The biggest mistake Elon made in his response was to dump all that data and to attempt to tear apart each part of the review. This means that the rebuttals now involve taking pieces of that and disproving them in the aim of disproving Tesla's entire argument.
Tesla should have posted nothing more than a single line statement saying that Broder left the last charging station for a 65 mile trip with 32 miles on his range meter.
Tesla had the opportunity to define the territory of this argument very narrowly. Because Tesla placed everything on the table in the response, this has become a case of he-said, she-said.
I think the biggest mistake he made was accusing Broder of intentionally making the car fail in attempt to discredit the concept of an electric vehicle.
It's one thing to present data that contradicts the article. But to suggest possible dishonest motivations was a step too far.
> As a group, journalists simply get a great number of things wrong and cannot be relied on for detail oriented work.
Something is very wrong here. If the way you conduct business has nearly equal probability of pissing off innocent people unjustly as it has of making wrongdoers hot under the collar, isn't it time to revisit how you do things?
Nonetheless it confirms my experience of journalists also: as a class, they often play fast and loose with the truth and frequently misattribute statements, misinterpret facts and quote misleadingly out of context.
Take everything you read in the press with a huge grain of salt.
Newspapers are financed by ads and subscriptions. Both categories drive up ad impressions, links, referrals, newspaper profile, etc. and even if somebody would drop out of subscription based on that the chance is very low. So as long as journalists can keep on this side of a complete fabrication (that could drive subscribers away in serious numbers and make advertisers think twice) they're fine with sloppy work. A good controversy only helps the bottom line, and they can always say "we might have been wrong in small details but we illuminated serious concerns of public importance".
"As a group, journalists simply get a great number of things wrong and cannot be relied on for detail oriented work."
This is quite a general statement, which in itself cannot be defended. Furthermore, I think that NYT's standards are higher than the average journalist taken "as a group". Their fact checking is rigorous (although, of course, is not infallible, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair)
There's an old saying that you shouldn't argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.
It's still broadly true. Regardless of the dwindling influence of newspapers, arguing with the NYT doesn't sell cars but it does generate clicks for the paper.
Tesla can best refute the claims in the article by building great cars. A car review is not a story with legs, a fight between a genius billionaire and the worlds most respected newspaper has juice, and only compounds interest in a highly negative article for Tesla.
Exactly. The bottom line is that if there's no good reason to leave a gas station with 32 more miles to go in the tank if you intend to go another 65 miles. The fact that the car is electric or a Model S is irrelevant.
It's just a dumb choice and if you make such a mistake, I am of the opinion that it disqualifies from saying anything about said car. Especially if you usually specialize in mostly hagiographic articles about oil companies in the NYT.
The bottom line is that if there's no good reason to leave a gas station with 32 more miles to go in the tank if you intend to go another 65 miles.
I find the notion that people like standing around looking at charging stations for hours on end extremely odd. The test was supposed to simulate a normal driver, and a normal driver will absolutely do the minimum necessary. With gasoline -- a ridiculous energy rich substance that we can fill in just a few short minutes -- most of us still find the five minute fill up once a week or less a nuisance.
Tesla is actually contradicting themselves a bit: They berate him for not heeding the in-car predicted range, and then pat themselves on the back that it actually went 51 miles, and supposedly still had juice (apparently an accessory battery was dead). In other words, that what their engineers supposedly told him (that it would recover the incredible loss of power overnight, from 90 miles left to 20 miles left, once the batteries warmed up) was actually largely right.
Musk also makes a big show about him not turning down the temperature, when his own graph shows that not much further in the journey he turned it to the minimum for an extended period of time.
Reading both sides, I find Musk's heavy handed attack response incredibly unpalatable. He was so hasty in attacking, he ignored that his own data and his own claims in many ways supported the reporter.
Tesla should have posted nothing more than a single line statement saying that Broder left the last charging station for a 65 mile trip with 32 miles on his range meter.
Tesla had the opportunity to define the territory of this argument very narrowly. Because Tesla placed everything on the table in the response, this has become a case of he-said, she-said.