Let’s answer these assertions in turn. My account was not a fake. It happened just the way I described it. When I first charged the car, which was equipped with the highest-capacity battery available, of 85 kilowatt-hours, at the Tesla Supercharger station in Newark, Del., I left it connected to the cable for 49 minutes until the dash display read “Charging Complete.” The battery meter read 90 percent full, with a range of 242 miles.

I was not directed by anyone at Tesla at any time to then switch to the Max Range setting and wait to top off the battery. If I had, I might have picked up an additional 25 or so miles of range, but that would have taken as long as 30 additional minutes.

When I parked the car for the night at a hotel, the range meter showed 90 miles remaining, and I was about 45 miles from the Milford Supercharger. As I recounted in the article, when I awoke the next morning the indicated range was 25 miles. The rest of that story is told in the article, including a Tesla official’s counsel, which I followed, that an hour of charging at the Norwich, Conn., utility would restore much of the range lost overnight, which had disappeared because of what he called a “software glitch.”

On that late January day when the Model S required a tow, it was "somewhere between 0 and 10 degrees outside," Ibsen said, so both of them were cold and miserable.

"It didn't appear that the gentleman driving the car wanted it to not work," Ibsen told me. "I don't think he had any desire to stand freezing on the side of the road."

Much of what Ibsen told me echoed what his towing company coworker said earlier today. When he arrived, the Model S was stuck in park and its electric parking brake was on, making it very hard to get onto the flatbed. There was a way to jump the car's 12-volt battery, but that wasn't working, he said.

Now, the car's touch screen center console was working, and Ibsen was on the phone with a Tesla employee in California who was walking him through a process to get the brake off, but he wasn't getting the messages or menus on the screen that the employee said he was supposed to.

"We put the jumper box on to get the 12 volt battery working, but he said if it was completely dead it wouldn't work," Ibsen said. He said the Tesla employee was helpful but understandably frustrated.

Now Tesla Motors, or a pro-Tesla individual close to the company, appears to be trying to smear Max Drucker, the owner who spoke out about the problem, by leaking confidential documents and insinuating that he's doing a "shakedown" despite the fact that Drucker doesn't appear to be asking for any money.