertising including program sponsorship.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
I see no sign that Top Gear ever mentioned BP ("British Petroleum") in connection with its poisoning the Gulf of "Mexico" last year, but plenty of evidence of BP's ongoing sponsorship of that show.
Dumb fucking Yank. BP do NOT sponsor the TV show. NOBODY sponsors the TV show. It is fully funded by the British TV Licence payer and the money they make selling the programme around the world. BP sponsor a once a year 3 day long live event held at a car show at the Birmingham NEC.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
fucking semantics. what is the real difference between claiming that you calculated that on your track it would run out after 55 miles, and saying that it's range is only 55 miles?
I don't know - is that the same difference as claiming they claimed they calculated it, or that they claim Tesla themselves calculated it?
Fandroids hate facts.
Thanks for the original BS logic that because you failed to find Top Gear criticizing BP on Google that there was some conspiracy to protect the shareholders (a large proportion of whom are Americans). You are just a total fuckwit with some ridiculous trans-Atlantic chip on your shoulder. Now do yourself a favour and see if you can actually use Google to look up why BP is not, and has not been for a long time, British Petroleum. That's if you can remove your head from your enormous arse.
especially for Tesla.
Top Gear is a comedy show. It contains British Satire. They rip the pish out of stuff. This is a national sport in which the British have no equal (re: Gervais Golden Globes http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=1Ryr5EqURkQ).
And why not? It's funny!
Oh for the benefits of a classical education.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
If the battery would have gone dead after 55 miles, and they drove it 25, of course they stopped before the battery was dead -- the purpose was to demonstrate to the audience in a visceral and entertaining way what would happen when the battery went dead, which would have been after 55 miles of use. There is no need to actually drive it to those 55 miles unless you're trying to verify things, but that figure was given to them BY Tesla. Who are they to argue with the manufacturer when the manufacturer is handing them numbers like that?
Nope, you simply take their word that it's 55 miles -- especially if you drive it a bit and the battery seems to be draining charge at a rate consistent with going dead after 55 miles. So you drive a bit, but not the full 55 miles that would kill the batteries for 18 hours, and then you film as if you had driven the 55 miles and the battery really was completely drained. Yeah, you're not showing reality 1:1, but you're showing what really would happen, according TO TESLA, had they driven 55 miles on their track.
How is that deceptive?
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
You still didn't answer his question.
Here, I'll repeat it in case you forgot:
You are welcome on my lawn.
How is that deceptive?
Do they push every car off the track to demonstrate what happens when fuel runs out?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
In the UK you have a annual safety test for motor vehicles, called the MOT. No vacuum powered brakes when the car is supposed to have them, is a failure. No vacuum powered brakes and no way to fix them is a tow-away for the AA. If you get in an accident with a car that has broken vacuum powered brakes and you subsequently crash into something, you are liable. How much more clear would you like the term "broken" defined? It doesn't matter that in an emergency case you could still stop the car, by using excessive force on the pedal, it's technically, legally and for insurance purposes considered broken.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In Tesla's defense, it's not like actually driving the 55 miles would have taken that long. An hour, tops.
Too bad that of the two cars, one had an overheating motor and couldn't be tested at anywhere near full speed, and the other one was taken out of the race by Tesla because of a break problem.
Fandroids hate facts.
all electric vehicles? not ready for prime-time.
Sure they are, but the US infrastructure isn't ready for them. That's the point of starting with the luxury market.
it's not going to translate into a production vehicle for general use -- the market is abysmally small, and made up almost entirely of people living in dense urban areas. You know, the sorts of people that aren't as likely to own a car.
Your assertion is ignorant. The vast majority of the US market is multi-car homes where at least one car is used for local commuting much less than 250 miles a day. Electric cars fit perfectly for that application.
If you don't need a car for 18 hours a day, you probably don't need a car.
Yeah, because nobody commutes to and from work as 90% of their driving? Well, except fricking everyone!
This is a high end sports car. You are supposed to take it out on the track, accelerate and brake hard. Driving the car as it is designed to be driven will get you all of 50 miles or so on the battery. Driving the car as a typical commuter will get you over 200 miles on the battery.
Following with your laptop comparison, think of this as a big 'desktop replacement'. Running Crysis, with the quad core processor and memory at full speed, 17" monitor at full brightness, powering your big surround headphones, charging your phone and gameboy, you might only get half an hour of battery life. Using a spreadsheet with the processor and memory downclocked, three of the four cores gated off, monitor on low brightness, no headphones, and no USB devices, you will get several hours out of the battery. The system was designed for gaming, and using it as such will drain the battery very quickly. Using it for typical office work will get you several times the battery life.
Why buy the big heavy laptop if you're not going to play intensive games on it? Why buy the expensive sports car if you're not going to take it out on the track and have fun? The show was reporting that if you DO use it as intended, those are the consequences.
They don't have to -- with every other car, if it runs out of fuel, someone grabs a gallon canister and trots over, drops in enough fuel to get it off the track, and there you have it.
now, they may push it in to the warehouse regardless.. but running out of gas on the track is not a big issue for an IC car. An electric? Yes, you would need to push it.
There's a huge difference between running out of juice in an IC car and an electric. I've run out of gas before. Hell, I ran out of gas the first time in 1998 -- note the year, cell phones weren't huge. It was a 3 mile walk for me to my buddy's house, but after that -- after they all had their chuckles -- we just nabbed their car and the gas for his lawnmower, threw about a half gallon into my tank, problem solved. Had I been in an electric car, it would have needed to be towed.
It's a not-very-subtle distinction between the two that I think was well-illustrated by the scene in question. What actually happened to them is irrelevant -- they were demonstrating what actually would happen to you, and in THAT light, the whole shebang is accurate.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Now, I'm going to flip this on you a bit: You've been hurting from the gasoline prices lately, yes? Pretty much everybody is.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, according to wikipedia the battery pack for the Tesla model in question costs $36k and has a lifetime of 100k miles which is 36 cents/mile travelled to which you can add about 3 cents/mile in electricity costs (86kWh per full charge at 200 miles/charge and assume 7 cents/kWh). Current US petrol prices seem to be about $3.55 per US gallon so for a petrol car to have the same fuel costs as the Tesla it would need to have a fuel consumption worse than 9.1 miles per gallon...which is about comparable to a hummer.
So, unless the cost of petrol gets very significantly higher (by x3-4) or the cost of batteries drops considerably the fuel cost of an electric vehicle is significantly higher than a petrol driven one. I wish that were not the case but sadly, for now, it is.
Of the TV program or of different events outside the TV program?
Sorry. The TV program is not sponsored, and they have made fun of the BP disaster. You are usually pretty well-informed, but on this issue you need to either watch more Top Gear or shut up.
Running for your very life, and jamming it full throttle to the floor isn't sporting. It's racing, where you try to keep your vehicle in front of all the others.
Sporting is going down US1 between SF and LA and getting to Santa Barbara in 3.5hrs. Racing, and chancing becoming cliff decoration can be done in 2.5.
I find doing a video where you make a viewer presume you ran out of fuel when you didn't is disingenuous. Being red-faced hopping mad when you ran out at 57 and they told you 55 could be understood, after all, a 55mi range is rather small even for gas gulpers.
Drawing a conclusion before the test(s) have been done is also disingenuous, even if you are prepared to change the scores should you find out that reality flies in the face of your pre-conclusion.
Was it fair to Tesla? Not as written, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If they wanted to show the limited range Clarkson should have driven from London and tried the make it to Northern Scotland and let it run out of juice. The problem is he knows under normal driving conditions it'd do better than 200 miles and it might actually impress some people.
London to the north of Scotland? Dream on.
They could get from London to York by driving carefully. There's still a lot of England left before you even reach Scotland, Edinburgh's in the south of the country and York's only halfway to Edinburgh.
They could have demonstrated how fucking useless the car is for travelling from London to Scotland but that would've been a waste of their time, and they actually did use a comparable trip to demonstrate how pointlessly inconvenient another electric car was.
They also seem to be the only ones making the 55 mile range claim and they never bothered to actually test the range. I always considered the episode biased but I got upset hearing it was mostly scripted ahead of time. As I said in an earlier post it calls into question every review they have ever done.
Read the fucking article which addresses all of your concerns. Except for your stupidity - I can see why you've posted anonymously.
... portable, really?
Still hundreds of pounds.
If there was a portable system which could rapidly transfer a charge to a battery, that did not weigh as much as that battery, we'd be using it instead of the battery. Think about what you're saying. The Tesla's battery weighs 1,000 pounds. A portable system to transfer 1/10 of the battery pack's capacity would weigh... about 1/10 of the battery. 100 pounds. That's about the same as what, a gallon and a half of gas? Which weighs maybe 10 pounds?
There's also absolutely no other use for such a beast. Can of gas? Who doesn't have a can of gas. if you have a lawn, you have a lawn mower. If you have a lawn mower, YOU HAVE A CAN OF GAS.
Ohhh, you're an urbanite, no lawn mower, no can of gas? Sounds like a personal problem to me.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.