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NY Times' Broder Responds To Tesla's Elon Musk

Posted by samzenpus on from the ding-ding-ding dept.

DocJohn writes "NY Times' John Broder responded to Elon Musk's blog entry. Accused of driving around a parking lot for no reason, for instance, Broder notes he was simply looking for the poorly marked charging station. Worst of all, much of Broder's behavior can be attributed directly to advice he received from Tesla representatives — something Musk fails to mention."

3 of 609 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A couple of points by EvanED · · Score: 5, Informative

    A charging station he had previously been to...which makes his claim seem pretty suspect to me.

    When? On the way up?

    Not true: there are separate service plazas on each side of the highway. Furthermore, if you look at Google's "satellite" photo, they are not symmetric -- the parking lot is a completely different layout on the two sides, and the Tesla charging station (marked on the Google image) is in a different location.

  2. Re:Does Broder not know how to fill'er up????? by craighansen · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was at a "regular" charging station, not a supercharging station. It was an unscheduled stop and he charged it for an hour, which he says Tesla support staff told him would be enough to get back to the supercharging station. Reportedly, they said that the lost range would be recovered as he continued to drive, warming the batteries. It would have taken as much as five hours to fully charge the car at that station.

  3. Re:A couple of points by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why jump from station to station on as little power as possible. He should have powered up the car to its max before leaving every station, not just enough to make it to the next one.

    Because it's an electric car. It's not like a gasoline car where filling the tank takes twice as much time as filling half a tank. The charge you get doesn't ramp up linearly with time. It starts off charging quickly, then slows down. If you charge it up to max, you're going to be sitting at the charging station for several hours. The quickest way to get from one place to another (minimizing charge times) is to use about a 50% quick-charge at each stop (supposed to take a half hour).

    If you look at the logs Tesla posted, you can see that's exactly what he did. The two interim supercharges gave him approx 200 and 150 miles in range. The controversial Norwich charge was not a supercharge station, so he would've been there overnight if he'd charged to full there. He did the prudent thing - take on only as much charge as needed to get to the next supercharge station. Except according to him, Tesla employees told him he could get there with a smaller charge than the mileage meter showed was needed. According to Musk, his employees told him no such thing.