On February 8th, the New York Time’s Josh Broder released a scathing review of the Tesla Model S, claiming it was unfit for cold weather driving. The problem was, according to Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, there were factual inaccuracies in the piece. Matter of fact, according to him, the review “was fake” and he would produce some hard data to back that up. Yesterday, he did, and it’s quite shocking. It turns out Broder did a number of things to, at least apparently, purposely sabotage the test. Here are just a few:
The car never actually ran out of battery, even as the flatbed truck was being called.
On the final leg of Broder’s trip, he disconnected the charger with a range of 32 miles on the dash, when that leg of the trip was going to be 62 miles. “He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense.”
On that last leg, Broder drove right past a charging station, even as alarms on the dash were telling him that he was low on charge.
Perhaps most damning of all, in one of the legs of the trip, Broder drove around in circles in a tiny parking lot for over half a mile, attempting to drain the battery fully, which was displaying “0 miles remaining”. He didn’t succeed that time, though apparently that motivated him to try harder next time.
There are quite a few other things, and you should definitely head over to the Tesla link below for more details. It’s sad to see media outlets trying to destroy the reputation of what could very well be the future of transportation. In the end, hard data speaks louder than everything, and we hope Tesla succeeds in reversing whatever damage the NYT might have done.
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