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NY Times' Broder Responds To Tesla's Elon Musk
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."
Is it so far fetched to imagine that there isn't a conspiracy, and his bias is just part of who he is? Humans are irrational. They form opinions and become entrenched in them. Millions of people are pretty biased in interpreting politics, not because they are part of some mass conspiracy, they are just stubborn and close minded.
They know exactly what Broder did with the car. It's like your son telling you he didn't visit that porn site when his laptop's IP address is logged by your router as having done so. Seriously, the guy didn't understand the technology he was fucking around with and his lack of credibility is about to be exposed in a big way.
What's most likely is that he's just sloppy and got caught fudging the data. It was a Fake, But Accurate moment, a firecracker in the gas tank moment, or, a Zimmerman tape edit moment
Reported fudge, lie, push the truth to fit their preconceived notions. What his was? Who knows. But he tried to make a stupid point and got caught.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Something that Broder also failed to mention in his original article. In my opinion, if you are claiming to review A CAR, and THE CAR says it won't reach your destination, and someone one the phone says go anyway, and you go, and it fails to reach the destination, implying there's something wrong with the car by saying it should have but didn't is either being deliberately misleading or unforgivably stupid. There's no third option.
Clearly, tech support for computers with drivetrains is as stellar as tech support for computers in general, but if Broder is going to blame everything on bad advice, even if every single thing he says is true, it destroys his credibility as a technology reviewer of any kind. That would be no different than doing a review of an operating system and saying "it kept losing all my settings" when in fact what was happening was some tech support person kept telling you to reinstall it from scratch. That's a pretty important thing to mention explicitly. The Tesla didn't just "fail" by Broder's own words it failed because he was told to do dumb things and actually did those dumb things *against the advise of the car itself*.
And that's the best case scenario assuming I take it as a given every single factual statement made by Broder about the test drive is accurate. That doesn't account for why CNN's route replication appears to have been dramatically different.
How is this "Insightful"? Given the low regard that the general public have for reporters, why would they regard the reporter as a customer like them?
Personally, I don't think reporters get called enough on their BS. I am not a big Elon Musk fan (he came across like a baby after the "Top Gear" situation), but his response in this situation raised my opinion of him a couple of notches.
Anyway, in the past, I have observed a strong bias against particular cars in the Automobiles section in the NY Times. There are occasionally very good automotive-related articles there, but, for the most part, I take everything that I read in that section with a grain of salt. Given that NYC is one of the most car-unfriendly cities in the US, I have always wondered why the NY Times even has an Automobiles section.
Speaking as a person who provides support professionally...
Fuck you, fuck the horse you road in on, fuck your mother, your father, your sister, and your dog.
If Musk's people gave the right advice, and he's positive they did, major props to him for standing behind them. I wish more companies out there would be willing to tell off the "customers" who purposely act the fool.
How you treat those above you shows nothing. How you treat those "below" you shows everything.
If you didn't find it on your first time circling the small 100 car lot, why wouldn't you just slow down to look for it rather than going in circles around the lot 30-40 times at a speed too fast to carefully look?
30-40 times? Hah.
My estimate of the perimeter around the main parking lot area is about 500 feet. That would put it at 6-7 times max to get 0.6 miles.
But look: the Tesla charger isn't in that group of parking spaces, it's lower down to the left. Directly in front of the building. (Google helpfully has it marked.) Going around the whole building would take the distance up quite a bit more, depending on what path you follow. (It's not totally clear from there what paths are legal, and there doesn't seem to be street view.) If you got there, drove around the main parking lot a couple times looking for something that wasn't there, went up and down an aisle or two, then found yourself going around the north side of that building, that'd probably be sufficient to hit 0.6 miles.
And furthermore, 0.6 is even an overestimate. Based on Musk's own graphic, that 0.6 includes much of the exit into the service plaza. Just that exit could easily account for 20% of that 0.6 miles.
I'm not saying that Broder is in the right when it comes to the whole story. I think there are a number of unanswered questions, and some parts of his review + Musk's data that are suspicious. But, I also think that a couple part in particular of Musk's post are grasping at straws, and I think "Broder was driving around trying to run the car out of power" is one of them -- I find Broder's explanation way more credible than Musk's pseudo-accusation of sabotage.
Considering two other reporters from Consumer Reports and Motor Trends drove essentially the same route without any of the problems Broder had, combined with Broder's history of electric car bias and oil friendly articles, I'm much more inclined to believe Musk over Broder.
Musk has not published data, but charts...
Those charts are data. They're representations of time series. Do you think it only counts as data when it's numbers in columns? Then measure the chart, write down the numbers, and make yourself happy.
In this case, I'm way more inclined to trust Tesla. Why? Well they have data, the reporter doesn't. I figure both sides have a reason to make shit up.
Reporters are not someone I truest with facts these days, it is stories. They like to have the big story, and that often means scandal, be it true or false. We have have, many, many times, seen the press neglect evidence in their haste to get a story, omit things that don't fit with their narrative, frame things (pictures in particular) to show what they want, and sometimes outright make shit up.
Now I also figure Tesla has a reason to lie since, after all, they want to sell cars and as such want their cars portrayed in the best possible light. Companies don't want to admit faults of their products if they don't have to.
So given that both sources can be suspect, who do we believe? Well the one with the more credible data. The reporter has nothing but "ummm, the tires were the wrong size" which is a very half-assed explanation. Tesla appears to have rather extensive data logging. Given the choice between data and assertion, I'm inclined to trust the data. Give me some proof it is wrong if you wish to convince me otherwise.
This guy has no credibility, particularly in light of his half-assed response. To me it sounds like he was trying to gin up a sensationalized story, got caught, and now is doing a poor job covering.
And the car salesman doesn't like his half-baked vehicle to be reviewed negatively
How about "Car maker reacts poorly to a supposedly reputable publication putting out blatantly false statements that damage their reputation, having the data to back their complaint up"?
"Half baked" is kind of out in left field here-- the car did better than it should have, but could not complete an impossible task. Did you actually read Musk's blog entry? You know, the one with all of the data backing his "ramblings" up? Or the part where another journalist completed this exact same task with no issues?
"...drove the EV something like 2 miles into the heart of a major city with huge traffic congestion issues where it could take 45 minutes to move a mile..."
FTFY
Case in point:
http://gawker.com/5789444/guy-proves-childs-big-wheel-bike-is-faster-transportation-than-a-nyc-bus
A grown man riding a freaking big wheel went one mile in NYC in less time than the city's fleet of buses take to go the same route and distance. He not only beat the bus, he did so by two minutes. On a big wheel. That two miles looks a bit bigger now doesn't it?
But that isn't as much the point, is it? Per Musk's data from the Model S driven, the guy undercharged the car three separate times, sped like a maniac with the heat cranked up, and drove it around in circles in a parking lot trying to kill off the battery. He then responded to the accusations with basically a "nuh uhhhh!" when they had a freaking black box recording every single thing done in the entire vehicle.
This is the kind of crap you catch 10 year olds trying to pull on their parents.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."