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High Court Rules In Favor of Top Gear Over Tesla Remarks
esocid writes "In 2008, BBC's 'Top Gear' aired an episode featuring the Tesla Roadster. One of the show's car reviewers, Jeremy Clarkson, gave a less-than-flattering analysis of the vehicle, sparking a legal case with the automaker that doesn't seem to be working out in Tesla's favor. Now, it looks as though Tesla is losing this battle after a full-day hearing yesterday at the high court in London. 'In my judgment, the words complained of are wholly incapable of conveying any meaning at all to the effect that the claimant [Tesla] misled anyone,' said [Mr. Justice] Tugendhat. 'This is because there is a contrast between the style of driving and the nature of the track as compared with the conditions on a public road [...] are so great that no reasonable person could understand that the performance on the [Top Gear] track is capable of a direct comparison with a public road.' The hearing now continues on Tesla's claim that 'Top Gear' made five other false accusations about the Roadster. Tugendhat has postponed judgment on Tesla's malicious falsehood claim, and is expected to deliver a verdict in the coming weeks."
Don't seem to realise that Top Gear is a comedy show.
... high up in the food-chain at Telsa Motors should read this wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
So Jeremy said some unflattering things - take those and use them the make improvements, or at least perceived improvements.
Buick made a car, about 25 years ago that had buckets of power but handled like a cow - they still sold them out. How? General Motors appealed to the emotions and egos of would-be drivers, not their rational minds.
Tesla would do well to take a page from that book. Their car doesn't need to be perfect, just satisfy the ego-massage of would be owners.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought the problem was that the script was written, in which the car ran out of power, before the episode was actually shot. In other words, it was a prefabricated lie. No?
1. Receive half a billion dollars in federal grant money.
2. Spend it on expensive lawyers to defend your "brand" overseas in the UK despite having sold less than 2000 cars in the whole world since the company started.
3. ???
4. Er, profit? It will take off any minute now. I promise.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't know if Tesla submitted the vehicle to Top Gear themselves or if Top Gear sought one from an intermediary, but anyone building an automobile must expect that television shows that review automobiles will probably review theirs, in their own way, and will probably state exactly how they feel about it. Top Gear in particular won't hold anything back if they don't like a vehicle, and are known for being biased, usually in a humorous, way, but still biased.
If Tesla wants positive reviews, they need to build a car that gets those reviews from testers. For the most part Top Gear uses the types of tracks that are available to companies that build cars, so if they want to excel at a specific type of track they have the option to engineer with that in mind.
If not, there's always Motor Week...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The claim is that the car did not actually run out of power, and that Top Gear pretended it did. You would think telsa would have been smart enough to place some sort of monitoring system in said vehicle.
Koenigsegg put a super car on Top Gear. It was not good enough. There was not enough down force in the rear, the car lost control, and it crashed. Top Gear said, "This thing REALLY needs a spoiler."
Koenigsegg sued Top Gear. Just kidding, they put a spoiler on it and sent it back to Top Gear. They took it around the track again and it got an amazing time. No crashes.
No, I'm not saying that Top Gear can instantly diagnose car problems and their words should be heeded at all times. What I'm saying is that Koenigsegg made off with massive good PR by taking criticism from some of the most watched television personalities in the world, improved their car, and, showing no hard feelings, gave the car back to them. They didn't call mommy and daddy claiming their driver crashed their car. They didn't claim slander. They knew that they had the opportunity to show how dedicated they were to making an amazing car and took it.
Tesla, well... We breed them litigious here.
You are proof that the judge is wrong. Either that, or you are not a "reasonable person". Because he said that Top Gear did lie but noone reasonable would believe what they said as true...
The breaks technically didn't fail, the fuse for the breaks failed. But, personally, I wouldn't consider that to be a lie as I wouldn't give a damn why the brakes weren't functioning if they were stuck in one position or the other.
They did. That's why they're claiming outright fraud with respect to the "the car is dead" segment - according to the car's logs, the car never ran out of power.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The brakes would still work then, just not the power brakes. I have driven a car without power brakes, you would not want to use it on the track but it is not a braking failure. Just a power braking failure.
Top Gear used lies to tell the truth.
Tesla used the truth to tell lies.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
I'm convinced that Tesla is run by weasels.
They know they produce an inferior car to most well below their price points in terms of performance, but instead of being honest and working hard to improve the car or lowering the price, they sue those that call them out on it.
As far as I have seen, their strongest ad campaign has been through drag races against the Dodge Viper and the Porsche GT and those are very apples-to-oranges races. The Porsche and Viper are 180mph+ cars and are geared to do so; the Roadster is geared to do about 125mph.
Low gearing will allow many weak cars get to 60 quickly, and the motor's weak performance really shows in the quarter mile (12.7s@104mph <Viper is 12.9s@113mph first gen, 10.92@127mph current gen>).
Its no surprise that the rest of the car is lackluster as well, but a lot of their problems could be solved if they lowered their profit margin a bit (or raised the price) and created a product that stood on its own without the smoke and mirrors tactics.
Being thin-skinned is an understatement. In my opinion, they go out of their way to be liars and cheats and it seems they will do anything to hide that behavior.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
The question isn't whether Top Gear lied - they did. Top Gear showed the battery running down and the car coming to a stop, which never actually happened because Tesla checked the car's computer and showed that the battery was never run down. The only question is whether Top Gear should be financially liable for damaging Tesla's reputation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdOpKv9D7rA
Tugendhat - is he related to Tophamhatt? Together, they seem to have cornered the ground locomotion market. The barons are back!!!
shows how a good PC liberal can be simultaneously funny and scathing taking on Jeremy Clarkson.
I have a hard time believing that, or that there aren't other fairly practical solutions to that.
I live in Arizona. The summer peak power draw starts in the late morning and continues to dusk. It would be practical during these times to either put a timer on the charging circuit to restrict start time until later when power draw is lower, or to use a load controller to restrict when to charge, but giving the driver the possibility of restricting other power use at the residence in order to allow the charger to engage.
I have three air conditioners, two hot water heaters, and a slew of other electrical devices. I could easily restrict the hours the hot water heaters and the air conditioners operate while charging the car...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
For the same money you could actually go out and buy a lotus elise, not just a car that looks like one.
And in doing so end up with a car that is a FAR less interesting than the Tesla. Not like the Lotus is a practical vehicle either.
Reviews that lie about a product can be slander. Let's say you own a restaurant. I don't like you, so I buy a few cockroaches, smuggle them in, plant them in the meal I order, and then film myself "finding" them in my food, and post the results for millions of people to see.
That's not a negative review anymore. That's slander and fraud, and you have every right to sue me to make up for all the business you lose. You can't "swallow your pride and make improvements" on a problem that doesn't actually exist.
That's what Top Gear did. They faked serious problems to discourage people from buying the car. I like the show, but what they did was inexcusable.
It's a different system. I couldn't find a source for it, but it wasn't a matter of power braking failing, it resulted in the brake being inoperable on one of the wheels.
Our $$$ at risk with Tesla and another $0.5 Billion at risk with Fisker supporting offshore jobs in Finland.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
While I realize the cars Tesla are selling are supposed to be more high-end/performance cars, what the world really needs is a $20k electric car. $40,000 buys a LOT of dead dinos.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Top Gear: Series 12, Episode 7 is the one this happened on, in case anyone cares. I just went through the 2008 eps at epguides.com. Many seasons are on DVD and streaming from Netflix.
Have you seen Top Gear? It's not a car review show. They get fast cars, new cars, whatever, and race them around their track, let the Stig race them, then they do some silly challenges, like make tanks out of lorries. I've said this whenever these issues come up, if anyone is basing their car purchases off of watching Top Gear, they need their heads examined. They do present things in an informative manner, but it's an entertainment show. Take it all with a grain of salt, and remember it's entertainment.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
There's actually a python script out there for decoding the Roadster logs:
http://www.mybitbox.com/articles/tesla-roadster-log-parsing/
"In my judgment, the words complained of are wholly incapable of conveying any meaning at all."
Dear Tesla,
Your roadster is a pile of cunt.
What are you going to do about it, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I missed the episode: what did they fake?
Sorry kid, fiction is fiction no matter what is possible.
The battery was not flat so it was not flat.
It could've, might've, maybe is completely irrelevant when people pretend something is true but it is not.
Why do I even have to tell you this? Have bad examples in politics poisoned things so much that deliberate lies are seen as being normal and far fetched excuses are thought of in attempt to make it look as if the lie was an accident?
in that home-made electric car.
Newer ones being built have 100A, some even 200A. You can of course forget this on older homes, which often have only 60A. US homes also have 240V, which is usually used to run the water heater (if electric), the oven and the clothes dryer.
But think if half the homes in an area get electric cars. The grid itself in many places couldn't handle that load, even if individual homes could. As it is, some places get brown outs when everybody runs their A/C units at the same time.
It's a car show. Not an electric car production showcase. From their end, electric cars are the solution. How the electricity is produced, transported and stored is Somebody Else's Problem, and that's a perfectly fine position to take when you're a car show and you're reviewing a car.
I changed a couple of words, and now it's apparently different!
Didn't you notice them pushing the car in to be charged when it was not necessary to do so? That's what this whole thing is about!
Also why is this argument style of pretending to be too stupid to survive to a reading age becoming popular on this site? Are you all catching it off people that are acting stupid to get attention and be noticed more than other political canditates?
The problem is that folks get used to the level of stopping power normally provided by their brakes - and if that drops sharply (and unexpectedly) then they don't react instantly to that. That could be the difference between having a close call, and having a trip to the body shop (and/or morgue).
I've experienced brake servo failure (in a road car) in the past - fortunately, I had plenty of room and nobody got hurt - but things could quite easily have turned out very differently.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Look, just go read my first post above enough times until you work out that it says no more than it says instead of trying to hang extra meaning that doesn't exist on top of it.
Didn't work? Ok, I'll try again:
The difference between this incident and the Koenigsegg one is that one actually happened and the other was scripted. Pretty simple isn't it? Whether that makes it worth a legal penalty or not is up to the court and you should have noticed by now that I didn't actually write anything about that one way or the other.
Which of course means that I do not think the comparison the above poster used is valid and I'd go as far as saying it was misleading noise. That is why I posted.