Outrage

Today:

My automobile is running low on fuel. I drive to a gas station, spend five minutes filling the gasoline tank, and leave.

The Future:

My automobile is running low on charge. The car informs me I need to slow down and shut off the heater. I try to limp to a recharging station and get stranded. I call for a flatbed truck to haul my vehicle to the nearest charging station. The CEO of a tax-payer subsidized company which produces my $100,000 car takes to Twitter to call me a liar. The company in question collects the logs of my travels to prove the point and posts them on their blog.

The future sucks.

Lil4X

Funny that John Broder and the NYT got caught with their agenda-driven journalism showing. The "Old Gray Lady" of the American press, the paper has a long history of managing news for its benefit while proclaiming itself "America's Newspaper of Record". In an age of rapidly declining circulation and failing ad sales, it often seeks out controversy as it did at its launch, back before the Civil War.

I don't see this as a "big oil" issue at all, but a desperate attempt by a failing news operation to generate its own headlines by proclaiming the failure of Tesla Motors. Broder reckoned without the scope of the technology he was attempting to expose as fraud - yes, it came back to bite him big time. What happened?

First, Broder is incredibly ignorant about the properties of batteries in general and the Tesla's operation in particular.

1. Batteries, particularly Li-ion batteries, lose capacity at low temperatures. The Tesla has the capacity to warm its batteries to a more efficient temperature, but this itself requires energy.
   
   
2. The posted range of the car is based on a full charge and ambient temperatures above 55°F.
   
   
3. The car was being driven at high constant speeds which will cut range, particularly at low outside air temperatures.
   
   
4. In addition to these facts, at 10°, Broder was probably using the car's heater (also electric-resistance type) rather heavily - again cutting into the energy available from the batteries to propel the vehicle.
   
   
5. The car's instrumentation was correctly reading all of the incoming performance data and making adjustments to its estimate of the remaining range throughout his test, but Broder chose to ignore it.
   
   
6. Broder chose to ignore repeated and consistent warnings from his instruments that his charge was running low, yet continued to his destination anyway - even deviating from his planned route to take a less-efficient one.
   
   
7. Broder, being warned by his instruments that he would not reach his planned destination, rather than pull over and plug in the on-board 110V charger for a couple of hours to pick up the energy needed to complete his trip, chose to drive to the point that the system shut down to protect itself from deep-cycling the remaining ergs of energy from the battery pack that would have destroyed them.

It is clear that Broder was outsmarted by the very technology that he intended to trash. First, the system shut down in its last moments in an act of self-preservation. It was obviously smarter than the driver. Second, the vehicle was logging his activities, control inputs, and position - which pretty much ratted out his cheap attempt to smear Tesla by intentionally creating an incident.

If the automotive community doesn't come down hard on John Broder for his obvious attempt to libel the automaker with a clearly intentional scheme to produce a spectacular failure for the benefit of the paper by creating scandal where none existed, we aren't paying sufficient attention. If Broder doesn't have his journalist's credentials lifted for this cheap attempt at fraud, he should at least have his driver's license suspended. I don't like to think people either this deceitful or this stupid are allowed to drive on public highways.

spwolf

welcome to the world of journalism... thats how reviews of any car are written... plenty of Lexus and Toyota reviews had bad info in them.

But you guys are not doing Tesla any favours anyway... so if you get Tesla, dont deviate from planned route and to go with the flow of traffic or Musk will call you out on twitter!

Allen K

iTrader: (4)

No, if you get a Tesla that is provided by the company for the purposes of an auto review don't deviate from the planned route and lie about it in a column or Musk will call you out on twitter

My0gr81

Why are you so intent on ignoring the fact that NYT lied about the test drive on a car provided to them for a purpose different than what the article was about?

Outrage

What sort of "review" must stick to a manufacturer's route on the manufacturer's timetable driving the way the manufacturer dictates? That doesn't sound like a review at all. That sounds like propaganda.

My0gr81

This wasn't a manufacturer's planned route, he got caught lying about his own route in the review by the gps tracker and the instrumentation recordings in the car.

Allen K

iTrader: (4)

I suppose it's also propaganda when Ferrari or Lambo says sure you can take our car to the track, but we'll have a team of engineers there to tune it to the specific track conditions.

Outrage

Yes, it is.

My0gr81

How is that? Most of the Ferrari and Lambo being reviewed are cars are being sold to the retail market, not for tracking and racing. Testing them in that setting for the purposes of a retail review puts them at a disadvantage.

At least they offer to tune the cars for track testing, some manufacturers outright refuse to provide review cars if they are going to be tracked or raced. And so they should if the cars aren't designed for it.

GoHuskers

I agree with Mr. Musk here. If you lied and tried to hurt my company then I will call you out, will sue you, and make you issue public apology. Stupid journalist.

spwolf

because going 5mph over the speed limit and running your heater is not supposed to be a big deal... nor is 5 minutes in the parking lot.

from the other forum:


and of course, another thing is - they told him to turn off the heater.

Not sure if they want to tell their $100k customers to turn off their heaters.

In reality, reported did nothing that normal driver wouldnt. He could have charged at slow chargers but again, do they expect people to stay for 8hrs at slow charge station in order to "refuel" the car for another 260 miles? Even 100 minutes at super chargers is really too slow but L2 chargers, which are most common public charging stations, are too slow for such long range vehicles.

Imagine if refueling your current car took 2 hours to get 200 mile range, and only available at several stations in the state? And rest of them took 8 hours? And your home took 2 days?

As I said, Tesla is handling this way too wrong as we will see in next days.

LeX2K

Nonsense. Musk is doing his job and protecting his company against slanderous journalism. He'd be an immature and incompetent moron if he just let it slide.

spwolf

Yeah, too bad he is doing the same thing as that journalist - presenting his version of truth, that is not exactly right.

Musk claimed that Tesla S never run out of juice... but it did...

Apperantly, main battery stopped charging 12v to protect itself and the car died. So Musk is being "innovative", as main battery never discharged completely, because it never will reach 0% due to protection but the car did not want to start regardless, was dead and had to be towed, which was also a problem.



more on Jalopnik:

http://jalopnik.com/towing-company-t...n-it-196100064


And Antlantic Wire run a piece on acusations and what seems to have happened:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/techn...#disqus_thread


Musk might have dealt Tesla a blow that it might not recover easily from.

spwolf

and "circling around in parking lot", was a total of 0.6 miles, near charger station that was not marked while he was trying to find it.

I think NYT is going to ram hard on Musk... this might become even bigger story.