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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.
This is right on. Trust data.
You can look at my comment history... I have a history of trust problems with corporate America, but in this case there are logs backing up the claims. The NYT has free access to those logs and if there is tampering then it IS going to be found.
What SHOULD have been done by the NYT here... they should have had video evidence of what they are saying. We're stuck with one reporter who has shown to have an anti-electric car bias and his word vs a log. It's not hard to see who has the burden of proof in this situation.
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.
Unless these logs were doctored (unlikely), then Broder lied. However, the one claim of Broder's that Tesla doesn't try to debunk is the loss of charge from overnight cold. Looking at the graphs, somewhere around mile 400, there is a sudden drop in charge from ~45% to ~38%, with a corresponding drop in estimated range from ~80 miles to ~20 miles (the two are not linearly related, presumably because of the intrincacies of the charge/discharge curve being nonlinear). This seems to correspond to what Broder said, that by letting the car sit in the cold, it lost 2/3 of its range.
... actually there is a spike in the 'cabin temperature' right at that point...). As someone actually interested in electric cars, that's the kind of question I would like a proper answer to. So, it would have been nice for Tesla to address it (beyond just saying that they have lots of sales in frigid countries).
This is the one negative thing that may have been true in the NYTimes story. Of course, now that Broder has ruined his credibility, even that must be called into question (did he leave it running in a parking spot for a few hours with the heater blasting?