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Elon Musk Lays Out His Evidence That NYT Tesla Test Drive Was Staged
mykepredko writes "Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk definitely isn't the best guy to try to pull a fast one on. The visionary entrepreneur set Twitter a titter when he claimed earlier this week that New York Times writer John Broder had fudged details about the Tesla Models S car's range in cold weather, resulting in what he termed a 'fake' article. Musk promised evidence, and now he has delivered, via the official Tesla blog."
Did John Broder think that in a car as sophisticated as the Tesla they wouldn't keep event the simplest of logs? My home router keeps more detail than it took to debunk this story. When I'm 30 miles from stranded my far less sophisticated Volt starts nagging and the Nav system offers "Plot a course to the nearest refueling point?" If you ignore this for half an hour, I assume you run out of gas. I'll never know.
Fake news enthusiasts should probably form a club so they can bounce ideas off one another and prevent embarrassingly weak lies from getting into print. It makes them all look... lame.
It gets old when we see so many on the far right wing scream about the MSM when in fact, they are under reporting things, not over reporting.
But now, you have a CAR reporter who cheated for some odd reason. It could be because he was on the take. Or it could be because he needed a story. Regardless, Border needs to go. He has no integrity.
The blog entry explains that the logging is not done on consumer vehicles without prior consent, but that this is always turned on for the press, after Tesla was scammed by Top Gear.
Tesla monitors cars remotely now to warn owners who are in danger of bricking the batteries by not keeping them charged. And while you might ask whether you can trust them not to monitor where you go if you buy a car from them, you should certainly expect them to use the capability if it's THEIR test car and you're writing a review of it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
What happened with Top Gear?
But, I bet that oil company envelope he got under the table will make his humiliation more palatable.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Why let facts get in the way of a good story?
Anyone who is surprised to see this from a newspaper shouldn't be. They aren't in the business of telling the news - they're in the business of selling papers and putting advertising in front of eyeballs.
Unfortunately.
not to worry, sir, its normal. please type 'ifconfig' and read back its contents for me and I'll check on its next-hop adjacency while you do that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They apparently fudged a test of the vehicle to make it seem like it went from having a decent charge to being completely dead within a very short timeframe. I think it was Clarkson driving, and he gave a very bad review of the car.
The blog entry explains that the logging is not done on consumer vehicles without prior consent,
And, as we've all learned from EULA's and ToS', that prior consent is always willfully and knowingly given, right? FWIW, the Tesla Corp. is not the group I'm concerned about having access to my driving data.
but that this is always turned on for the press, after Tesla was scammed by Top Gear.
Anyone who thinks the electric car maker was "scammed" by Top Gear has obviously never watched Top Gear - Jeremy hates those things, and he's not afraid to let the world know.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That was never an issue. The issue was that Broder did not charge it fully and then ran it down. IOW, the tow truck driver is simply confirming what everybody agrees on.
Pretty much the same thing. They implied that the car could break down inside its range and showed the staff pushing a functional car back to the garage.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
John Broder works for the New York Times. They don't lie. Who do you trust more, a legitimate journalist or a corporate CEO? Seriously, people.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Musk was smart -- the logs don't lie, and they don't jibe with what the reporter said. Now, this was in print, in the new York Times -- I'd be fascinated to have seen the same story reported with in-car cameras. I have a funny feeling it would turn out differently.
And for Top Gear to film a bunch of people pushing the Tesla they were test-driving -- implying that it had run out of go, when in fact it still had some juice left -- that's just rotten. Entertaining TV, but crummy journalism, and cheap.
print? there's no printer onboard.
instead, they use TELNET
TEsla's Logging NETwork
(its not secure, of course)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sorry but a tow truck company is not a credible source for anything. Additionally that story contradicts itself. The vehicle coasted on a freeway off-ramp but then become unmovable once stopped? ..did I miss a step somewhere?
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Top Gear had a pre-scripted show, where they decided in the end that the Tesla would run out of power, so they had a shot of their people pushing the car, even though it still had plenty of power in its batteries. Top Gear claimed it was OK doing this, because they were showing something that could happen, even though it didn't.
When you're citing a Gawker Media site as a reference, please forgive me if my opinion is not swayed.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Ten years ago it was the car companies, now it's the automotive press that seems determined to hasten its demise. Sad.
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
tow truck companies - the most ethical of people on the planet
Being that you actually have to turn this feature on yourself, I'd say that amounts to prior consent...
The Top Gear scam, as admitted by Top Gear's producers, was that they had already decided on the result AND written the script before receiving the vehicles. Yes, it's entertainment, yes I love the show too, and yes, Tesla's response wasn't the greatest (lawsuit subsequently thrown out for legal technicalities despite judge confirming intentional lies by Top Gear), but come on they were presenting a review as if it was a result of testing, not of scripting...
We assumed that the reporter would be fair and impartial, as has been our experience with The New York Times, an organization that prides itself on journalistic integrity.
AHAHAHAHAAAA that's a good one! They think they're better than everyone else and certainly haven't had any journalistic integrity regarding politics (being clearly biased for years now), so why would you expect it for a vehicle review?
In his own words in an article published last year, this is how Broder felt about electric cars before even seeing the Model S:
"Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”
Too bad about that, but at least you zinged him back real good. Orbital high-five good.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
RTFA, but basically they wrote a scripted event showing the car running out of energy prior to actually testing the car. Tesla found out about it when Top Gear left a copy of the script while the car was being tested.
Musk is not claiming that the car still had a charge. If you RTFS you'd see that the accusation is that the reporter purposely did not charge the car and that is why it ran out of electricity. This occurred after behavior was logged that appeared to indicate an attempt to drive the car in circles in a parking lot until it died. When that failed, it was minimally charged and driven until it died on the road. Assuming the Tesla data is accurate, it doesn't disagree with your claims from the tow company and there's no reason to think there's anything more to it than what Musk describes.
The vehicle coasted on a freeway off-ramp but then become unmovable once stopped? ..did I miss a step somewhere?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from reading the post above, I'm guessing you missed the part where he put the parking brake on?
Theory: Broder didn't realize the logging capabilities of the car, and when the Model S' software ui initially supported his internal baises he took liberties with the truth. By "documenting" his experience through Tesla support he attempted to falsely add credence to what would be a traffic generating, "anti-electric" review masked in the journalistic repute of the NYT.
Firstly, all of Broder's excessive winging about the cold weather (I think) was designed to subtly imply that the Model S doesn't work in the cold. You future buyer, will be cold and your car will break. This is why Musk had to address the cold weather link directly in the evidence blog posting.
Secondly. Broder likely couldn't have fathomed that every parameter in the car was being logged. Very specific details add credibility and character to a story. They make the author appear diligent, and one who gives great attention to detail. In the past such details were a "literary tool used to bend the story. Now thanks to data driven engineering words and truth in such matters should align more closely.
Lastly. For a man who may or may not have a bias against electric vehicles (cars at least), the observation that "the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating" at the outset of the author's journey might have set the tone of the coming review. With all the incessant calls to Tesla support to document all the "trouble", Broder had plenty of documentation to support his (what was IMHO a) journalistic malignment. This angle also had the added benefit of generating views for NYT - plus through the courtesy of Tesla arranging a tow - the money shot.
I hope NYT has the ethical chops to do what they must.
(comment posted first at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220302)
How would a tow truck driver know a Model S was out of charge? Most tow truck drivers can't even chew gum and drive at the same time.
Read the blog post, it takes 2 minutes. He did run out of charge, in fact he KNEW he was going to run out of charge because he took a 61 mile drive with a 32 mile reading on the charge indicator. During that drive he drove past several charging stations.
He also drove around in circles in a parking lot trying to make it run out of juice at one point.
The writer had an agenda, and he should have known they would log the data and prove him a liar. Musk was incensed by the Top Gear article and proclaimed that he would never let a journalist have a car without logging enabled.
Frankly the writer of the article should be fired, this evidence is very damning.
They weren't scammed by top gear, Tesla whined semantics about the nature of the breakdown, but the fact of the matter is that Tesla's own technician signed off on the brake being broken on the wheel.
Top Gear is a shameless proponent of everything that electric vehicles have to overcome in the marketplace. The devotion to 'performance' in the 1/4 mile, invidious comparison, conspicuous consumption and the glorification of the automobile as a status symbol (see #2) are Top Gear's raison d' etre. If Musk wanted a favorable review, he obviously forgot to guarantee hookers and booze at the end of the 'test drive.'
That's it in a nutshell (as we all know TV to be).
Is nothing to be proud of.
The electric car thing will never work until the power can be taken from the road. Like slot cars.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Having the brake default to "on" when the battery is dead is a safety engineering issue. Just like in a truck you need air pressure to take the brakes OFF, not to apply them. If the battery fails and the emergency brake is the only thing keeping a car parked on a hill, you want the car to stay where it is. Now I will agree that there is probably a need for some sort of "manual release" that can be used by towing companies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That Jalopnik article has since been updated, pointing out how both Musk and Broder could be correct.
UPDATE: A source who has seen the data logs explains how it's possible how Broder and Musk could both be truthful but sort of wrong. The high-voltage battery in the pack, allegedly, had enough power to move the car a much greater distance than needed to move the car onto a flatbed, maybe as far as five miles, but the 12V battery that powers the accessories and gets its juice from the high voltage battery shut down when Broder pulled into the service station.
When Broder decided to turn the car off, which was a mistake, the parking brake (operated by the 12V battery) was rendered unusable. If Broder was told not to turn the car off, it's his mistake. If Tesla told him to do it, or didn't inform him he shouldn't do it, then it's their mistake.
Jeremy hates those things, and he's not afraid to let the world know
Finally, a decent excuse for dishonesty and the blatant fiction Top Gear serves to their viewers every week. Why can't we have dishonest television in the States? Oh, wait...
According to TFA, Consumer Reports already did a review of the car.
Being that you actually have to turn this feature on yourself, I'd say that amounts to prior consent...
Yea, ok, I can buy that. Point conceded.
The Top Gear scam, as admitted by Top Gear's producers, was that they had already decided on the result AND written the script before receiving the vehicles. Yes, it's entertainment, yes I love the show too, and yes, Tesla's response wasn't the greatest (lawsuit subsequently thrown out for legal technicalities despite judge confirming intentional lies by Top Gear), but come on they were presenting a review as if it was a result of testing, not of scripting...
I still maintain that anyone who watches Top Gear regularly already knew it was a rigged game.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That's exactly right - until an impartial third party comes in, it's just a pissing match between two fools.
Semantics of a breakdown?! There was NO breakdown whatsoever--it was scripted! They pushed a car with a solid charge around!
Brake was not broken--fuse that supplied brake *assistance* failed. Brakes still worked. Tesla admitted extreme driving could cause the fuse failure, and has since redesigned it.
print? there's no printer onboard.
instead, they use TELNET
For you, Sir
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As usual Clarkson was being a twat pushing his agenda rather than being truthful.
If you watch a nationally, and internationally lauded show that is intended as entertainment and expect to be able to use the results as a review/in place of research, then the fault is yours, my friend. And that rule applies to any show, not just Top Gear.
It's entertainment, remember that.
This is not the first story that calls into question the NY Times accuracy/impartiality on tech related news stories.
Actually I watched that show, what they claimed was that at a track (where one might want to drive the roadster) while driving at track speeds you get very little range. Which is probably true since it is true of gas cars as well. The difference being the refueling time.
There is no doubt that they sensationalized the filming of it, as they do (this is top gear after all)... but the point Clarkson made was that you got a very short amount of track time out of a car that is really built for the track, followed by having to recharge rather than just gas up.
Why can't we have dishonest television in the States?
Apparently because our newspapers have a monopoly on that.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
My thoughts exactly. Elon Musk is just making sure we all know that they have computer logs confirming that their cars have limitations and should not be considered a direct replacement for a cheaper more consumer friendly ICE based automobile. Think of it as a more expensive golf cart.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Replying to a bit of a troll, but:
Consumer reports basically the same route.
Motor trend car of the year 2013
The brake isn't held on or off by electric power, because that would be illegal.
What happens is that a surprisingly small electric motor (about the size of an electric window motor) tensions up the perfectly ordinary mechanical handbrake mechanism through a screw jack. The friction of the screw is sufficient to stop the tension in the brake cables slackening it off.
This is pretty common on cars now, for some reason. I think they're fairly horrible to use and make hill starts difficult.
Yeah, Top Gear's open disdain for electric vehicles makes it hard to watch sometimes... along with their ever-present homophobia, misogyny, and racism.
strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
John Broder works for the New York Times. They don't lie.
While the NYT might have a well deserved reputation for quality reporting, it does not follow that employees of that organization never lie or that they never get the facts wrong. I've personally had a reporter from a regional paper do a hatchet job on me when I was a high school athlete based on some joking comments I made. If you think reporters (including those at the NYT) do not approach stories with biases you are being very naive.
Who do you trust more, a legitimate journalist or a corporate CEO?
False dilemma. I trust data. If the journalist can back up his reporting with data and a logical narrative then I will believe him. If he cannot then I will not. Right now we have quite a lot of data on the side of Tesla and rather little from the journalist aside from his narrative. Reporters are not to be trusted any more than anyone else and there are countless examples of reporters tinkering with the "facts" in pursuit of a good story. They provide information but you have to decide if the information is credible.
Not a day goes by that some one says "I did this" or "I did that" and the end result is "I didn't work". Yet going back to a nice log file in fact shows "you didn't do that" and "you actually did this, causing your issue". I'm not sure when people will learn that you cannot lie about what you did when everything you do is logged, but its awesome to point it out when they flat out do and you have the evidence.
> I still maintain that anyone who watches Top Gear regularly already knew it was a rigged game.
Ok, I guess I'm a bit naive then. I still watch Top Gear, which is very entertaining and funny, but when they seriously talk about having tested the vehicles, show them being driven around the test track, etc., I *still* feel like these are probably accurate reviews, despite my knowledge about the Tesla scam...
Disgraced NYT writers:
Science writer Jonah Lehrer - plagiarism.
Jayson Blair - plagiarism and fabrication of facts.
There are a few more but I'm at work right now. Whether the writers are staff or free-lancers it's irrelevant - the editors should be thorough in grilling their own writers for facts and accuracies. They're supposed to be the gate-keepers.
Why would Broder lie? Who knows. Maybe personal fame for "calling out" a big company, so he can be contracted to write for other organizations. If it was a positive review, it would come off as an ad, and people would forget about it.
People typically remember "investigative" journalism - hit pieces where someone has done wrong. Articles where things go right are often forgotten and delegated to Readers' Digest. Nobody wants to be known for writing "soft" pieces (also known as "fluff").
From TFA:
Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F.
At the point in time that he claims to have turned the temperature down, he in fact turned the temperature up to 74 F.
The charge time on his second stop was 47 mins, going from -5 miles (reserve power) to 209 miles of Ideal or 185 miles of EPA Rated Range, not 58 mins as stated in the graphic attached to his article. Had Broder not deliberately turned off the Supercharger at 47 mins and actually spent 58 mins Supercharging, it would have been virtually impossible to run out of energy for the remainder of his stated journey.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded? It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
I enjoy the above post where you assume that just because you drive 600 miles all the time everyone else must as well thus this car could never work for anyone.... well played.
NYT is the paper where if the reporters aren't making news up whole-cloth then they are probably just uncritically repeating government propaganda. I wonder what they would have to do to lose their reputation as the world's best daily? Even Judith Miller still works as a journalist. Apparently, nobody gives a damn.
You drive 600mi often? The car is not for you.
Millions of people drive less than 100km a day. The car's for them.
The pathetic complaint that the range is low is funny, because the vast majority of people never make use of the maximum range of their car. If you do, good for you! Just keep using a gas guzzler and shut up.
If you have to regularly drive 600 miles, you don't. That's 8-10 hours of driving though, with no breaks. You sure you wouldn't mind an hour layover or two?
The Post Office was doing great until someone made a plan for them switch to electric vehicles.
All of the sudden a bill was pushed through that they had to pre-fund their pensions for complete coverage 75 years in advance and now they're eliminating weekend delivery.
All I'm saying is, the folks at Tesla need to watch their backs.
When the baleful eyes of the oil barons fall on you, well... Sauron has nothing on them.
If it wasn't reviewed on Top Gear UK, it wasn't reviewed!
Wait, what is this "unbiased" you speak of?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
"Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in."
Wow. That's pretty damning right there.
Not everybody has your driving habits. You may not want to drive one. But they are perfectly fine for many people.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
So did Motor Trend... They named it their 2013 car of the year. As did Automobile Magazine.
Read the linked story. That was just one of the lies Musk alleges the journalist wrote. The reason the journalist got stranded was because he didn't charge the car enough to actually do the intended journey. That's like putting a gallon of gas into a car to drive 100 miles.
When the mud flies, it's a matter of determining who has the most reality on their side. If indeed the tesla folks have logs that prove that what was written was wrong, but a fat out lie, then maybe the tesla folks have ground for a lawsuit, dunno. However, I do know that in times like the ones that we live in, it's important to take into consideration the fact that the only thing stopping a new way of living, for us all, aka progress, is to lie about what's emerging. So that can only really mean that the folks at tesla have a good product that has their competitors freaking the fuck out.
just my .02
Normally when someone is this far off factually I'd tell them to RFA. But it appears you read it and failed to comprehend it.
Tesla never said you can't drive 65 or have your temperature at 74F. *Broder* - you know, the lying liar who lies - claimed that he had to do that. Musk simply provides evidence that his claims are false.
I agree that the range sucks, but, as the article clearly points out, the car not only made its recommended range, it did it after being driven at high speeds and charged significantly less than the recommended time. Broder had to drive the thing in circles to get it to run out of range!
Because... right now the vast majority of privately owned vehicles are not driven more then 200 miles a day. If you need a longer non-stop range you'd use/borrow/rent something else.. Or you can wait a few more years for battery tech to advance... eventually they'll do 600 miles nonstop, putting most ICE cars to shame.
There appears to be a reference to his driving at 81mph. Surely that's above the speed limit, so can we look forward to a cop knocking on his door for a fine as well?
Not to mention, they are usually extremely biased against American cars.
Mind you, there are a lot of not great things about American cars, but TGUK would try to convince you that they are fueled by eating babies alive, and could have their efficiency rated at babies-per-mile.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Perhaps Broder would like to test drive --- A ROCKET SHIP!!!
Maybe he would refrain from screwing around with the fuel tanks; and if not, problem solved.
Jeremy Clarkson is the real-life Eric Cartman. Entertaining as hell to watch, you want to like him in a way, but he's still a gigantic asshole and terrible person.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because your not regularly going to be driving for 3+ hours straight on a consistent basis? It's not ideal for a road trip car, but seems solid for what the vast majority of people do on a consistent basis.
The plots show a precipitous drop in charge level around the 400 mile mark that doesn't match the constant discharge slopes elsewhere. The only thing that happened at that time was the temperature increasing from 70F to 75F. It seems odd that at 35% charge the heaters would have that effect when nothing seemed to happen at other times with the temp above 74F.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Can't stand "reality TV" in any of its various guises. This just give me one more reason not to watch it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
It's faster than a Dodge Viper and gets the equivalent of about 100 miles to the gallon.
>Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded?
The Superchargers are 200 miles apart, but you can use regular chargers too. If you look at Tesla's blog post, there were chargers all over the place. You're not going to get stranded unless you're a dishonest reporter with a grudge against electric cars.
>It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Drive 3 hours (200 miles at 65 mph), stop for charge and lunch. Drive another 3 hours, stop for an hour break. Drive another 3 hours, and you're at your destination, so let it charge up overnight.
If you're a trucker with a pee bottle that doesn't want to stop for anything, I'm sure this isn't great. For normal people, an hour break every 3 hours of driving is fine.
The link you posted says the accessory battery could be out of juice while the engine battery still had a bit of charge. Dead batteries can lock the brake on normal cars.
But none of that matters, because the journalist intentionally ran the battery out - never fully recharging, and driving farther than the projected range. It was already past "0 miles left" when it finally gave out. It is irresponsible for him to let the charge run out, nevermind lying about it in a national paper.
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Clearly the car is intended for people that would not have a problem with three one-hour charging stops for a 600-mile trip. Clearly you are not one of those people, so I don't think we can answer your question.
Many people rarely take 600-mile trips. Of those that do, many would be fine with three one-hour charging stops. You can plan one or two stops around meals, for instance, to minimize the inconvenience. Those that need to make those trips and can't wait to charge will need to buy a different kind of car. No one is suggesting this type of electric car is appropriate for all purposes.
Many households with two working adults end up with two cars: a long-range large-capacity family vehicle and a smaller commuting vehicle. Electrics will dominate the latter use case before the former, for these reasons.
I know this is Slashdot but still, RTFA, it has all about Top Gear and everything else you might ask. Maybe Slashdot can ban posting without clicking on a link first?
When I see an unbiased third party do the test - like Consumer Reports or Motor Trend - then I'll take what has to be said seriously.
You may have made that comment sarcastically, but in case you didn't (and for those unfamiliar with the other tests):
From CR: Tesla Model S - The electric car that shatters every myth.
From Motor Trends: 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year: Tesla Model S.
While those two publications aren't perfect, they seem to have way more credibility than Broder.
You might not want to. However, some of us have a different lifestyle and may have different concerns. It would be an ideal car for people who spend most of their time in their car commuting and can charge it every night. Given the large reduction in fuel and pollution costs some might consider that worthwhile.
In my case I have 48 solar panels on top of my house and the ability to charge an electric vehicle for free. Yes, I will be getting an EV when costs of being at the bleeding edge of development are reduced.
Mod parent up, another spanner in the FUD machine's works.
It's a luxury car that does 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds while using no gas. I'm guessing most of thebuyers of these vehicles have other cars for long haul cross country trips. (At least that's what it looks like from down here, looking up....)
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
What happened with Top Gear?
Well, some boring guys with bad teeth that make a lot of overly-cute, smart-assed quips about shit they really don't know much about faked a Tesla test-drive.
You can drive 65 (and more) and turn the heat up. Just give it the hour charge. I've read that they have plans to get the charge time down to 30 minutes for the same range.
They had already decided that actual features of the car (poor range and heavy weight vs. the Lotus Elise on which it was based) made them not like it.
As usual they put together a dramatic sequence, Tesla fishtailing off the track, lotus handling well. Ending with the Tesla having dead batteries and requiring a long recharge.
That's no more dishonest then Consumer reports rating the 'vette as unsatisfactory because it has a small trunk and poor gas mileage. In both cases their assessment is based on fact and the argument is with their criteria.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Tesla also whined about Top Gear saying it would only get 55 miles per charge during their tests, but that number came from their OWN engineer when Top Gear asked them about it.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
You may not have read the article. It's possible, but it's turned off by default. Telsa says they won't turn it on without the owners written authorization. Except for the media - they turn on logging for the media.
Actually, he came pretty damn close to being able to drive 65-80MPH with high heat levels. What he didn't do was actually charge the damn thing like he is supposed to and like he said he did. The last charge was just to 28%, not the 70+% he said.
Like the car or not, but to LIE about the conditions you drove it at is just bad journalism. I hope the guy is fired. I would say the same thing if he put 4 gallons into a ICE Car and claimed the car didn't run as advertised.
Do you Gentoo!?
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded?
Correction: you can't charge the car to 25% and then drive off for more miles than the display shows as "available range" without having to worry about getting stranded. The guy was deliberately undercharging the car to intentionally get stranded. Because we need to sell more newspapers, dammit!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They are selling them faster than they can make them and it has received spectacular reviews from the automotive press--or at least any automotive press that hadn't already made up their minds that "electric cars suck". This is a car which is more than competitive within its segment (luxury sports sedan). It's just a matter of time until the technology becomes more affordable and trickles down into mass market segments.
It's absurd to claim that electric cars won't be practical until we have fusion reactors when they are clearly practical in some segments today.
You sound like the sad, pathetic curmudgeons who crap on any trans-formative new technology--I'm sure some jackass said the same things about "horseless carriages" at the time. Someday soon you will be just as wrong and just as irrelevant.
Musk will print your driving log, and you'll end up getting traffic tickets in the mail.
No.. no. I wont.
Years ago I adopted a foolproof way of avoiding speeding fines; and one that keeps me and everybody around me safer; I simply obey speed limits.
As your driving improves you might discover this secret too.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
There is a simple way to prove it. Have someone else who is acceptable to both NYT and Tesla motors repeat the trip with the following differences;
1. Video the whole trip.
2. Charge to full at each stop.
Compare the logs from both trips and report the results. Let the readers decide who is telling the truth. How about we have more reporters telling the facts and fewer commentators telling us how to think.
Because you aren't driving 200 or even 600 miles most days without a stop? If you do, then clearly this isn't a car for you.
It was an accurate review. The Tesla is a useless track day car. (unless your day is very short)
The only complaint Tesla could come up with is how they dramatized the out of power issue.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded?
What kind of car do you drive now where you are able to use more energy than you put in to it?
I know on /. it's good to hate corporations - but I do think it's Ok for a company to be upset when a customer - in this case a newspaper reporter - purposefully lies about how good or bad a product is in a review. Tesla isn't complaining about the guys poor driving - they're complaining b/c he purposely lied in his review about what he did and didn't do to make that product look bad.
Because the vast majority of people live less than 60 miles from work and waste $26,000 on gas every 10 years! Not to mention causing vast amounts of pollution and noise. This is not the end-all of electric cars, but an important step on the way to an affordable electric car for everyone. How can it NOT be beneficial to society, the economy, the country, and the environment to use less fuel for travel? That's why the fuck!
Like this? http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2012/11/video-tesla-model-s-drive---the-electric-car-that-shatters-every-myth.html
can fuel them with grass and they can procreate.
By the way:
Half an hour of supercharge gets you 150 miles. An hour would normally get you about 260 miles.
This is almost the exact same (bogus) argument used about the EV-1.
The same counter-argument applies... many people were happy because they wanted the car for town driving and it was well within their range.
There is a an update on that Jalopnik article that states "A source who has seen the data logs explains how it's possible how Broder and Musk could both be truthful but sort of wrong."
Evidently the parking brake runs off the 12V accessory system which shut down when the car was turned off at a service station. This locked the parking brake.
How can you read the blog but still not have comprehension? Oh, you must be suffering from confirmation bias. Please reread, paying attention to they reporters recharge cycles. If you only put in $4 of gas, you expect to drive 100miles? --hyperbole
You don't have to worry about getting stranded if you're not continually failing to charge your car and departing on 60 mile trips on a 30 mile charge. The point of pointing out the speed and the climate settings is that both of these activities (extra heating, extra speed) consume more power, and reduce range. By lying about these things, the author of the fake article was attempting to make the car look worse than it actually is.
So it is a lie to use Tesla's own estimations for how long the car could be driven in given conditions?
I'm surprised they didn't post GPS data of the actual route, especially the parking lot incident. They should also be able to get security camera footage. If this is true the journalist's career should be over, flush the fuck down the toilet!
Motor Trend named the Chevy Vega the car of the year in 1971. Car and Driver named the Renault Alliance as one of 1983's 10 best cars. In 1985 the Ford Merkur also made this list. You might enjoy this.
1. I can't feed my horseless carriage grass, it needs some special fuel that I can only get a special stations?
2. I can't breed my horseless carriage to make more horseless carriages.
3. It costs how much?!?!?
Why would anyone ever buy one of these things?!?
What happened with Top Gear?
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
However, what with TV production schedules, budgets etc. (and probably not wanting to really push the car all the way back to the hangar) they acted it out, rather than actually driving the car until it turned into a brick on wheels.
In other news, food 'prepared' on cookery shows is probably stone cold and dried to a husk by the time the guests taste it and obediently go 'yum'. The windows behind TV presenters on news shows are added in post-production. When someone uses a phone on TV, even in a documentary, there isn't actually someone on the other end. When you see an interview, unless its actually live, the interviewer has probably re-recorded his side of the conversation after the fact, and the editor has probably cut out a load of 'ums' and 'ers' from the guest's responses.
To summarise - if you see it on TV it has probably been staged somehow. The issue is whether the claims are honest.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Sorry, but my sense of logic asserts that:
PRE-SCRIPTED-RESULT != ACCURATE-REVIEW
Years ago I adopted a foolproof way of avoiding speeding fines; and one that keeps me and everybody around me safer; I simply obey speed limits.
+1 Agreed.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded? It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Because round trips for most people are far less than a single charge? Because highway driving at avg 60, that is around 10 hours of continuous driving to get 600 miles which most people will maybe do a handful of times in their lifetime? Because it's not a one size fit all vehicle?
Sorry but a tow truck company is not a credible source for anything.
And Musk is?
The tow truck company has no vested interest in the success or failure of Tesla.
Musk does. Pity his spurious lawsuits keep getting thrown out of court for some reason, hey?
They're not implying that the customer is using the car wrong, they're implying that the journalist lied about what he did with the car to make it break. If the journalist had operated the car in the manner he claimed to be operating it, it would not have run out of charge.
There's a big difference between saying "no, you have to do it this other way or you're stupid" and saying "Uh, he didn't actually do what he said he did".
One is a condescending nanny tsk tsking at people's driving habits, and the other is a wronged producer of equipment pointing out that a journalist lied about them, and showing proof.
The actions of the driver in this case were not just not optimal, they were fraudulent.
What scares me is how many people either didn't actually read the article and are now making wild claims about what Tesla was saying (much like the journalist made wild claims about what he himself actually did), or perhaps how many people actually did read the article, and completely failed at reading comprehension.
Being that the "journalist" lied about it, yes, it's a lie...
When fossil fuels run out you simply won't have a choice.
Although I'm not myself a fan of electric vehicles, I'm happy some companies are trying to develop the tech. They dump tons of $$$ for an a**hat to go and tarnish a name over their own self-biased agenda. The a**hat get's to drive a $100k car for free, just have some respect back and write an honest review with out any BS, or if you bash the hell out of it, make sure you got your facts straight. I can get the guy's impractical points for sure as I share them, but I do feel reading thru the review, seeing the response from Tesla that the guy was leaving them high and dry for suckers.
For now I will happily enjoy my gas guzzling twin turbo 350z with 1k cc injectors and high boost for the weekend, and the toyota for the daily until fossil fuels run out or become out of my price range; with the assurance that at least there will be viable alternatives thanks to companies like Tesla etc.
Oh and as far as big brother, please.... its part of the game. Do you guys not realize that a Nissan GTR is the same and tracks a whole ton of parameters with the black box? There's credible stories from the forums of folks & vendors souping up GTR's where there have been issues on tracks (drag strips/road courses) where Nissan, said hey idiot, you were driving like a bat out of hell at drag strip X, or road course Y, and no we will not repair your car under warranty as it was clearly being raced/"abused".
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
You wouldn't. Nor would I. This is an expensive toy for people with a lot of money (and perhaps not overmuch sense), it is not, and was never intended to be, practical transportation for the masses. If you happen to live someplace with abundant electricity and no gasoline or diesel and need something more than a golf cart, I believe Nissan will sell you something resembling a car that might satisfy your needs. It'll be expensive compared to a compact car. And probably idiosyncratic as well, but it might work out OK.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
That's gonna leave a mark.
Hopefully, a bootprint on the rear end of a near-future job seeker.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
I agree that the newspaper writer obviously set out to make them look bad.
It's just the sheer volume of data and the level of detail of the data Tesla had on the operation of the car was shocking.
We all want to trust news sources, but it's really just naivete to think that corporate interests don't trump journalistic integrity. They absolutely do. Not just in terms of the actual reporting, which I'll grant you is probably less common. It's far more likely the case in terms of what stories to cover; what stories to bookend on those to produce a particular spin or emotional response; and what advertising to juxtapose with all of that. But I don't think a journalist, even a NYT journalist, is above taking a massively overpaid and cushy job at an oil company a few years after an early exit from journalism in exchange for a one-time unfavorable review.
Journalists are humans and prone to the same failings as the rest of us. Even honest journalists are under the mantle of their news bureau, who in-turn is under the mantle of their parent company. Those parent companies drive the agenda, the story arc, the dialogue, and thusly drive the money back into their pockets. I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but money drives it all.
The NYT does not have a parent company that I'm aware of, but I'm sure the executives rub shoulders with the executives of other large companies and conglomerations (like auto industry and oil execs). That becomes a kind of club where everyone looks out for each other. No one wants to be ostracized because that means less power, influence, and access. We're talking about people with enough of those qualities to effectively end the career of anyone who isn't on-board and hide their hand in it.
OK so maybe that is a bit conspiratorial, but I'm willing to bet there's more than a grain of truth to it.
To answer your question, I don't trust a legitimate journalist any more or less than a corporate CEO. Everyone has an agenda. "Telling the truth" is likely an agenda that only exists in J-School, when you're too young to know that the world is a far darker place than you realized.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
your an idiot. I don't think i need to explain to everyone why.
self-worth from their belief that "electric cars suck".
Because round trips for most people are far less than a single charge?
So I should buy a $100,000 electric 'luxury' car for a five milte commute to work each day?
Because highway driving at avg 60, that is around 10 hours of continuous driving to get 600 miles which most people will maybe do a handful of times in their lifetime?
That's a drive to visit my girlfriend's parents, which we do several times a year, with a five minute stop for fuel along the way.
Because it's not a one size fit all vehicle?
For $100,000, most people expect a car that they can actually use without having to ask the manufacturer whether they can turn the heater on.
1) Logging is switched off in consumer vehicles- it is for testing only. Tesla switch it on for journalists after they were burned by a falsified Top Gear skit implying the car broke down when it didn't.
2) Basic user behaviour is that you pay attention to what the car tells you. The journalist stopped charging the car before it was fully charged for no reason. The car said it had 32 miles of range, and there were 60 miles left in the journey. He drove on past multiple charging stations, even when the car was giving him warnings. The car exceeded it's predicted range by 20 miles. He also drove the car around a car park in circles for a while hoping to run the battery down further.
This is nothing to do with "real world conditions". If I drive a petrol car around with no petrol in it, refusing to stop at petrol stations, and the car breaks down- that's not the car's fault.
To be fair, top gear does this ALL THE TIME. Its an entertainment program and they do so by panning some cars and lauding others (like DIY kits or 500k super cars). Any typical top gear viewer shouldn't consider a 'bad review' on the show as a buying decision.
Bye!
..dick!
It's funny that Tesla hasn't posted them, or given them to a third party for analysis and review, but has spent a lot of time doing this exhaustive analysis on their blog.
I love the idea of electric cars, I want them to be successful, but this whole things strikes me as a little too much noise and too little actual content. If Tesla thinks he lied make public info that people can look at and assess. He drove in circles? Because you say so? Okay... sure.
I also think some of the points he makes are asinine... driving 54 mph? Not turning the heat to 72f in the winter in an electric car with NO ambient heat source? Yeah, high, welcome to real world conditions. I don't know how hardy these norwegians are, but I don't like driving in 65f, or spending 80 hours driving to my target. Avg speeds in the northeast are about 65-75mph for most folks, if you aren't testing in those conditions you've already failed IMHO.
RT
Jalopnik reached out to the towing company to verify. The Tesla was DOA, along with several other recent developments. It's an interesting read, but it sounds like Elan Musk is full of shit and in full on spin mode.
http://jalopnik.com/towing-company-the-nyt-tesla-model-s-was-dead-when-it-196100064
That's not too far off the mark, though, is it ?
Actually the last TGUK show I saw that had US cars in it gave them pretty good reviews. Standard TG procedure, they each chose a muscle-car and drove it across the country a bit. A few gimmicks along the way (police trap in the middle of nowhere, etc.) but IIRC they gave all the cars the thumbs-up at the end of the program.
Physicists get Hadrons!
reviewed the car and verified the range, as has the EPA and the NY Times (a previous NY Times review got 300 miles). Motor Trend named it car of the year as did a number of other companies.
This wasn't, "hey you bought a car and you have to drive it a certain way or it wont work", this was a "does the car do what you say it does situation", and if you do something else with it and it doesn't work, you cant say it doesn't do what they said it does. Which is what this guy was saying, He was saying that the car did'nt live up to what tesla said it could do, and it turns out he did a bunch of other things to make it fail so he could push his agenda of it not doing what the company says it can do.
> Drive 3 hours (200 miles at 65 mph), stop for charge and lunch. Drive another 3 hours, stop for an hour break. Drive another 3 hours, and you're at your destination, so let it charge up overnight.
At 80 mph (average speed in the south) 200 miles is 2.5 hours, so every 2.5 hours you have to stop for an hour.
To put this in perspective, in a typical 12 hour driving day, you spend about 90 minutes fueling, bathroom, and getting food. So it is capable of being driven 840 miles in that 12 hour day. This number is based on actual experience, I use it for planning my car trips.
With an electric car, even with Super Chargers that same 12 hour day, you should spend almost a third of it watching the car charging, and get around 685 miles.
It gives even worse if you push the maximum driving time, 12 hours is my limit. I know people that routinely do 18 hours. And it doesn't factor in the distance per a charge at 80mph which will likely be less.
A $100,000 car is "mass market"?
They were originally targeting a $50k price tag with the S but rapidly gave up on that idea. Cool car though.
-l
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What happened with Top Gear?
I was a fan of Top Gear but stopped watching it after the Tesla episode. It was pretty pathetic. Basically he ran it flat out to show he could burn through the battery in 15 or 20 minutes. It's pathetic because in another episode he showed how a Mercedes McLaren flat out would run dry in less than 20 minutes. You'll also burn through a set of tires proving they aren't meant to be run that way in everyday driving. Clarkson has a personal dislike of electric and diesel cars so he wanted to make the Tesla look bad. Considering most other electric cars have a 50 to 100 mile range the Tesla is impressive.
Then shut up.
- Here is a bottle of ethanol and here is an ethanol burner.
- Burn 1/50th of the contents of the bottle and notice that it takes 4 hours to burn through.
- Now you have two choices:
1) Burn the rest of the ethanol and sit there avidly timing it to see how long it takes
2) Multiply 50 x 4 => 200 in your head, taking less than a second, and go watch the game.
Top Gear chose option (2). You would appear to have chosen option (1). Personally I'm with TG on this one, I have better things to do with my time.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Of course Elon has proof to back up his claims. He is the guy behind that car after all. And if his car used pink unicorns, he'd have proof of their existence.
When I see an unbiased third party do the test - like Consumer Reports or Motor Trend - then I'll take what has to be said seriously. Until then, I'll treat everything with skepticism.
Considering how easy it is to monitor vehicle state, functions and location with a few added gadgets, all of which we have been hearing are being placed in some rental cars, beginning a few years ago, never mind this car is built around the corner from Silicon Valley Broder assumed they wouldn't be watching. Here's an education for future journos, keep it honest and keep your job.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Top Gear will do whatever gets them the most laughs. If you believe everything you see on that show, then you believe that each of the presenters has died several times. Nobody expects a serious review from these guys.
What scares me about this is:
How much is Tesla implying that the customer is using the car wrong?
Are we really looking at Terms of Service about how you are going to use an automobile you purchased? I know this was a media test drive, but what's to stop Telsa from using their diagnostics to throw you under the bus for speeding if you complain about running out of juice in a remote location "if the customer had been operating the car properly it wouldn't have run out of charge."
Are Tesla owners getting a nanny that will monitor their driving habits and tsk tsk at them when less than optimal driving results and range happen?
I understand the car is very complex, but in the real world stuff happens and you can't assume the conditions or even the actions of the driver are going to be optimal.
Okay, here's the rub. The car can keep logs of everything. You can turn it off. And apparently, you like to break laws while driving and putting everyone at risk, so you probably would turn it off.
Other then that, they should throw you under the bus if you think it's okay to drive like an idiot. You threaten everyone when you drive like that. I know, laws don't apply to you because you think your god or something stupid like that, but guess what? They do. Start obeying the traffic laws.
Be seeing you...
So I should buy a $100,000 electric 'luxury' car for a five milte commute to work each day?
No one is telling you to.
That's a drive to visit my girlfriend's parents, which we do several times a year, with a five minute stop for fuel along the way.
So basically the vast majority of the year you'll never hit the mileage range limit. Gotcha.
For $100,000, most people expect a car that they can actually use without having to ask the manufacturer whether they can turn the heater on.
They won't. Most people don't do 300 mile trips on a daily basis.
I don't know about "this car" since it's so dang expensive. However, *an* electric would be sweet!
-l
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you are putting words in the mouth of the writer. the blog never implied those things. it was directly refuting claims made by the reporter: he said did X, when he really did Y.
reading comprehension: you has none.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Wow. 1971. It's almost like there were different people working there 40 years and it was a different time in automobile advancements and technology. Seriously, is that the best trolling you can do? Digging up old articles from 25-40 years ago to reflect on how a magazine might be run today?
So it was broken, then. Right. Gotcha.
If you're driving a car and it has power-assisted breaking you are naturally expecting the car to behave in a given way. If you get into a situation where the brakes do not react as strongly as you expect, that is potentially lethal - not just to you but to the poor pedestrian you didn't see.
No excuses. No "semantics" here. It was broken. End of.
What I'm reading from your post is that Top Gear identified a crucial weakness in the Tesla braking system, and Tesla has since fixed it. Good for Tesla, but to claim the original fault was specious is plain wrong.
Physicists get Hadrons!
No. All they did was save themselves time.
Tesla's engineers told them the estimated range they'd get on the Top Gear track.
Top Gear drove a few laps, but did not drive to the maximum range they were quoted.
They then ACTED as if they drove that distance, and proceeded to show viewers what would have happened had they driven the distance Tesla told them the car would go. There was no deception, all they did was act like they drove it until it died so they could then show the problems with the car. Namely, the PRIMARY problem, that running out of fuel isn't just a hike with a jerrycan to fix.
What, you think only going a few laps around the track is bad? That's really not different from any other supercar. That's not the bad side to the Tesla. The bad side is that if you drain the battery, you're pretty much fucked. Call the tow truck, you're not driving again any time soon.
Top Gear has never shown every single lap a car would drive before it went dry, because it's TV and that would be boring to watch. They never claimed the range would be any less than what Tesla's engineers calculated it would be -- yeah, they actually simply *assumed Tesla was right* about the range.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I've always wondered why Jeremy Clarkson (or any of the Top Gear UK people) have any sort of authority at all. It seems to me all Jeremy has done is some cheeky car reviews over the years while he gained weight around his belly and lost hair off his head. Now, who want's to take auto advice from some middle aged English guy?
The supercharge thing is fine on the surface. Park and go get something to eat, come back in an hour. The problem is the graphics I see of them show about 5 chargers. I didn't see any pictures of actual supercharge sites so I could be wrong on the 5, but still, it's a pretty limited number. That means on a massively heavily traveled corridor like I95 a whopping 5 cars an hour can fully charge. I understand that most people charge at night and will seldom need a supercharge. But considering the sheer volume of traffic I have to wonder if you will end up spending 3 hours waiting to supercharge, and 1 actually doing it.
And do you remember what the OTHER cars were like in 1971? The Vega well could have been the best of the lot.
Wrote the script before receiving the cars. All I need to know.
If you don't put enough fuel in your car, it'll stop going, petrol or electrons. If you need to go 60 miles and you only put 30 worth of fuel, you're going to have a bad day. Did you even read the article?
The plot of estimated range vs. miles traveled is particularly interesting... if the range estimation was accurate, the slope while driving should be -1. However, it's pretty consistently around -1.3, with the exception of the section between about 400 and 475 miles (note that the x and y axis scales aren't the same, so you can't just eyeball the line or measure the pixels). I.e., an estimate of 130 miles only gets you about 100 miles of actual driving. Which Broder also noted in his original article: "At 68 miles since recharging, the range had dropped by 85 miles." Why doesn't the estimate adapt to driving conditions and style? In my gas-powered car, the estimated range remaining does seem to take into account the current running average mpg.
In any case, I'm not really interested in what happens after the Milford supercharge (at ~320 miles): he should've charged to completion there, or charged longer at Norwich. The Delaware to Milford supercharge is the portion that's interesting to me. Musk claims that Broder drove the car hard during that section, but I'm not seeing it in the logs. He was going about 60mph during most of that (Musk quibbles that Broder said he set the cruise at 54mph--whatever; neither 54 or 60 are driving the car hard). The slope of the estimated range vs. actual mileage for that section is about -1.25. The distance between the Delaware and Milford stations is 200 (or 202) miles. The estimated range after a 90% charge at Delaware is 242 miles. So factoring in the inaccuracy, an estimated 242 miles translates to an actual 193 miles--not quite enough to reach the destination. And that's while driving below the speed limit.
They are positive about some US cars, though. They drove a Focus through a mall while being chased by a baddy in a corvette IIRC. Every time they get on classic muscle cars, right after decrying how almost good but kinda terrible they are, they always mention that despite the car really not being technically great it's still a car you smile while driving.
They really hadn't treated Tesla unfairly, at all.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
So you're saying they've made this mistake before, admitted it, so it's unlikely to happen again? I couldn't agree more.
Do not attempt to lie to Tony Stark. He will come and have a chat with you.
You have 80k$ of disposable cash sitting around?
Millions of people don't, this car is not for them.
Try reading what I wrote!
Then, on the NYTimes' original response to the controversy (at http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/ ) Broder writes:
I drove more than 100 miles below 55 on cruise control to conserve power.Yet the graphic presented by Elon Musk ( http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/speeddistance0.jpg ) of speed vs. distance clearly shows that Broder's statement is false, unless Elon Musk is presenting false data logs. Of course, one possible explanation could be an uncalibrated speedometer, which showed Broder the numbers he wrote in his article. But considering the digital-ness of this fancy-schmancy electric car, I expect that the display is a digital display of speed and that the console speed displayed actually matches the speeds logged and graphed by Musk.
.
Now little things lke "I but the climate control to low at 182 miles" when he really did it at 212 miles (approximately eyeballed by me) which would have seemed like picking at details and mistakes takes on a sadder dirtier note of trying to spin the story the way he wanted it to turn out.
:>(
How sad for the nytimes if Elon Musk's allegations turn out to be true and Broder lied.
After Musk's initial complaint, the Times doubled-down and defended their report as accurate, and then Musk presented this quantitative evidence. Someone at the Times is going to be very pissed with Mr. Broder if Tesla's data stand up to scrutiny.
Just as anyone watching Uri Geller perform shouldn't consider him to have psychic powers. But shoulds and shouldn'ts are the way things work in practice.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Well, I don't think the concern is that he was doing it in a non-optimal way. I think the concern was that he was doing things to fail, and then reported them as if they were Tesla problems, which they weren't.
If you bought a Tesla and ran out of juice because you're speeding and there's no charge stations, you have no right to complain to Tesla (outside of needing more stations). That's like complaining to Toyota that you ran out of gas. Tesla is hoping that the infrastructure will eventually get to a point where the concept of running out of juice because you were speeding is just as ridiculous as running out of gas because you were speeding. They aren't there yet though, so you have to plan accordingly.
They never mention that they are fakes during the shows. The reviews are presented as reviews. Entertainment is not an excuse for outright lying.
"he KNEW he was going to run out of charge because he took a 61 mile drive with a 32 mile reading on the charge indicator " -- this really kills any credibility of the nyt author and is clearly evident on the NYT graphic accompanying the original article
that he drove around in circles near a charger, trying to kill the battery is a fair part of the test IMO.
i don't know if he had an agenda, but it was definitely at least partly his decision (whether due to malice, stupidity or laziness) to start a 61 mile drive with 32 miles of indicated range
Aren't, dammit. Aren't the way things work in practice! I'll get me coat...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They are stopped by the fact that only the cars loaned to the media for reviews contain the logging hardware/software. Not only that, but the media organization (in this case the NYT) has to agree to the fact that the data is logged in order for Tesla to loan a vehicle for review. No agreement, no vehicle for review.
I think Broder and the NYT didn't realize how detailed the logging would be nor that it might come back to bite them. They've been caught in a lie. It's best for them to admit it and then to fire Broder. His credibility is shot, as is that of the NYT.
There was also a element of strawman in Tesla's complaints about the Top Gear review. Watch the video and you will see that Clarkson does not say that the car ran its batteries flat. Top Gear said that, driving on the track, they way they were doing it *would* run the batteries down in 55 miles. A claim that Tesla did not dispute. There was a real problem with the brakes on one of the cars -- the brakes did not fail completely, but again, Tesla did not dispute the partial failure.
Let's not forget that in the libel-lawsuit capital of the world, Tesla's libel suit was switftly dismissed.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Of course, I can't prove it until someone with the means to do so conducts a study on the reporter, but it's fairly obvious what's happening here. I see absolutely no other reason to write such a scathing and skewed review of a great car like the Model S. Not to mention that, according to TFA, the reporter tried to run the charge down when the car outperformed what the meters said it would do. I see now way that a big check with a fair deal of 0's was not involved in this.
Well, as for me, I have a $10,000 Honda Civic, which I drive about 8,000 miles a year. At 30 mpg, that comes to a little over $1000 a year in gas, assuming $4 per gallon. I'll probably replace the Honda when it is around 10 years old, which makes the total cost (excluding maintenance, which is likely to be way cheaper than on the Tesla), on the order of $20,000. I can therefore do this for about 40 years before I recoup just the purchase price of an 85kw Tesla Model S. Gas would have to go up to more than $260 a gallon to make the Tesla break even on cost. And I accomplish more environmentally by living close enough to my workplace to commute by bicycle.
The Tesla is an expensive toy for enviro-posers.
You drive 600mi often? The car is not for you.
Millions of people drive less than 100km a day. The car's for them.
The pathetic complaint that the range is low is funny, because the vast majority of people never make use of the maximum range of their car. If you do, good for you! Just keep using a gas guzzler and shut up.
that's right -- if you think about the cars out there, most people drive less than 50 miles in a day to get to and from work, maybe around town to shop and run errands. One of the big wins for electric cars is that when they are stuck in stop and go traffic on the highway, they don't waste power. A gas car will have to keep idling even when its not moving and that kills your MPG. This is the same reason many newer cars have a fast-start and auto-shutdown of their gas engines even - to save fuel.
If even just 1/3 of the people who use short range driving would switch to a less-emission / better MPG car, it would do a lot of offset the smaller number of people who have gas guzzling long range trips to make. We don't have to eliminate ALL the cars, but making the bulk of use more efficient will save lots of money.
Tesla did not sue Top Gear for brake fuse failure.
Tesla sued Top Gear because they lied (affirmed by the judge) and staged the whole running out of battery scenario, HAVING SCRIPTED THIS IN ADVANCE.
What scares me about this is:
How much is Tesla implying that the customer is using the car wrong?
In this case? That is exactly what is happening, and at the moment, Tesla seems to be the more credible.
Are we really looking at Terms of Service about how you are going to use an automobile you purchased?
Ever read your car's warranty? (Of course not, nobody does.) If you did, you'd recognize that there are all sorts of limitations on things you can do (driving off-road in a sedan, towing a trailer with your Toyota Corolla, etc.) in there.
I know this was a media test drive, but what's to stop Telsa from using their diagnostics to throw you under the bus for speeding if you complain about running out of juice in a remote location "if the customer had been operating the car properly it wouldn't have run out of charge."
From what I understand, the media loaners have special diagnostics installed, which consumer models don't have. That said, if I am going to abuse the hardware I've purchased, automotive or otherwise, I don't go whining to the manufacturer when I break it.
Are Tesla owners getting a nanny that will monitor their driving habits and tsk tsk at them when less than optimal driving results and range happen?
Again, supposedly, owners don't; media loaners do.
I understand the car is very complex, but in the real world stuff happens and you can't assume the conditions or even the actions of the driver are going to be optimal.
And in the real world, customers do some strange stuff with equipment, and then show up and indignantly demand recompense for their own irresponsibility.
I pretty much already covered the answer to this, it's because he's entertaining as hell to watch. If he were only writing reviews he probably would have faded into obscurity a decade or two ago.
James May actually does have the knowledge to be a technical authority, but unfortunately he's the most hardcore traditionalist not only out of the Top Gear crew, but out of any automotive journalist not writing for a classics mag.
If I had to pick one as the best journalist it would be Richard Hammond. He's by far the most open-minded and least biased of the three, decently entertaining to watch and writes good reviews too.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Kinda dumb. They weren't reviewing its range, just the car, and running out of power is something you can realistically expect. Even if you don't drain it down to the point you have to push it into the garage, it's STILL a long wait until you can drive it again.
What part of that is not true? Should they NOT have shown the primary downside to the Tesla and other electrics? Would ignoring the most serious flaw of an item be the more honest way of reviewing it?
Top Gear's a entertainment primarily and review secondarily, but jesus christ. You're tilting at them for.. actually touching on the negative points of something they were reviewing. Good god. That's what is supposed to happen.
They didn't say the Tesla's range was any less than what Tesla's engineers told them it would be, they didn't say it would take 3 days to charge, they didn't say you have to charge it with the soul of a murdered street urchin.
They just pretended they drove 2 or 3 laps that we didn't see, and proceeded from that point as if those laps had been driven.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
But what Musk does not describe is how the test vehicles are picked to begin with. It wouldn't be the first time a manufacturer rigged a test for a favorable review. I remember quite a few years ago some video card manufacturers got caught rigging their chipsets to detect when they were being tested and report better numbers. Just the simple fact that he states they rig the cars they give to reporters is enough to question the whole test from the start in my eyes.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Replying to a bit of a troll, but: .. .
How insulting of you. How was the parent a "Troll"? He made a simple statement and considering the PR (aka lies) by companies these days, a valid point.
Troll my fucking ass.
What is it with you people? You don't like what someone says and you label them a "Troll"?
I can't take someone like you seriously.
There is no doubt that they sensationalized the filming of it
No, they fictionalized it. It was staged. As in it didn't actually happen.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A $100,000 car is "mass market"?
They were originally targeting a $50k price tag with the S but rapidly gave up on that idea. Cool car though.
-l
And, after the tax break, the low end one is about $50k, only the early-adopter limited edition model is $100k.
Why is this insightful?
If you don't operate a Chevy properly, it'll run out of gas at a faster rate than the EPA estimate.
Proper operation includes filling the gas tank with the proper octane gasoline, making sure you don't leave your foot on the gas pedal while the car is in neutral, and not leaving the AC on "sub zero" or "scorching".
This is all stuff that will reduce your actual MPG far below EPA estimates. Are you going to cry foul on the EPA estimates now?
Any good tow truck driver has these:http://homytools.com/hydraulic-vehicle-automotive-moving-jack-dolly-hydraulic-car-dolly They let them move vehicles that have their ebrake on and to change cars direction so they can be towed/or if tire is flat and needs to be moved
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
My dad bought a Renault Alliance because it was Motor Trend Car of the Year in 1983. What a mistake. That is still the worst car I have ever driven by a long way.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The problem with most of those cars was horrible long-term reliability -- not something which could be picked up on an 8 hour test drive.
At least in one case (Chevy Citation), people suspect GM provided rigged review units that drove better than the real car.
Sure, because the NYT left the charger with 32 miles estimated range and then drove it 51 miles to make sure the battery would actually go flat. Run a gasoline car until the guage reads E, put in a single gallon of gas and drive more than the car's MPG and SURPRISE! you're out of gas. You might even get a tow truck driver to agree that you're out of gas if you ask him to verify it.
But don't try that at home, many gasoline cars don't take kindly to being run out of gas.
Re:Don't be too quick to pass judgement on this one..
.
Please mod parent up, it is not a troll, despite being rated and moderated as a troll! How fucking clueless is it to have a parking brake system that depends on battery power, when every other car has the parking brake as a manual-mechanical linkage to the braking system which allows it to be engaged and disengaged regardless of the battery status of the vehicle? It is silly for tesla to have the parking brakes done this way.
Tesla's lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality despite the judge, as explained by Jalopnik:
"Top Gear intentionally said something untrue, as opposed to intentionally misrepresenting true facts."
When I push down on my brake pedal, and when my car does not then brake, my brakes are broken.
I don't give a shit if it's the brake pad, the brake fuse, or if the brake pedal grew fucking wings and flew away.
You're arguing semantics in a most idiotic way and I hope that you can see that.
BRAKES THAT DON'T WORK ARE BROKEN BRAKES.
And the 'breakdown'? That was running dry of charge, which was TV magic and make-believe -- but it is an actual thing that actually happens, and was actually pretty fucking irrelevant. All cars can do that.
What was relevant and what they wanted to show was that it wasn't a simple matter of dumping a few gallons down into the tank from a jerrycan to get it running again, that once you've had your laps with it you've gotta sit it down for hours while it recharges. That was the relevant bit, and was entirely factual.
And as far as the car not having a drained battery.. do you know how far they drove around the track? Did they show every lap or lead you to believe that every lap was shown? They used the range estimates given to them by Tesla motors, took them as fact, and stopped short of those numbers to save everyone the headache of actually dealing with a dead Tesla car.
Again, Tesla's engineers told them how far it would go on their track -- and they unquestionably believed those numbers, and gave them as facts.
Are you sure they weren't TOO forgiving? Maybe they should have driven it out, and then complained about the actual range being lower than the lowered range estimate given to them by Tesla's engineers? Would THAT have been more to your liking?
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Look at other articles he has written. He is consistently pro-oil and anti-environmentalist.
See: Dirty Hippies get arrested for obstructing the utopian big oil future.
This guy is an oil shill.
Yes, I get it--you love Top Gear, and you're willing to accept that they WROTE THE SCRIPT BEFORE RECEIVING THE CARS and pretended that it had run out of charge.
Everyone else does, that's what makes the 24 hr (s)news cycle deliver so much snooze-worthy crap!
Broder appears to have posted a response.
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
Go go Musk. Love it ;) Stupid damn paparazzi needs to learn some physics (and common sense). You don't name yourself after one of the worlds greatest scientists unless you mean serious business!
Wow. 1971. It's almost like there were different people working there 40 years and it was a different time in automobile advancements and technology. Seriously, is that the best trolling you can do? Digging up old articles from 25-40 years ago to reflect on how a magazine might be run today?
If you bothered to read the link provided, you'll notice some more recent cars (1990s, 2000s) were also awarded Car of the Year, but failed to live up to the hype as well.
It's just evidence that a CotY award isn't sufficient to prove that a car is great. It takes time to find out if a car is reliable, and that's something that takes time and a large number of vehicles to find out.
The Tesla is a useless track day car. (unless your day is very short)
The car has an EPA range of 260 miles. What percentage of people really drive 200+ miles a day?
1%? 2%?
How long is your commute?
The range is fine. The only problem with the car is that it's too expensive.
Misinformation. you're full of it.
and again with the heater comment...just like the OP, another reading comprehension fail.
my car gets ~300 miles a tank. so does the Tesla. that's a reptty good comparison right there to be making.
i have to refuel my car once a week. the Tesla never needs it, not for daily driving.
my car was ~26k. Tesla S starts at 52k and goes to 85k (not 100k).
fueling once a week, at the recent avg gas of 3.35 a gallon, spend ~40$ a week on gas.
they say teh S is equiv to 100 mpg. 300 mile range, 3 gallons of gas. ~10$.
30$ a week I dont have to spend. 1560 a year.
at the current rate, i'd need to drive it for ~16.5 years to break even from energy savings.
but then that's with a first line luxury model. saw the same thing with teh Prius and other hybrids when they first came out, vs now.
more production, more demand, the price will drop. give a couple more years, and you'll see a mass market EV that functions as a complete replacements for the average people who only replace a car every 7-10 years, and people breaking even on fuel around the 3yr mark.
also..on long drives, why not stop and enjoy the countryside? its about the journey, not the destination. there's lots of stuff out there worth seeing.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Oh my god you're such an idiot! THE BRAKES STILL WORKED!
If you pushed down on the brake pedal the Roadster still braked! They only required somewhat more foot pressure. And this is a common effect, if temporary, on *all* vehicles with power brakes. It happened to my Prius this morning as I pulled out of the garage, but I didn't end up pushing it to the dealer for effect.
What would've been more to my liking is if they *ACTUALLY* tried the car first, and reported actual results, instead of *WRITING THE NEGATIVE SCRIPT BEFOREHAND*!
I drive 600 miles each way to work and I do it twice a day every day. If this car can't do something this common then it will never sell!
When I see an unbiased third party do the test - like Consumer Reports or Motor Trend - then I'll take what has to be said seriously. Until then, I'll treat everything with skepticism.
Sorry but you're an idiot. Stop trying to act like a guy/girl with principles when you're not even aware that the two entities you named already reviewed the god damn car and praised the fuck out of it.
From TFA:
Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F.
At the point in time that he claims to have turned the temperature down, he in fact turned the temperature up to 74 F.
The charge time on his second stop was 47 mins, going from -5 miles (reserve power) to 209 miles of Ideal or 185 miles of EPA Rated Range, not 58 mins as stated in the graphic attached to his article. Had Broder not deliberately turned off the Supercharger at 47 mins and actually spent 58 mins Supercharging, it would have been virtually impossible to run out of energy for the remainder of his stated journey.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded? It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Why are you asking us? If the car doesn't meet your needs, of course you wouldn't buy it. Not every car is meant to meet the needs of all drivers. not every driver goes on 600 mile trips regularly.
My car hasn't been more than 100 miles from home in over 4 years. When we go on family trips, we usually rent a minivan since it's more comfortable for everyone. If I needed a new car, I'd probably get something like the Nissan Leaf since it has enough range for 2 days of commuting, and spending a minute plugging it in at night to charge it is more convenient than spending 15 minutes driving a couple miles out of my way and refueling a conventional car.
99.9% of the things you call "homophobia, misogyny, and racism" on Top Gear, simply aren't.
When you, like most modern politically sensitized people, hear words related to women, homosexuals and non-white, non-Christian cultures, used in a humourous context, you automatically assume that IT MUST BE OFFENSIVE! and therefore IT IS WRONG! and OMG I WAS SO EMBARRASSED TO BE IN THE ROOM!
Please grow a fucking spine and look at the context in which something is said. Not everything that deals with those subjects is bad or offensive or, God help us all, infringes on someone else's right not to be offended.
Jealous much? The Tesla isn't targeted at people who spend $10k on a car. It is targeted at people who pay between $50k and $100k on a car. At that point, it is a VERY competitive car.
And I accomplish more environmentally by living close enough to my workplace to commute by bicycle.
Congratulations. We're talking about cars, not about bicycles.
The Tesla is an expensive toy for enviro-posers.
Do you also complain about people buying Ferraris being performance-posers?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You keep on harping on about the SCRIPTING IN ADVANCE part of filming a TV show, as if this is in any way not normal... I happen to have worked in the film industry. It's *completely* normal to have a script of what you're doing and when, as well as a rough outline of what you expect to happen. The producers wouldn't be doing their job if they *didn't* have such a script.
With that in mind, here's the show's producers comments on the scripting thing:
In terms of the what Clarkson actually said during the driving, he loved the car. It's the fundamental design faults that caused problems, and the fact that Tesla were marketing it as 'The Supercar. Redefined' led to TG testing it as a supercar (you know, on a racetrack). If you've seen any of their other supercar reviews, they're equally scathing about those cars deficiencies.
Tesla didn't get any worse or better treatment than any other manufacturer. They just went in there expecting to get a fawning love-fest type of review, perhaps they'd never actually watched the show...
Anyway, I'm out. I don't really care enough about this to argue it to completion.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If you actually do what you claim, you are a complete jackass. 10 hours with a single 5-minute stop? There are reasons it is illegal for even professional drivers to do that.
I love logs like these, since they let you fact check both sides. They paint a pretty damning picture when you take them with Tesla's notes, but Tesla's notes are rather one sided and skip some obvious facts that they'd rather ignore but which are plain for all to see. Similarly, Broder's account was clearly sensationalized a bit in various parts, though not in all of the ways that Tesla claims. For instance:
1) The cabin temperature logs Tesla provides have a note saying that Broder turned up the temperature at the 182 mile mark when he claimed he turned it down. If we read the original article, we see that Broder merely mentions having noticed a decreased reported range at the 182 mile mark (114 miles from start + 68 since charge), but he never said he decreased his speed or turned down the heater at that exact time. What we see in the logs is that he did turn up the heater slightly around that time, but very shortly thereafter he turned it down to its lowest setting, exactly as he claimed. If you're looking at the logs, it's easy to spot the deep valleys where he did what he said he did at about the time that he said he did it.
2) Similarly, if you compare the graphs, you'll see that at about the time he dropped his heating down to its lowest setting, his speed also dropped down to around 54 miles per hour, again, as he claimed. That said, he seemed to imply in the article that he maintained that speed for quite some time. What the logs show is that he only maintained that speed for a short period of time, before resuming his typical driving habits that had him in the mid-60s for his speed. He conveniently neglected to mention how long he maintained that speed, leaving it to the reader to assume that he maintained it until his next stop, which was untrue.
3) Tesla disputes the time that Broder claims he spent charging at Milford (the Times' picture claimed 58 minutes, Broder's article says "nearly an hour", but Tesla claims 47 minutes). It's possible this was a simple case of misunderstanding, where he was in the service station for 58 minutes (including the rather shady 5 minutes driving around the lot to seemingly try and kill the battery) but actually only spent 47 minutes charging. Either way, there's no dispute that his range read 185 miles when he stopped charging the car before it was done. Tesla suggests that it's his fault for not charging it to full, even though the reported range was 60 miles greater than what was necessary to reach his next stop.
4) If you look at the logs showing the reported range, you'll see a sudden drop in range of about 50 miles at the 400 mile mark. Broder claimed that the reported range went from 79 miles to 25 miles overnight, which is exactly what the logs show. Tesla doesn't make a point of highlighting that blip in the logs, to say the least. We also see that Broder once again turned his thermostat to an extremely low setting, though the logs do not support his claim that he limped along at 45 miles per hour (though he did slow down quite a bit...maybe he made a typo when meaning to say 54 miles per hour?).
5) Broder never mentions in the article what the estimated range was after his last stop, instead merely saying that "after an hour they [Tesla] cleared me to resume the trip". Since he says he woke up a Tesla official on the west coats to ask for instructions and this was not his scheduled stop, it's quite possible he got someone half-asleep or unfamiliar with the fact that he had stopped at a non-Supercharger station, meaning that they cleared him after the hour that the Supercharger would have taken, rather than the several hours necessary at the station he was at. Either way, he was definitively not charged enough (which he clearly knew), since both Musk's notes and the Times' own map indicate that he had around 32-35 miles of reported range after he had charged, which was nowhere close to the 51 necessary to reach his destination.
Long story short, both sides are trying to spin the facts in their favor. As far as I can tell,
Also makes towing fun.
The brake isn't held on or off by electric power, because that would be illegal.
You got a citation for that?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This guy thought he was smarter than an entire company that gets paid to be the best at what they do. In the most simplest of terms he was just pwnd by 'Engineering'. It is not something you get to see every day and so I very enjoyed blog article.
However, the top gear review was only entertainment, they don't do 'journalism'. Sure it was crummy for Tesla, but I don't see how anyone can argue TG was outline. If we were to take TG as journalism then I would be lead to believe, that a Bugatti Veyron is faster than the Euro Fighter, a Cobra gunship could never shoot a Dodge Viper, a Toyota Hilux is indestructible, the Stig has a cousin in every country, a boat car can drive/float across the English channel, and the list goes on.
According to Broder's blog on why he drove on low speed in circles:
"She [Tesla employee] said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage."
And that was the moment when he believed to have invented endless engine.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/?ref=johnmbroder
I'm sure the NYT will issue a full-page apology, now.
When he first reached our Milford, Connecticut Supercharger, having driven the car hard and after taking an unplanned detour through downtown Manhattan to give his brother a ride, the display said "0 miles remaining." Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in. On the later legs, it is clear Broder was determined not to be foiled again.
the rated range historesis, charge logs, and cabin environment logs are all available. The speed logs from the vehicle directly contradict any claims made by the reviewer to have 'limped along' at anything less 60. this is an asshole, not a journalist.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Jeremy Clarkson got 17 mpg while driving a Prius, so I can totally see the Tesla Roadster not meeting the expected range on Top Gear.
So, he showed the Tesla can be run flat in 15-20 mins, and he did the same with a petrol car, and somehow that is inconsistent? Sounds like he treated the Tesla the same as any other, and the pointed out the downside is it can't be refuelled easily when that happens.
Musk's post is absolutely damning for three reasons:
1) Millionaires never lie.
2) Logs abso-tively cannot be falsified, massaged, or sexed up
3) Reporting/Logging software never fails. No software fails. Ever.
I only do a 10 hour trip with just one break twice a year (To and from PAX). I could rent a gas car for those two trips. Most people would consider me someone who likes to drive. I regularly drive a couple of hours to the nearest large city, but at that point I'm at my destination and would charge the vehicle. It's only for hardcore unfun road trips that the charging is inconvenient.
The only thing stopping me from getting an electric car today is the high up front cost of electric vehicles. I can buy (and usually do) a gas vehicle in completely operable shape for under $5,000 at any time, and the amount of gas I use over the lifetime of the vehicle doesn't compensate for the additional $30,000 I need to even consider an electric car. But, in 5 or 10 years, those electric vehicles will be under $5,000 used and I'll have one of those instead.
I regularly drive one-way 380 miles which is 80 miles longer than the largest battery capacity model advertises. I spend 5-1/2 hours to 6 hours on the road during this commute and would not like adding an hour layover to an already large portion of my day. My current automobile is able to make that commute easily with a 1/2 tank of gas to spare.
I would love the lower fuel costs but the lack of range and the fact that I would probably never have any real savings due to the high cost of the car make the Tesla S model a non-starter for me.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Cool, thanks for the heads up. I haven't generally tracked it in awhile and saw the 100,000 quote mentioned and made an incorrect assumption.
-l
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It was an accurate review. The Tesla is a useless track day car. (unless your day is very short)
The only complaint Tesla could come up with is how they dramatized the out of power issue.
did you actually read the articles and ignore the parts you don't like, or are you genuinely not paying attention to reality. Top Gear was found to have done exactly what Tesla said they did, and only escaped having to pay damages because the judge determined that Tesla could not produce vehicles to meet demand and therefore not suffered any monetary loss (They sell every car long before its manufactured, and Tesla would be hard pressed to manufacture fast enough to keep up with demand). As for Top Gear, they are lying weasels of the worst variety. Anyone who trusts their word is either an idiot or a child.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Not unusual for me to do 220+ miles in a day just work, school, daughters training. My wife quite regularly does 400 miles + in a day. This is in the UK where traditionally we don't do huge distances in the same way as the US.
Is born out to be true...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3455899&cid=42876871
Great job on Elon Musk's part. I know people were asking for where the evidence is. At this point, I think the NY Times smartest move would be canning the reporter. And publishing an article on the amazing ability of new technology to track and report you movements, and how this could play into future law enforcement. ;-)
A $100,000 car is "mass market"?
They were originally targeting a $50k price tag with the S but rapidly gave up on that idea. Cool car though.
-l
So many lies being passed around here. Here is the price list for the Tesla Model S. Base price: $52 400. With the large battery it is $72 400. With the high performance options, it is $87 400. I don't know whether you are lying deliberately or whether you simply don't care about the truth of what you write.
Posting anonymously because I moderated.
The data is useful for debugging problems. Would you also be shocked by the volume and level of detail of your computer logs if you turned them all on? These logs are turned off for owners by default unless the owner requests they be turned on.
I did, and you're full of shit. The Tesla technician admitted that there was a hardware problem with the brakes. And as the Top Gear folks said at the time, if your wheel seizes up, you're going to call that broken regardless of what the technicality is.
If Top Gear lied about it, then why on earth did it require a redesign to fix the issue?
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
Then why didn't they arrange to have that set of circumstances and film it rather than inventing lies whole cloth? If it allegedly would have happened then why didn't it, and why did they have to fake the breakdown?
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Base price: $50 400. It is easy to check.
Agreed. My father did the same thing. Worst car he has ever owned, and he has had some clunkers. Never buy anything but wine or cheese made by the French, and especially not cars.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Alternative explanation: Hanlon's Razor.
See my other reply.
-l
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Motor Trend named the Chevy Vega the car of the year in 1971. Car and Driver named the Renault Alliance as one of 1983's 10 best cars. In 1985 the Ford Merkur also made this list. You might enjoy this.
Hey, my first car was a Vega and I resent your insinuation. Mine might have been 15 years old the first time I got behind the wheel of it, but it survived that long, and kept on running... I could get over 100 mph (after accelerating about 5 minutes) in that thing, despite parts of it being held together with chicken wire. Just because our nickname for it was "The Green Skunk"... OK, looking back, it might not have been the car it felt like at the time. No wonder my Mom was so quick to pawn it off on me and get a new car.
There were definitely a lot of stinkers in those days. But sadly, I think that for many of us the Vega was the worst of the worst.
You have 2 good examples, but I'd like to point out that the Merkur wasn't an engineering failure, it was a marketing failure. That same car, if it were badged as a Ford, would have sold massively.
And apparently, neither is the New York Times, so now who do we trust?
The car coasted down the off-ramp, then the driver applied the electric parking brake, and the car ran out of charge. How will the electric parking brake, which was holding the vehicle in place, be released, if there's no mechanical linkage that can be operated manually?
If Tesla is keeping tabs on consumers, then that's definitely a bigger sin than Broder lying through his teeth. Any proof they do this for everyone? I'd be more likely to believe they only do it if you're driving THEIR car which they loaned you for a test drive for you to report truthfully on. Probably not safe to just assume they respect your privacy more than your cell phone company does though.
There is no bigger danger to democracy than an individual who is tasked with educating the public knowingly falsifying reports. There is a reason in our society that journalists enjoy strong protections under the constitution, but that protection comes with responsibility, and Broder has violated the trust. If the NYT doesn't act, then they are complicit.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Maybe read the subject?
I'll probably replace the Honda when it is around 10 years old, which makes the total cost (excluding maintenance, which is likely to be way cheaper than on the Tesla), on the order of $20,000.
OK, how in the holy fuck did you figure that?
If you knew anything about electrical motors, is that they are extremely low maintenance. That's what you get for not burning things with fire.
http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options
So, battery then? Says 8 *year* warranty on battery, so probably should last a while more after that too.
I would complain about initial cost of the vehicle - mostly thanks to cost of the battery. These cars remain expensive in comparison to gas powered. We still need 10x price/power_density reduction in battery costs for electrics to become superior to gasoline for everyday needs, or gas to become 10x as expensive. $40/gal gas? Maybe.
But bitching about maintenance? Please! You do NOT know what you are talking about.
PS. Comparing a $10k car to a brand new, high end car like Tesla is kind of stupid. Kind of like comparing your Civic to a Cadillac ATS and then bitching that Cadillac is soooo expensive. But then even Cadillac is not even close to torque of Testa's electric cars, never mind the Civic.
Completely different market segments.
I'm surprised they didn't post GPS data of the actual route, especially the parking lot incident.
Heh, yea, it would be poetic justice for Musk to post the video of Capt. Jackass circling the lot, and out him for the charlatan he is, wouldn't it?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Unless they're being paid (the tow truck company, that is), which I covered in my original post. I mean, it's insane for anyone to believe that Musk is above manipulating a graph that he's released to make his baby seem like its failure was the fault of someone else. How many battery failures were there with the roadster?
Yep. Appreciate the heads up.
-l
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Since when has Jalopnik been known to be as terrible a news source as their corporate overlords? They're the only blog in that network that is credible in any way, shape, or form. Why? Because they're gearheads that know cars, and in the years that I've been reading, I haven't noticed sensationalism as a normal tool of theirs. That said, every news source should always be thought of as 'in-question' because all writers have a personal agenda, all editors have a personal agenda, and all companies have a corporate agenda. So, please forgive me if your pithy slight against a pretty damn good auto blog is considered meaningless.
and not elon's interpretation of them?
In the 3rd pic the Rated range to distance log.
the 80miles rated range to a sudden drop to 35 would be a WTF moment for me if I was driving this thing, anybody know the scenario that would cause that? It might be legit that he thoguht he had 80 miles
Also the low power charge (not at a super station) does that mean that if we pluged it in for 30 minutes it only gets a about 1mile per minute? So if we needed to go the other 200 miles on the route, it'd be 200 minutes? Though Broder here asserted he charged it for an hour, he did add that if tesla said it would regain its charge lost over night, he might be led to believe that the est 32 might "jump" back up to the original 80 he had as the logs show.
I also thought that batteries should never lose their entire charge, so elon's assertion that the battery never ran dry is probably a fail safe mechanism they put in place after that article a month ago that some guy left his in the airport for 2 months only to find it bricked.
4th pic, the climate control, how many of you guys fiddle with the cabin temperature like the logs said you would?
like you go from 73.5 to 69 to 71 all in a matter of minutes? that assertion just confuses me. What if the clima control just doesn't react as expected?
Also in pic 1, someone want to explain to me what the downline means at the 450 mark? the car was cruising at 50 then hit 0 instantly then went back up to 50? Huh?
Not saying Broder might not have added some sensationalism to tell his story, as people have mentioned "It just works" is kind of boring. But I'm not fully sure about Elon's side either
Agreed. Trying to wring every last joule of electricity out of the battery isn't a bad thing, and it's useful to determine what, if any, safety there is in the 'tank' of the Model S. It's basically the same thing as validating that when your car's trip computer says that you've got 50 miles of gas left, you actually HAVE 50 miles of gas left.
Now you're simply lying, and Top Gear's response to the lawsuit show this. No wheel seized up. A fuse failure led to loss of power braking, but the *brakes still worked*. Top Gear says broken is broken, but the difference between brakes not functioning (spectacular crash, death, etc) and having to press slightly harder, is immense. Top Gear claimed the fuse failure "immobilized" the vehicle. It did not.
Good idea calling it a Merkur, not an XR4Ti. Those exroti fans are pretty rabid. My roommate in college still Loves, with a capital L, his. They were just quirky. Like the first turbo four Toyotas, Nissans, and Mitsus. Oh, wait, it predated most/all of those. And had the intrinsic rain shedding coating on the glass, no rainx required. Shoulda kept the all wheel drive from europe tho.
andy
In looking over the logs, I'm having trouble finding places where Broder outright lied, and I see several places where Tesla takes some liberty with the facts as well. I detailed my points in another post further down, but suffice to say, Broder implied extended duration of events in a few cases where they didn't last, and Tesla made a few obviously incorrect assumptions that were convenient for their efforts to make Broder look bad.
For instance, in looking over Broder's account, he never provided an exact time for when he turned the heater down, merely saying that it occurred sometime after he noticed that the range had decreased faster than he expected. Tesla chose to assume that he turned the heater down at the exact time he reported seeing the range drop, so they painted him as a liar by showing how he turned up the heater around that time, while neglecting to point out that he clearly did turn the heater to its lowest setting a few minutes later. They conveniently ignored quite a few other facts like those that supported Broder's story or made them look bad (e.g. the overnight loss of 54 miles of range that Broder reported, which the logs support as having happened).
That said, Broder also claims that he dropped to 54 miles per hour and put the car on cruise control around the same time he turned down the heater, suggesting strongly that he maintained that speed until his next stop. What the logs show is that he did drop to around that speed for awhile...before speeding back up to his typical speed in the mid-60s for that leg of the trip. Again, it doesn't contradict his account, since he never actually said he maintained that speed, but it does show that his account was at least a bit disingenuous. Not enough for libel, but certainly enough to be shady.
Discrepancies like those abound in both accounts if you compare them against the actual logs. I went into a lot more detail in my other post.
Can't stand "reality TV" in any of its various guises. This just give me one more reason not to watch it.
How is Top Gear a "reality show?" They test drive cars most people will never be able to afford, engage in 'challenges' that have little to nothing to do with reality, and spend most of the rest of the episode making bad jokes and puns.
To top it off, (most) every episode features a millionaire celebrity taking a lap in a cheap dogeater that not a one of them would ever, ever buy.
Nothing about that show would qualify it as "reality TV," IMHO... except maybe to people with a warped sense of what's real.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded?
Actually...I've got to take my gas vehicle to the dealer because it has a fuel sensor problem. I have to worry about its gauge being inaccurate.
It takes an hour to refill the thing, and I have to do it three times to drive 600 miles?
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
Because you don't fucking have to drive 600 fucking miles, and have other fucking needs, you fucking moronic idiot who fucking can't see the forest for the trees.
Right, and that's fine. He KNEW it was going to run out of charge. Did he know that the parking brake would be locked, preventing him from getting the vehicle to a charger, once it was dead?
And of course the writer had an agenda. So does Elon Musk. So does every blogger, writer, Slashdot commenter, and editor alive.
A hatchet job is still a hatchet job whether or not others do it, or it's more efficient to do so...
They showed the car getting stranded and having to be pushed back. Seeing as the car gives you plenty of warning about mileage you'd have to be an idiot to end up in their scripted situation.
Nobody would have had a problem if their "dramatization" had been that they only got X amount of track time before having to take it back in because the batteries were low. Instead they lied about it being likely to leave you unexpectedly stranded.
That's like putting a gallon of gas into a car to drive 100 miles.
If my car actually used gas, it would do that...
I'm just sayin
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Have you ever tried to use a vehicle dolly to move a car onto a flatbed truck? I have. The casters are not big enough to adequately make it onto the flatbed without slipping.
Wrote the script before receiving the cars. All I need to know.
Yup - just like every other TV show about cars.
You want accurate information? Go read Consumer Reports. You want car-related entertainment? Watch Top Gear.
Simple as that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Why the fuck are you driving so much?
How much is Tesla implying that the customer is using the car wrong?
When your charge indicator says "31 miles range" and you have a 60 mile drive ahead of you, I think it's safe to say the average user is going to know to keep charging. Assuming the posted logs are accurate there is nothing complex about this, the guy hooked it up to the charging station for less time each time he stopped. He lied about speed, temperature settings, route, charging time, and indicators. The piece was a hit job.
"She says that their records indicate the car's battery pack was completely drained."
What records. All that means is that the call they received for a tow, had a stated reason as "battery drained"
A towing company has no means to test or confirm such. Second, when my wife needed a jump in our 1st generation Prius. She had to argue for 20 minutes that the battery was in the trunk. They couldn't find it. And refused to listen to her. Called a second tow truck operator. Who still was clueless. After 30 minutes of arguing, they listened to my wife. Lo and behold they found the batter in the trunk.
Furthermore, the Tesla Model S is like a 100x beyond my 1st generation Prius. So claiming a tow truck handler had ANY knowledge or understanding other than what the driver told them "battery pack completely dead". Is just BUNK!!!
"(Broder's own report said that the car couldn't be moved because its electric parking brake was stuck in place.)"
I've seen flatbeds tow cards with parking breaks on. They hook the winch and the whole car bounces up and down off the ground as it's dragged. Done every day, hundreds of times.
"12V battery that powers the accessories and gets its juice from the high voltage battery shut down when Broder pulled into the service station."
And why would that battery drain? Just wondering if Mr. Broder is influenced by Tom Beaudette and Motel 6 "We'll leave the lights on for ya!"
http://jalopnik.com/towing-company-the-nyt-tesla-model-s-was-dead-when-it-196100064
I'm not seeing the shilling.
It's clear that Mr. Broder frequently writes on oil and environmental topics, but it seems to me that he's as plausibly pro-electric as anti-electric. Even the one article cited in the Tesla blog response hardly seems anti-electric car; if anything, it's the opposite: it's a story about how companies seem to keep trying to kill electric cars.
Sounds like a dumb design, to use a completely separate battery system for the parking brake, rather than just have a step-down transformer that runs off the existing battery voltage powering it.
A lot of the cars on that list were decent cars in their day. The XR4Ti in particular was a fine little sporty car that Lincoln-Mercury dealers just had no idea how to market. It's fun to laugh at something like the Mustang II today because it's a shit car, but it was competing against other shit cars.
Not that different than 'Jersey Shore', except that instead of skanks no one would touch you have cars no one can afford, and instead of cat fights you have (apparently) 'challenges'. Maybe that's just my perception of the whole genre of cheap schlock programming that would also include the 'Repo Men' and Mythbusters, staffed by actors too stupid to be able to stick to a script but pretending to be some aspect of real life.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yes and it was very informative. No one could have possibly known what you would have to do if a car ran out of fuel before Top Gear showed it happening to an electric car.
I don't think PBS' Motor Week decides results prior to receiving cars.
Why do you feel the need to foist your little thoughts based on imaginary facts onto people. Just RTFA and try and educate yourself a bit because your tripe certainly isn't educating anybody.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The US has a large market for luxury vehicles, this vehicle is in that market. Plenty of people are willing to spend $80k on a vehicle, especially one with zero emissions which very well may also cost nothing to refuel (if done at a Supercharger station). I'm one of those people, and I'm certainly not the only one. The Model S Signature model was sold out before delivery even started. They had over 13,000 preorders by Sept. 2012, and expect to sell 20k units in 2013. By the way, depending on batteries and performance, the base price of the various Model S vehicles are $57,400, $67,400, $77,400, $95,400, and $105,400 for the Signature Performance version in the US. All versions are more expensive in Europe.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If Tesla is only keeping tabs on reporters, then it sounds like that's entirely justified. Should they have warned him that he has no privacy while driving the car they loaned him specifically to report to the world about it? I don't know.
Tesla says in their blog they inform all their reviewers that the car is being logged and require that they agree to this in advance. So, yes, the NYT retard was informed in advance that the car was being logged and just assumed that he could make up lies anyway.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
I suppose we'll just have to chalk this one up to the old adage, 'one man's trash is another man's entertainment.'
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Funny those are exactly the reasons I do watch it. Honesty is rare these days.
How does a dead battery lock the brakes on a normal, gasoline operated vehicle, other than one with an electric parking brake (in which case, a car with a dead battery can always be jump started)?
And it does matter. Tesla wants these cars to replace normal gas operated cars, yet every screen, dial, and component in the car saps power. If the real world range is insufficient to make the vehicle worthwhile for longer distance trips, why would someone in the US buy one, other than 'green cred'?
From the article:
... they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance.
Really? The above statement implies that the protested author was foolish enough to carry his article around while he test drove the car, and even was sloppy enough to leave it on a table where anyone could find it. Preposterous!
I do not think I can believe either side on this
You are using ones that are not made for it then. Try going out and spending yoru money wisely on better ones. I have done it plenty of times and with good winch, plus non cheap ones its easy to do. Instead of cheap plastic casters, try the ones with rubber tires..Works just fine
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
Media causes a stir and the company who can benefit most from the stir out-stirs the initial "stirrer" while also creating drama among the internet cattle who just have to take a side. ... and this is in California. We only had a few "cold" nights that month. On the other hand, the S is perfectly fine for daily commute to work if you keep up with the charge. It can be a daily city car , if you can live with the fact that once in a while you have to reboot the damn thing in the morning while you're late for a meeting, or that certain bits and pieces do have a mind of their own once in a while, or that the performance figures are a bit misleading, or that you simply can't buy the car for the advertised prices. .. albeit not for long drives. On the other hand absolutely everything is electronically controlled. So if you like to shift some gears and have some fun on your drive, well too bad so sad. There's also the cram factor. In the back, at least for me, it feels .. umm undersized.
C'mon people, it's not so complicated. There is truth to the initial story. I have a friend with an S and in December he never got the promised range
It is a beautiful car, makes for a comfortable drive in the city and a smooth cruiser on the highway
Model S is exactly what it is advertised to be. A great car for those baby boomers with money who like to pretend they are hip, or their spoiled grand kids, or for trophy wives , or just rich housewives, or boring/smug executives or bored individuals who have nothing to do with their money. Now admittedly I know two decent folks who bought it not because of the smug factor but because they just wanted to have one.
For everybody else who could afford a Tesla S, but like to have more fun driving, there's BMW M5 ( same price, more space, more performance and a lot more fun) or a Jag XFR or even that new fast Caddy.
Anyway, I rambled enough, going back to the point i was originally tried to make, it's funny seeing how people jump on each side so quick without even thinking that the media guy might have made up some things to amplify the impact of his story,or that the new Messiah in town, Musk , with his checkered past when it comes to honesty and truthfulness, might have had his engineering massing the interpretation of the logs. I am not accusing him of doing so but who here was there when they downloaded the logs? Just sayin'.
The bottom line is, this is much ado about nothing. Everybody is defending his piece of the pie.
toodles
Right, and there are things that they're just plain biased against. Clarkson HATES most American vehicles, even if they're faster, look better, drive better, cost less, and have more features than their European brethren.
It's not temporary, and the brakes broke.
Or, I dunno. Maybe you're the guy who's gonna be OK driving his supercar around a race track with a braking system that isn't working as intended.
Sounds safe to me boss!
Please detail the difference between them driving the Tesla around the track two or three more times and actually having to push the thing into the garage and them simply claiming that that is exactly what they did.
The negative part was still the same. You get a couple laps out of the Tesla and then hours of downtime, whereas with a normal supercar you get a couple of laps and then a few minutes of downtime.
So where's the deception, again? Where did they paint the Tesla unfairly? What exactly happened that would not have happened had they done things differently?
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
All hail the Invisible Pink Unicorn! She created everything, obviously: otherwise there would be nothing. We know she's invisible, and we believe and have faith that she is pink.
All hail the Invisible Pink Unicorn! And obviously heretics like yourself will be stabbed to death before being thrown into manure for all eternity. mhhnbs.
Are you seriously that fucking stupid? The parent is a troll because he says "When I see an unbiased third party do the test - like Consumer Reports or Motor Trend - then I'll take what has to be said seriously." WHILE THERE ARE ALREADY REVIEWS BY THESE TWO.
Fucking idiot.
Shame they didn't mod you as Funny, because it definitely was.
For those who may be misled by the Insightful, I /do/ remember 1971, and there were several better cars. But the Vega was brand-new and looked like a game-changer. So it was forgivably car-of-the-year they same way Time could list Khomeni as man-of-the-year, and because nobody had had to live with the piece of shit for a full year yet.
By 1978 you could buy them in the local junkyard for $250, which included as many trips back as you needed to score spares off the rest to get yours running. And it was still a bad deal.
There's been mention of the 2/12 response from Broder (previous to Musk's rebuttal), but the first post-rebuttal articles are now showing up:
* http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/conflicting-assertions-over-an-electric-car-test-drive/?smid=tw-share
Plus a general line by line analysis of Musk's comments:
* http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/
Do not attempt to lie to Tony Stark. He will come and have a chat with you.
"Tony, I swear the suit shut down on my 32nd villain!"
"Ah, well, let's just see what the suit has to say about this."
"He's a lying sack of poo, he didn't fully charge me before going after the villains."
"... the suit ... it's lying, I swear it!"
"Suits. Do. No. Lie."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm pretty sure that you would question the test regardless.
For me, it would work just fine; almost all my drives are less than 200 miles, and I have two cars so could rely on the second one for distances. YMMV.
My next car is going to be some type of electric or hybrid; hopefully not for a few years though.
"did not, in any way, claim that the car ran out of power when he drove it in circles
No, but he did claim that he didn't drive it in circles, that he didn't take it on a side trip into new york, and that he followed instructions given to him by Tesla employees on where and how much to charge the car.
This is getting tedious, as you seem to feel Top Gear can do no fault. As I've said before: yes, I get it, you love Top Gear. Hooray.
The brake issue is not like the pregnancy thing (you can't be a "only little bit" pregnant). The brakes still worked. This was not catastrophic failure and you know it.
I'm not diving into your strawman argument to "detail the difference" as I don't accept your implied premise that cooking up results in advance is acceptable journalism due to expediency.
ow much is Tesla implying that the customer is using the car wrong?
Not even a little bit.
If this were a gasoline car, this would be a case of:
Customer fills tank 1/4 full. Customer notes the onboard computer says he can go 100 miles. Customer plans 140 mile trip, and sets off. Car runs out of gas at 120 miles... 20 miles further than the onboard computer estimated.
Customer calls manufacturer to complain car doesn't work properly, and writes article for New York times complaining the range doesn't meet what was advertised.
Manufacturer checks logs and rightfully tells customer he's a fucking liar and an idiot.
Furthermore, the logging is optional, off by default, and only turned on because this was a 'media road test', and the logging was disclosed and agreed to.
101k dollars buys me a lifetime of fuel.
Got Code?
I had a 1978 Renault R17 Gordini and it was awesome! Never had a problem with it. Still miss that car to this day.
Elon Musk case is a weaker than it appears. Good analysis of the data.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/
I don't think PBS' Motor Week decides results prior to receiving cars.
PBS doesn't count, they're actual journalists, not entertainers.
In case you were wondering, yes, that's a dig on pretty much every other "news" agency in the nation.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... and if you are, I don't want you on the same road as me!
Go google "new york times reporter fake stories." Jayson Blair, Judith Miller. Now this loser. What's of note here is that even tho the NYT got burned, there appears to be no process in place to vet reporters stories, and failing to vet - which can happen - hold the reporter(s) accountable when they do publish knowingly fake stories.
Of course Elon has proof to back up his claims.
(not that these can't be faked but...) There are Vehicle Logs graphs at the bottom of the Musk rebuttal that discredit Broder's account:
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/speeddistance0.jpg
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/socdistance0.jpg
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/ratedrangeremaining0.jpg
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/speedmph0.jpg
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/norwichtrip.jpg
It's worth reading the New York Times article author's response to the accusations which was written before Elon Musk's new blog post with the data. And also remember when this all happened before? I'm not sure who to believe, but I'm not sure why everybody thinks the NYT reporter is blatantly lying but Musk wouldn't fudge the numbers a little. I think some of Musk's response is weak and still dances around some major issues that the reporter had with the car. All the graphs he posted are shown in miles instead of time, which hides some of the problems that the reporter talked about, like going to bed with with a 90 mile charge and waking up and finding the battery with 25 miles.
If you're talking about BBC's Top Gear, then question is "what is this review you're talking about?"
How much ganja that would have been detected in the cabin air, with an air quality monitor, would be an interesting chart to see.
Alliance wasn't that bad. No power, but decent overall.
That's like complaining to Toyota that you ran out of gas.
I carry a 5L gas can in my car, in the unlikely case that I run out of both LPG and gasoline. Even if I didn't and ran out, I could walk to the nearest gas station, bus some gas (and the can), walk back and refuel, or maybe some helpful driver would be willing to sell some gas (just enough to get to the gas station). 5L of gas in my car would be good for at least 50km on the highway.
So, how much would an extra battery that is good for 50km would cost and could I carry it from the recharge station to my car?
does not do Tesla any favors.
a 100k car where running the interior temperature at comfortable levels has a detrimental effect on range... wow
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Easy there, chief. Did I say it was wrong or offensive? No. But it's there. And it's exactly as wrong and offensive as old people farting: You can't really fault them because it's just the way their bodies work and they can't control it. But that doesn't mean you can totally ignore it.
strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
Do you also complain about people buying Ferraris being performance-posers?
Of course not. Ferraris are toys too. Nothing at all wrong with toys. And an $85,000 car that can't go more than 200 miles without stopping for an hour is, likewise, a toy, not a useful general-purpose vehicle. The only difference is that Ferrari owners don't pat themselves on the back about how environmentally responsible they are by owning one.
It's interesting how most, if not all, of the ad hominem attacks on Tesla Motors are done using anonymous accounts. I've read through half the comments for this article now, and some anonymous coward seems determined to throw dirt on Tesla and defend the journalist.
c++;
You know, not that I don't agree that the whole review smells very fishy, but it would help Tesla's (and Musk's) case if logs were released showing these same numbers over *time*. For example, as was pointed out, at 400mi, the internal temperature abruptly went up a bunch, then down again, while the car lost a ton of predicted range without moving.
What happened? Did he turn on the heater and sit in a parking lot for a few hours? Did he leave the car overnight and then come back in the morning to find the charge depleted (the way he claimed) but turned on the heater briefly to warm the cabin then started out anyhow? Did he leave the heater on all night, depleting 2/3 of the car's remaining charge while it was sitting still and unoccupied?
Now, this could be easily determined... if we had logs over time. In fact, a lot of things would benefit from this analysis.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
it's because he's entertaining as hell to watch
Exactly, and in his own words to Alistair Campbell, "I don't believe what I write, any more than you believe what you say". Clarkson plays a character, and it's a lot of fun to watch, but I don't for a second believe he's like that in real life. At worst he plays a caricature of himself.
Given all that evidence, it's obvious the reporter did in fact want the car to "break down." I guess he didn't know that every single thing the car did was being tracked. There's no explanation for what he did other than purposely attempting to make the car fail. Lying about turning down the heat to prevent running out of electricity when in fact he turned it up to make it run out faster is just further evidence that it was all premeditated.
You see, this is exactly why I support paywalls for online newspapers. Quality journalism deserves to be rewarded. Insightful and accurate stories will not write themselves for free.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
So? The problems with the Vega were not immediately apparent. OTOH the promise of the Vega was immediately apparent. Same with the Alliance (which also garnered awards from the French press and French auto buying public). The Merkur range, OTOH, suffered mostly from poor marketing. These car of the year awards aren't about who's built the longest lasting, most reliable car. They're about who's built the flashiest, most innovative car.
The revolution will be mocked
The two Tesla cars supplied failed due to electrical and mechanical issues. Why ignore that? The world's biggest viewing car entertainment show, was reviewing the world's most over hyped Lotus electric conversion. They were very favorable to it, even with a Tesla crew and two failed cars. Tesla appears to be a bigger wankfest cult than Apple. The fact they lost their libel suit shows how desperate they are. Make a decent affordable car, it'll sell. But not for a very long time. The world doesn't want low range temperamental electric vehicles. Make them $10k, and things will chance. Soccer moms and snow birds will probably lap them up.
What car has 760 miles of range on a single tank? Not saying there isn't one, but I've never been aware of such a car.
And what about those who aren't "regular viewers" but instead hear from somebody that "there's a review of this really cool new car on TV?"
Unless they explicitly state (for the benefit of new watchers, if nothing else) that the "review" is scripted, it's lies and bullshit. Fiction presented as fiction is entertainment. Fiction presented as fact - even when *most* people know it's not - is grounds for libel.
Tesla "won" the lawsuit but was awarded no damages as it was determined that no financial harm had been done to them. I'm skeptical, but I wasn't following the story so maybe that's perfectly true. In any case, I have no respect for Top Gear after that incident. "But it's just for funsies" is not a legitimate excuse when you're lying to people about a product (an expensive one very important to peoples' day-to-day lives, in this case) failing to live up to its manufacturer's stated capabilities, especially by supposedly conducting a test and then ignoring the results and following the script.
Lies and bullshit.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Sure. Haven't you seen what the "top of the line" ferraris, porsches, mercedes and roll royces go for nowadays? $100k is pretty mainstream. It certainly doesn't buy you what it used to a few years ago. Yeah you can buy several hondas for that price and maybe a dozen hyundais and kias. But 100k is not so far out of the market, especially if there are rebates and tax incentives, that none will ever sell.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I owned two Vegas. Both were fine cars. The basic thing was to never let the engine overheat. Part of this was keeping on top of oil and filter changes, etc.
Or maybe I was just lucky.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Apparently the current Ford F150 can do 756 miles on a single (monstrous 36 gallon) tank, though I wouldn't describe it as a "car". The closest car would be the Mercedes-Benz S400 Hybrid at 694 miles/tank.
Then again, these are based on mileage ratings. If you hyper-mile, then I suppose you could get far higher ranges than these. The drive wouldn't be very much fun though.
And the catalytic converter can require replacement if you run the engine dry.
So why don't they show the AA taking the latest hot rod to the manufacturers to have the engine replaced?
Yeah this is exactly how lawyers make money. One says it is. The other one says it isn't. They argue about it in front of a judge, and in the end everyone gets paid. Except of course for the parties they represented...they only get paid if they're extremely lucky and if there's anything left.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) 1986, Schedule 3, chapter 18:
"(c) in either case, its braking force, when the vehicle is not being driven or is left unattended (and in the case of a trailer, whether the braking force is applied by the driver using the service brakes of the drawing vehicle or by a person standing on the ground in the manner indicated in sub-paragraph (b)) can at all times be maintained in operation by direct mechanical action without the intervention of any hydraulic, electric or pneumatic device and, when so maintained, can hold the vehicle stationary on a gradient of at least 16% without the assistance of stored energy."
There's your citation.
Tesla isn't competing with Civics. They're competing with high end Acuras - but you knew that already.
It's a bit different when it's their job.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Hey, I had an Alliance, a 1983 model I think. It lasted me 135Kmiles. Never even had to replace the clutch. On the other hand, I had frends that had them, and theirs were junk. Go figure.
Tesla also whined about Top Gear saying it would only get 55 miles per charge during their tests, but that number came from their OWN engineer when Top Gear asked them about it.
And if they regularly discussed the range that ICE cars got on the track, they'd be fine. They didn't talk about running the battery down and then having a long charge time as the problem (cue scenes of the crew sitting around, playing cards, &c) - if they had, no big deal. They talked purely about the limited range being the problem, as if the other cars were going more than 55 miles when fully fueled up - and they weren't, either, but TG never mentioned that. The implication was clear: that the Tesla had a more limited range, rather than a longer refueling cycle.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
True.
Although the fact that a normal car has the capability to long distances should the occasional need arise does add quite a bit of value to the car. Hiring a car or using public transport for those occasional jaunts cost money and is less convenient.
Everything from the Elon's logs align with what John said happened. The "irregularities" in the logs are all reasonably within the measurement variances of the instruments, or within the programming safeties of the car itself. Even the harshest claims by Elon are just restatements of what John wrote, in a more inflammatory manner.
Here's a simple example: Elon claims the car had juice left. This is true -- Li-ION batteries have a limiter to prevent 100% discharge. There's technically juice left in the battery. But it's irrelevent -- that juice can't be used -- because it would damage the battery to use it, and the car won't allow you to use it. A tow truck driver confirmed the car had reached its safety-cut off, and locked the wheels, and had to spend over an hour dragging the car onto a flat-bed. So, Elon lied -- He stated a technical truth that's not accurate to the scenario.
There's tons others -- speed variance between the speedometer and a GPS within normal variance limits for the instruments. Charging to only 28% -- 2-3x the anticipated mileage. It's like buying $5 worth of gas to drive a $2 trip. The logs match what John, the reporter, said happened.
IMHO, the reporter is telling the truth. Elon is making mountains out of molehills to distract us from the truth. And, I read both Articles -- not just talking out my ass like a bunch of commenters here...
It's not even cooking up results. Anybody who has an all-electric car who runs it until it's dead faces the same problem, which is lightyears beyond the problem facing the driver of a vehicle which burns up dino juice when they run it until it's dead.
You can't detail anything because you're being a pedantic twat and like the Tesla and are mad it was shown in a bad light. Period.
There was no journalistic dishonesty, EXCEPT THE PART WHERE THEY TRUSTED AT FACE VALUE THE RANGE ESTIMATES GIVEN TO THEM BY TESLA'S ENGINEERS. There's every chance that had they driven it the full distance, it would have stopped short -- and then they could have ripped on Tesla for being bad with math, too.
If one thing happens, there is a result. They showed the result of what happens when you drive a Tesla dry. The bit wasn't about the RANGE of the Tesla, which is actually pretty much in line with the range you get from ANY FUCKING supercar -- that is, very, very, very short. Tesla was supposed to last, IIRC, 55 miles -- well, a supercar drinking down the shit fast and hard, 5mpg isn't unreasonable and a 12gal tank puts you at 60miles/tank. Yeah.. pretty close.
The range was not the issue or important. It was what happens AFTER you've driven that range -- if you're not near a charging station, you need a tow. If you are, you need another car or to wait for several hours.
Even if the car had not gone dead, it still would've needed several hours to charge. Them pushing a state-of-the-art futurecar into a garage is a pretty amusing image, which is why they did it in that particular way, but the whole point was to illustrate the major drawback to an all-electric vehicle. It's not all fucking roses and fairy dust, there are issues, bam they showed the issues.
Cooking up results in advance... c'mon. They didn't know the brakes would fail, or how the car would handle, or feel. They did know battery powered cars have issues with recharging times, and showed that.
I never said the brakes were only a little broken. I said they were *broken, fucking period, end of story*. If my driver side mirror is hanging off the side of my car, but I can still use it to see behind me, IT'S NOT FUCKING WORKING, it's fucking broken. Even though it still kinda, sorta, sure why not, is doing its intended job. Still broken.
The brakes failed. They were broken. They failed *gracefully*, fortunately, but the brakes were still fucking broken.
If that's the sort of semantic gymnastics you undertake when talking yourself out of fixing things on your own vehicle that "aren't broken".. well, the end of this sentence is irrelevant, because you've probably just died in a horrible fiery car crash.
But hey, keep trying to redefine "broke" as nothing shy of "catastrophic failure".. keep grasping and one day you might just catch that straw, grasshopper.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I agree with your point. If Top Gear had simply driven the car for the 40 minutes it would have taken to run down, and then followed the same pre-written script, then it would have looked exactly the same to a viewer, and Tesla couldn't have complained. So the meat of the bitis true -- 55 miles of track range; can't bring fuel to the car, have to bring the car to the fuel. Top Gear just saved themselves the expense of having the film crew sit around while they proved the 55 mile range.
I'll bet, though, that in retrospect the Top Gear guys just wish they'd done the extra driving and saved themselves the other trouble.
You are making it too complicated. Broder is a Reporter. Despite the myth that they are for finding the truth and holding it up to the light, they are actually about selling newspapers and enhancing their own reputation...wait, strike that. Reverse it.
To make matters worse, he is with the NYTs, which has a habit of playing fast and loose with the facts in preference for ideology. Elon Musk is Rich and his cars are for the Rich...at least for the very well to do. Who knows what twisted thinking happens in Broder's brain, but he set out to make the car look bad for his own personal gain.
That's my bet anyway. Will Broder have the guts to respond? Will NYTs management?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The thing is, if you run out of petrol, a can and a hike later will make your car go again. Where can you go hike and get a can of batteries? And even if you get assistance with an electric car, they have to tow you to a charger and wait at least a little while for charging before you can go again.
Wah wah wah what a lot of crying you do...
Top Gear got caught cooking up the results, just like the NY Times author. They've made admissions, but you can't even come to accept these.
THE BRAKES WERE FUCKING WORKING PERIOD. All you attempts to lie about it notwithstanding. You wrote, and I quote: "When I push down on my brake pedal, and when my car does not then brake, my brakes are broken." In Top Gear the car braked! Can you not fucking understand such basic shit? You're the asshole who refuses to admit you LIED and got caught doing so, only coming with "semantics" arguments after the fact... Puts you in the same class as Top Gear and Jon Broder...
All the logs show is that the Tesla is an over priced piece of shit. In a ICE car I can drive the same route with the heat on and never have to stop to refuel.
It wasn't a breakdown. It was the car running out of energy. Which will happen eventually if you drive long enough, they just didn't want to take the time to actually drive the car long enough for it to run out (and probably didn't want to actually push it all the way to the hangar after the car stopped).
This will happen to any car, be it ICE or electric. The difference is that with a gasoline powered car you have to walk to the nearest gas station, carry back a can of gas and pour it into the tank. With an electric car you would have to push the car all the way to the recharging station. Which is what they showed - pushing the car vs carrying a gas can.
General purpose: the ability to perform most of the common tasks in an effective manner. Now look up what the average car usage is, what the 90th percentile usage is, what the common ranges are, and what the common behavior is for 500-mile drives. Is it the right car for EVERYONE? No, and no one is arguing that. But it is very, very good for all but a few types of drives, which some people might never go through in their entire life.
The only difference is that Ferrari owners don't pat themselves on the back about how environmentally responsible they are by owning one.
I take it you also complain that if a solution isn't perfect, no one should even attempt solving a problem? Electric cars have a much higher environmental upside than gas-powered cars. The very simplest use-case where that applies is for anyone with solar cells: the car essentially becomes the giant-ass battery that is needed to make ubiquitous solar cells really, really useful. Whether someone is smug about that has nothing to do with the car, and all to do with the person.
You still haven't made a case for why the car is bad.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
David S. Broder, father of fake "bipartisanship" and "centrism?"
In other words, does hack journalism run in the Broder family?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
A 600-mile trip is more than a day's drive for most people unless you never sleep, which is a really, really bad idea.
It takes roughly 18 hours' drive time to make it from Denver, CO, to Louisville KY at reasonable speeds in reasonable weather, with sleep time and bathroom breaks factored in. The trip is 1052 miles, give or take, and a car like this would be outstanding. After driving for the first 300 miles, you'd WANT to get out and stretch your legs for an hour.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The level of details are there because it was a vehicle used for review, and to review the car you have to agree to logging everything. Exactly for this reason, lying journalists with an agenda are more common than you may think.
c++;
Although this evidence does seem to show that the NYT reporter is a liar, one of the most alarming issues was the overnight loss of charge. Broder claimed that his car went from 90 miles range to 25 miles range overnight for no reason.
You can see what looks like exactly this issue in the charts between Milford and Norwich.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Wow, you're fucking ignorant. You stupid too? And lazy? Musk has the data, which you could view if you read the fucking article this was posted from.
But, apparently, you have already made up your lazy, ignorant mind, and you've chosen to be stupid.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Well, I know who not to go to for information about my next car. Broder, or these guys.
What is it with "journalists" who feel the need to be the story, instead of report the story?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Except that it didn't, and they lied. And whatever their conclusion was, it is worthless, and can be ignored.
Do you have any other useless conclusions I can ignore?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The reason the journalist got stranded was because he didn't charge the car enough to actually do the intended journey.
You're holding it wrong.
Yes, because electric cars will never run out of charge, so pretending that it did is such a lie, because it would never happen in the real world. Right?
Good to know, since the problem with gasoline cars is that they do run out of fuel eventually (sure, I could go ~1000km on both fuel tanks with my car, but the fuel would still run out). If electric cars never run out of energy that is great! Then again, I have never driven my car until it completely ran out of fuel, so maybe it can't run out of fuel too...
Really, did they have to drive the car long enough for it to run out of energy to prove that it was possible to run out of energy?
I dont think the evidence is damning at all.
the history of car companies is littered with attempts to fake data to make their cars look better than they really are.
why should tesla be any different?
i dont find the logs posted at all convincing. when an independent third party retrieves the logs from the car I would
be willing to listen.
i think it is funny how everyone jumps to defend tesla here, but if something similar occurred with a gasoline powered
vehicle from detroit I don't think the response would be the same at all.
this is not to say that the tesla isn't a good car. i am only saying that there is no independent evidence here. Tesla has
financial motives to lie, so I wouldn't be so quick to side with them.
What, none of you guys have ever faked a log? I'm disappointed in the slashdot crowd.
Most interesting to me is the tow truck driver and the locked parking brake. Would he agree that the battery was dead then?
I'm not too concerned about this, because I'm not likely to be buying a $50k+ car ever. But it is interesting that Tesla won't let a Detroit car reviewer have one:
http://www.freep.com/article/20130214/BUSINESS01/302140060/New-York-Times-Elon-Musk-engage-in-war-of-words-over-Tesla-Model-S?odyssey=tab|mostpopular|text|FRONTPAGE
(By Mark Phelan, Detroit Free Press Auto Critic )
" I haven't reviewed a Tesla yet because the company won't make any test vehicles available in Detroit. It has offered me one-hour tests in warm-weather locations like Los Angeles, but nothing local, and no extended trial representative of owning the car. "
No it sounds like a dumb design to use an electrically powered brake on an electric car when a mechanical brake uses no electricity what so ever.
If you must know. I drive the 2011 Honda Accord V6 2-door coupe. Since all of the trip except maybe 12 miles is limited access highway (interstate) the automobile stays in "ECO" mode. The remaining half of the tank is used commuting back and forth between the "away" apartment and the office (gas milage drops a bit, but it's still pretty decent).
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Regardless, Top Gear faked the tests, that's why the results were scripted before they shot the film.
AccountKiller
Yeah, that's probably why I watch 'Deathstalker' and 'Pink Flamingos' every couple of years. Sometimes a train wreck is really the best thing on television.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I have read through both responses and there is no way identify what data is good or bad. For example Musk claims the battery was not fully charged, but the reporter mentioned "Charge complete". Both could be correct in this case. For the speed there could be a disparity between the driver reported speed and what Tesla's system is reporting. That the reporter called Tesla multiple times asking for advice is something Musk ignores while he makes the case for what happened with the data logs. I don't see any reporter taking out another Tesla though without their own recording equipment.
Warlock and Phantasm series.
Gotta love those '80s crapfests!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Using the heater in the middle of winter is the proper use of car.
The review of the Tesla was not negative. Not for a Lotus Elise-type sport car, anyway. They just made fun of the autonomy at the end of the program and Tesla decided to be a dick about it.
The IT-world analogy would be somebody reviewing Windows8, conclude with a screenshot of the new style of BSOD. Nobody would even notice or care, and those who do would probably find that funny. If Microsoft were to sue the reviewer to prove that they faked the BSOD in some maner, we would probably all think they are being a dick too.
I used to have a 67 Camaro, drum brakes all around, front and back
Stopping that thing at significant speed required jamming your foot into the floor until you were sure you were going to shove your feet through, ala' Fred Flintstone.
If the difference between having assisted braking and not having it is like that versus any standard modern car, then I'd consider it broken.
About a year ago coming down an off-ramp a semi pulled out from the shoulder, unexpectedly, and I had to lay on my brakes hard.
I stopped, but in stopping they began shaking the car something fierce, and then began to grind periodically as I drove.
I pulled over and called a mechanic.
My car stopped, but my brakes were broken. They worked, and stopped my car, but they were broken. I got them fixed, AFTER I drove it home, because though I could still use them to stop my car THEY WERE FUCKING BROKEN.
A mug with the handle missing is a broken mug, even though it still holds liquid. Still broke.
I'm the asshole.. yeah, I am an asshole, but you're a deceptive fucking tool.
Christ they had to replace a fucking fuse to get the brakes working properly again. In what world do you live that things work one way, and then stop working that way, and get a part replaced so they may again work in the original manner, but at no point was anything broken?
I've got a broken mug, it's missing the handle. IT'S FUCKING BROKEN BUT IT STILL HOLDS LIQUID WHAAAAAAAAAA? OMG! It must not be broken I guess! But it's clearly broken! OH JESUS CHRIST I'M SO CONFUS oh wait, no, it's a broken fucking mug.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
A $100,000 car is "mass market"?
They were originally targeting a $50k price tag with the S but rapidly gave up on that idea. Cool car though.
-l
The Model S starts at $52k. That seems pretty close to me.
Every car is currently custom built. This makes it pretty much impossible to meet production volumes that would easily allow it to get under $50K. It also makes it pretty much impossible to quote a realistic price. The highest end model comes in at $87.4k before the buyer adds options. And some of what Tesla sells as an option are pretty much standard equipment on most 50K cars.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Not when they test million dollar cars. Then they are super respectful.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I like Hammond and May, and am baffled why Clarkson is still on the show. He's got the least personality and is the most obnoxious.
May I ask WHY you do this drive? Have you considered getting your private pilot's license and maybe flying a more direct route? I value my time at ~$10/hour. That's $120 a commute if you value your time like I do, not including vehicle expenses.
You're also driving more than 99% of people in the USA. Edge cases will always be unusual. Now consider this - let's say 50% of people switch over to EVs - that leaves more gasoline for your unusual behavior, saving you money at the pump.
I don't read AC A human right
That doesn't seem all that out of character, I think they had a supercar fuel challenge, and various supecars were geting 3-6MPG on track.
I know my m3 gets about 9mpg on track, though my previous VW on the track got about 11-12mpg.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Wow, did you get that rant out of Tesla's PR department because just about every claim you made was not true. Tesla's claims about the NYT article appear to have validity, but the about the Top Gear review -- no.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Pot, meet kettle. The data that Musk has refers to the NYT review. GP refers to the Top Gear review.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
He drove two lap around a parking lot trying to find the charging station, which was not well lit. 3000 feet. 5 minutes. Have you ever spent that much time in a parking lot looking for a parking spot? Why would Broder lie? I don't know. But I can think of a billion reasons why Musk would.
You need to read this: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/
> I'm the asshole.
Well I'm glad there's something we agree upon.
The fact that you can't discern a difference between a blown fuse causing a temporary loss of brake assistance and a degenerative physical defect that threatened safety isn't what makes you an asshole, however.
I have a coffee cup with a slight chip in the handle. Still holds coffee. I can still hold it as easily in my hand. but it's slightly less comfortable. So that means my coffee cup IS BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN!
I bought a house 4 years ago. When I moved in I discovered that an outdoor plug wasn't working. So I called up the seller and shouted "The house you sold me is BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN!", he laughed, hung up on me, and I proceeded to reset the circuit breaker, thereby fixing my BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN BROKEN house...
(e.g. the overnight loss of 54 miles of range that Broder reported, which the logs support as having happened).
I'd love to see the data plotted versus time, which I assume it must record time as well. If you look at the Cabin Temperature Setpoint at 400 miles, it very curiously spikes to maximum temperature in such a way that it couldn't be a single spurious data point. Letting the car idle with the temperature set to maximum would produce that exact effect. I doubt Musk will release the data publicly, but maybe NYT or some other news outlet that wants to show them up will take the same route with full documentation.
I had a '71 Vega. It wasn't even the best of the worst.
Distance isn't quite far enough to make the expense of renting and flying a private plane worth the trouble and expense. I also driven in weather that I wouldn't have wanted to fly in.
I don't always fly, but when I do I let the professionals pilot me around.
The price at the pump is being manipulated. The US exports a lot of gasoline. A fact that is overlooked when politicians talk about the need for more domestic oil exploration.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
"And do you remember what the OTHER cars were like in 1971? The Vega well could have been the best of the lot."
I do, it wasn't. The aluminum block Vegas are nearly all extinct because the engine was a piece of shit. They died like flies on a bug light.
Some Vegas were fitted with the cast iron four cylinder also found in Pontiacs (another Airman I knew had one so I've seen it) and were decent cars for the time.
GM should have sleeved the block from the start or just used cast iron for the whole thing. "Innovating" by inflicting unproven tech on production cars is Fucking Stupid and LARTworthy.
Later engines with plasma-sprayed bore linings worked out for motorcycle makers, but they are still shit because they are more hassle to resurface for a rebuild than a traditional iron sleeve.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
My thinking on it was as yours: that Tesla surely has access to the time that events occurred, and that if that was indeed a case of him cranking the heater up and leaving it on, they'd have used that as the smoking gun to prove his agenda. Instead, they chose to use distance for the X axis, which makes the drop-off a bit less obvious, then they chose not to comment on it at all, suggesting that doing so would reflect poorly on them. As such, I think it's a safe assumption that the drop-off is as Broder described, otherwise we could have expected Tesla to comment on it.
They won't make money from us types, we just sneak around their paywall. NYT is a stupid rag anyway why would anyone pay for it?
I would love to see other papers showing how NYT fabricated this story with the real evidence.
I don't know about "this car" since it's so dang expensive. However, *an* electric would be sweet!
-l
Then I have good news for you! Tesla is planning on releasing a $30k car in 2105.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The inconsistency lies in the presentation. In the Tesla episode, short range on the track was presented as a damning indictment of electric cars. In the other case, though I haven't seen that episode, and in fact have generally limited my consumption of Top Gear, I've seen enough TG to be sure that it's nothing but fannish slobbering over the McLaren. If it's powered by gas, fast, makes a loud roar, consumes lots of fuel, and is generally as over-the-top-macho as possible, Clarkson (and therefore the show) loves it. If it's anything else, chances are they're going to call it a heap of shit while using ridiculously biased "tests" or "races" to make it look even worse.
(I'm guessing you've never caught much Top Gear. It's very much a meathead-appeal show.)
Stewart Lee (a standup comedian) had the best response I've ever seen to the sort of weak excuses you're offering for the homophobia, misogyny, and racism which is routinely excused as "just a joke" on Top Gear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7CnMQ4L9Pc
Watch all of it. It's actually funny. And actually edgy. Unlike the "hah hah it's just a joke wink wink" bullshit on Top Gear. (It might be uncomfortable for you though. You may have to grow a spine of your own to properly appreciate it.)
Geez, you missed the point pretty badly.
I know what to do when my car runs out of fuel. When I'm lucky I have to get a jerrycan from the back and empty it into the tank. When unlucky I have to walk to the nearest petrol station (or perhaps somebody gives me a lift), fill up my jerrycan and get back to fill the car up. Now explain to me how you'd do that with an electric car? You can't, you'll have to move the car, which is not as easy as moving some petrol.
Except that it didn't, and they lied.
That's what Tesla said, but the judges ruled otherwise.
I'm having just a liiiiitle bit of trouble believing you. I looked up specs for your car online. The 2011 Accord V6 coupe w/ manual transmission appears to have been rated at 17 city / 26 highway with an 18.5 gal fuel tank. Even assuming you're managing to wring 35mpg out of it in "ECO" mode, half a tank is just 324 miles, far short of the 380 miles you claim. But doing so much better than the EPA rating sounds like a pipe dream. Those ratings are usually better than reality, which is perhaps not surprising given that the tests are actually administered by the automaker and only certified by the EPA.
For your claim to be true, you'd have to hit 41 mpg (380mi / 9.25gal). I'm pretty sure I can hit that number in my hybrid 4-cyl sedan (rated for 39 highway, 200hp total power output) if I make sure to limit speed and leave it in its "ECO" mode (restricts throttle response and cabin air conditioning output), but in a conventional 271hp V6 car? Methinks you are exaggerating. More than a little bit.
Pre scripted result == Having done your homework
Any car with a range of 244 miles in an EPA cycle will run empty before the day is over when driven hard on an track, you don't need to test anything to expect that outcome. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to write a script towards an expected outcome. And lets not forget, they where right, a Tesla won't reach it's mileage when driven hard on a track. In TFA Musk is actually complaining Broder drove the car to fast, which is an interesting statement about a car marketed as 'a new standard for premium performance'.
I'm watching this go down at my work. THey've put in one charger for an executive. what do you think will happen when fifty people show up asking for power? They will say "um, tough".
Drive 3 hours (200 miles at 65 mph), stop for charge and lunch. Drive another 3 hours, stop for an hour break. Drive another 3 hours, and you're at your destination, so let it charge up overnight.
Who the hell drives a cool looking car 5 miles UNDER the speed limit? Speed limits on the interstate are 70 here. Less than that and you're probably asking to be killed by a 84 caddillac with bad brakes. We don't have state inspections either. People accuse me of driving like a grandma for setting the cruise at 74.
Often destinations are 50-100 miles apart. There's even a lot of 2 lane roads w/ 60mph speed limits here.
Now..... all that aside.... I would LOVE to have one of these if I could afford it. Would be great for running to town. Not practical as a primary vehicle here but awesome nonetheless.
If you're a trucker with a pee bottle that doesn't want to stop for anything, I'm sure this isn't great. For normal people, an hour break every 3 hours of driving is fine.
I'll take 15 or 20 minutes.... that's all I can usually afford. Not a trucker but my job requires a lot of field work as well as enjoying my office. The fam and I also make trips out-of-state every once in a while which this wouldn't be very useful for if we were on a schedule.
I want a turbine-electric hybrid. Can be nuclear for all I care.
It's not a very good one. I'll leave it to you to figure out why but I'll give you a hint: "NYT"
Also, I wonder what they do about trucks and air brakes.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
They figured out why the emergency break was locked. It was because the key was turned off. Had the key been turned on the car would have rolled onto the flatbed without problem. The same thing occurred when they tried to get the car off the flatbed.
Those numbers must be using the new method? The new method assumes California reformulated gasoline rules, which while great for reducing pollution from cars manufactured before 1981 (when Oxygen sensors became mandatory), tends to reduce the gas mileage by 20% or more.
If it's calculated with the new EPA method, per the above, then that's truly impressive, since on unreformulated gasoline, that'd work out to 70.58 MPG, which puts it slightly under the 72 MPG from the 1992 Honda CRX/HF.
But it's nice to know that it holds the worlds record, even though it should actually have gone to the Honda.
We know the facts in this case and can see how far the news article diverges.
Think of all the times you read a news article about some topic you don't know much about besides what the article tells you - and yet we tend to take those articles at face value.
The handful of times I have known people involved in an event which got reported on in a newspaper, the article often diverged wildly from reality. One time, a murderer was reported as "having been tracked down after a 3-day manhunt" when in reality once he came off his meth high he walked to the nearest police station and handed himself in.
Let me get this straight: I can't drive 65 or turn up the heat without having to worry about getting stranded?
If your petrol vehicle had a very accurate range finder, you'd notice the range going down when you sped up or turned up the heat.
You don't have an accurate range finder, so you assume that those things make no difference; and if you even do notice that your vehicle varies a bit in how many miles you get to each tank, you just put it down to randomness because you don't understand the actual factors that go into vehicle range.
What we really need to address these discrepancies are the same logs plotted over time. For example, at the 400mi mark, where the power and predicted mileage drops, the car's heater also spikes upwards and then down again. Broder claims he left the car overnight and came back to find it with a sadly reduced battery... but going by the logs, an equally valid (and possibly more plausible, when you remember how an electric car's heater works) possibility is that he left the car for a while with the cabin heater intentionally left running to drain the battery, then came back after burning off a chunk fo the charge. Now, if only we could see the time of day when he stopped at 400mi, and for how long, and what the battery charge, predicted range, and cabin settings were during that entire time... but we can't, because the car wasn't moving, so all events over that time period take place at the same point on the X axis.
I'm pretty damn sure that Tesla *has* the logs over time as well; it would sure help if they released them...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The price at the pump is being manipulated. The US exports a lot of gasoline. A fact that is overlooked when politicians talk about the need for more domestic oil exploration.
Oil/gasoline is a global market. We also import a lot of oil/gasoline. If we don't sell batch X to China, batch Y from somewhere else will go to China instead of the USA. Due to shipping and all, the costs would likely be higher in that scenario. It's complicated.
The way to drop the price of gasoline is to reduce the demand for it. If the 10% of drivers most suited for EV use switched, we'd save boatloads of oil/gasoline, and it'd drop the price for the 90% still using gasoline vehicles.
I don't read AC A human right
I completely agree. That said, and as I already replied in the sibling comment immediately preceding yours, my thinking is that if Tesla thought graphing it over time would have favored them, they'd have done so and called Broder out for it. Instead, they chose not to, which tells me that the graph over time supports Broder's account of how the charge went down. As such, they'd rather it be represented simply as a sudden drop on one graph that they can choose not to comment on and hope people won't notice, rather than leaving it as a drop-off that can be easily correlated to a lack of activity on Broder's part.
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The top model is $87,400. That's mass market for luxury cars (niche luxury car would be a Bentley).
The starter model is $52,400. That's in reach of upper middle class buyers (lawyers, doctors, businessmen, etc.)
http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You still get another could hundred miles on the gasoline engine in a hybrid. But, if you drive to work and back and your round trip is only like 5 miles. You can go pretty much all electric whereas with the conversions your gas costs 1.20 a gallon.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Well, Broder claims his hands were white and his feet freezing.
Yet, at no point does the set temperature go below 64 Deg F. The recommended set temperature for winter is 68.
This in itself damages his entire credibility.
Your feet start freezing at 64 F?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
That link is in reference to homes, not cars, and while the set point was at 64F, that doesn't mean that it was actually 64F in the cabin. It's not uncommon for the portion of a cabin where feet reside to be a significantly lower temperature than other parts of the cabin. As for white knuckles, honestly, with all of the other literary license he takes, I'd think that he might have just gripped the wheel harder so that he could actually claim he had white knuckles. ;)
Long story short, I don't think that damages his credibility at all, but I do think his credibility is shot for other reasons.
Just so long as I could get a car from Stark Resilient... I'd love a car powered by a repulsor...
Let's not forget that in the libel-lawsuit capital of the world, Tesla's libel suit was switftly dismissed.
It was "swiftly" dismissed, because the judge said no one would confuse Top Gear with reality. Problem is, a lot of people do.
One company does something wrong, so all companies must do something wrong?
Tesla didn't say they "rig" their vehicles. He did say they add additional logging. They'd be dumb not to.
55 mls on a track is actually a lot. You will not be able to make it unless you are well trained.
Not to mention, they are usually extremely biased against American cars.
Heh, ironic then that the Tesla Roadster was built in the UK at the Lotus factory. They could have spun it as "stupid 'mericans had to come to good old blighty to build a proper car" except of course TG hates electric cars so that was never going to happen.
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Too bad its true... It's not I really care if you believe it or not.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Do you have any other useless conclusions I can ignore?
Here's a cup of hot water.
Here's the same cup 3 hours later - its stone cold.
Except, rather than have the film crew hanging around for three hours, I chucked the hot water and filled it up with cold and filmed that.
So, the laws of thermodynamics are clearly useless, and can be ignored.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I see similar things all the time at work. Business folks will fail to perform some action and when questioned about it they'll come up with some excuse about the application wouldn't work, or I didn't get the e-mail. Then we do some investigation and find that the logs tell a different story. Namely that they never even tried to open the application, or that they e-mail they supposedly didn't receive is marked as read and sitting in their deleted items folder in Outlook. People naturally take the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is often to blame technology. What they don't realize is that the technology is keeping track of what they're doing and can replay the actual events that took place. In our case, it would be bad form to publicly embarrass an employee by throwing logs on the table and saying they're full of it, but in this case Tesla had nothing to lose by doing so.
I have a Nissan Leaf, total electric. Leases were available for $200/month, $0 down. I was putting $150/month worth of gas in my truck driving it around town. The truck now is parked, waiting to be used as a truck a couple times/month or as a backup vehicle when one of our fleet (2 married kids, my wife, my Leaf - 7 total vehicles) is in the shop. It's a great backup.
I charge the Leaf off 110V in the garage overnight. I plan ahead and charge accordingly. Right now I have 23 miles of charge (checked from my desk using my iPhone), will either run over to a close-by 220V charger after lunch and leave it there until quitting time (for free), or plug it in tonight and be ready for the weekend. My commute is a few miles/day, I can do that and run errands on 1-2 charges/week. I've not seen a noticeable increase in my electric bill in the 5 months I've had it.
Would I buy it as my only car - no, not yet. Would I buy it outright and not lease it - no, not yet. Am I saving money for the next couple years while the technology matures - absolutely.
Would I rather have a Tesla? You bet. Can I justify the cost - no way.
Is there some kind of joke where people just answer the same comment with the same response without reading the existing thread in its entirety?
-l
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There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Ford Merkur, besides the stupid name and the fact it occupied an idiotic location in the market so didn't sell.
And the problem with the Renault was reliability over time, something that it would have been rather hard to know when it first came out. That was also, essentially the problem with the Chevy Vega, which everyone loved in 1971...and had managed to have _two_ recalls by mid-1972.
Naming a new car that, unknown to everyone, _falls apart over time_ as 'Car of the Year' is not the same thing as naming one that supposedly gets much worse range than claimed. Now, if the claim is that Telsa Motor's cars fell apart over time, that would be something else. But Motor Trend does _test_ cars, so they do indeed test the range of cars...they just do not have a time machine.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I think you'll find that in the US they have very similar regulations.
Trucks use a bloody great big spring to hold the brake on, and have a complicated system of reservoirs and check valves to ensure that a burst pipe doesn't just instantly lock all the wheels. Buses have an even more complicated system with a sort of a latch thing that holds off the parking brake mechanism.
It's a conspiracy theory! Forget the evidence, The NY Times will debunk it and Anderson Cooper will do a special on it exonerating Broder because electric cars are BS and doomed to go the way of the printed news....Right?
Do you know what a 'track day' car is? Moron. You don't even know what top gear was reviewing the car as.
A 'track day' car is a half race car that people take to a race track that their club has rented time on. It costs a fair amount just for your share of track rental.
If you go 55 miles then have to give it up for the day the car is a USELESS TRACK DAY CAR.
Everybody else is burning tanks of gas and using up a couple of sets of tires (Clarkson of course uses up a couple of _dozen_ sets of tires).
Only a moron wouldn't have known that an electric sports car is useless as a track day car going in. It's not Top Gears fault that Tesla motors didn't realize this.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Pure, utter unmitigated bullshit. Do you even drive fast or well?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not 'consumer reports' for accurate information.
They do head up their ass things like give the 'vette an 'unacceptable' because it gets bad gas mileage and has a small trunk.
Like they didn't already have that review written before they got the car.
They all have agendas.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Slashdot is a full day behind on this story. Most of the up-modded comments here were knee-jerk reactions rushing to the support of Elon Musk. Although Musk has been shown to have over-reacted, and he's ended up looking like kind of a cad for the accusations he's made, it's really nothing compared to the caddishness of the people commenting here.
Ok, so Stewart Lee is a very rage filled man who sincerely hates Jeremy Clarkson. His comedy routine is quite angry and vitriolic actually. He basically repeats the same joke again and again and again for 14 minutes, in varying degrees of hate and rage.
Please help me out, what was I supposed to appreciate?! Did I miss it because I don't have a spine??
Everything in Top Gear is true. Nothing is ever staged in that show. It is 100% real.
Sarcasm.
That said, I haven't seen the epsoide in question (Canada is several seasons behind :(). Usually it is pretty easy to see that something is being staged in Top Gear. Though they do have a political slant (i.e. cars are great, piss off), so I don't know if they tried to be a bit sneaky or not. Usually it is pretty in cheek however.
> 12 hours is my limit. I know people that routinely do 18 hours
I'd put anyone doing over 8 hours a day of driving in the "trucker" category. It's not what most people do, even on vacations.
Yes, the current electric cars won't work for these extreme drivers. For normal people, it's fine.