It reads very similar to the infamous NYT review[1].
[2] Tesla's response: https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive
[2] Tesla's response: https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive
You can read the response from the journalist[1] and the NYT public editor[2] which concludes the report was done with "integrity". Musk was initially sympathetic to the journalist, then decided to go after him after he calculated that the optics of this situation were not good for Tesla. He does that crap all the time including with accident victims. Blames the victim. We've seen this over and over again, with little or no consequences for Musk.
Here are the major issues:
1- LOWERING SPEED: Out of the gate range was dropping faster than expected. Probably due to cold weather range loss (it was 30F).[3] He was advised to slow down and did so, which already is not a very good road trip story for Tesla.
Musk attacks him over whether he really engaged the cruise control or just how fast he was going (claims "65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip"). But in his reply the journalist correctly notes that Musk mischaracterized what the data shows ("Tesla’s logs clearly show, much of my driving was at or well below the 65 m.p.h. speed limit, with only a single momentary spike above 80"). This is the first major mischaracterization of the data on the part of Musk.
2- LOWERING TEMP: The reporter was also advised to turn down the cabin temp to improve range. Musk accuses him of lying and notes the average temp was 72 degrees.
But notice, he only cites the average. The journalist response that he cycled between shutting off the heat until his extremities got so cold he couldn't take it anymore, then kicking it back on for a time. This also is not a great story for Tesla. He notes, "The data clearly indicates that I sharply lowered the temperature setting – twice – a little over 200 miles into the trip. After the battery was charged I tried to warm the cabin." Musk chose to omit this and only cite the average in an attempt to mislead you into thinking the journalist made up his experience of freezing to compensate for range anxiety.
3- "DRIVING IN CIRCLES" AT THE FIRST CHARGER: Musk goes absolutely bananas here. His "big reveal" is that the data shows the journalist driving in circles before plugging in and charging up. As the reporter notes, he just couldn't find the damn thing in the dark. Here's how Musk spins this:
"Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in. On the later legs, it is clear Broder was determined not to be foiled again."
What the heck? It is amazing to me that anybody bought this crackpot theory. Let's just think about it for one second, ok? If his grand scheme was to intentionally kill the battery and get stranded to make a good story.... Why on earth would he do it mere feet from a supercharger?
Boy oh boy. Occam's razor says the reporter just had a little bit of trouble finding the charger in the lot. If he wanted to invent a story about his Tesla battery dying, there's much better places to engineer a breakdown.. like on the road!
4- CHARGING UP TO 72%: The reporter spent an hour charging up to "well beyond" the range he needed for his itinerary. He trusted Tesla's range estimate. Musk also spins this as "deliberately stopped charging at 72%," implying that it was part of a scheme. This is just malevolent spin.
5- SUDDEN OVERNIGHT LOSS OF RANGE: The reporter parked the car overnight with 90 miles of range left, enough to make it back to the supercharger. When he woke up it had only 25 miles of range. This is the biggest problem in the trip!
Clearly the car suffered cold weather range loss. It was 10F outside. Whereas previously this forced some compromises, here it completed f'd him.
Musk did not dispute or even mention this part. It's the root problem: If you're going to do a cross country trip in the extreme cold you have a plan correctly for it and take some precautions like plugging in overnight and not trust the range estimate (in 2013). But this doesn't mean the journalist has an integrity problem; he just trusted his Tesla too much.
6- SHITTY ADVICE ON HOW TO DEAL WITH A F'D SITUATION: At this point he's just screwed. The nearest charger is too weak. He goes there. After an hour he's at just 32 miles of range. Then someone at Tesla gives him bad info: more range will come back as it heats up. This is believable to him because he got the same advice in the morning: warming the battery will give you back lost range.
Musk claims the reporter acted "against" the advice of Tesla personnel. But he offers no proof. The reporter replied by naming names: "Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored."
This is a plausible misunderstanding. But the bigger picture is: It's not a good story for Tesla even under the best conditions. If he had never spoken with Tesla, just trusted the car's estimate and stayed put it would have taken another 1-2 hours just to charge up enough to make it back to the supercharger, ruining an already ~2 hour delayed day.
So this results in a breakdown when the range doesn't come back after warming up, as he had been led to believe.
SUMMARY- The core problem here was cold weather range loss combined with a driver who expected the car to just work as advertised. At first he drove it normally and was surprised by the diminishing range. He still trusted the range estimate at the first charge on the road. He didn't plug it in overnight in 10F weather, not realizing that it could reduce range. Then he misunderstood instructions from Tesla on how to limp his way back, although the trip was already a failure at that point.
Musk did not like this story. He schemed to find an angle to attack the journalist's integrity. I didn't respect him then for it and I'm not surprised that more of this behavior has surfaced in the years since.
[1] https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-...
[2] https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/problems-w...
[3] https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/cold-weather-range-los...
Oh, you meant to the NYT? No, because they were just driving the car like a normal person would. They weren't trying to drive the car [like] a Tesla fanatic would, and it was bizarre for Tesla to go after them for trying to drive the car like a normal car...especially when Tesla spends so much marketing $$$ trying to convince people their cars can replace a normal car.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but your comment reads as if you're very angry at Tesla yourself, which makes it harder to take your comment at face value. FWIW, if you're just legitimately trying to make an argument on HN it can be worth trying to be judicious about throwing around terms like "zealot" or "fanatic" or significant hyperbole in general. Furthermore you've started with something more then dubious:
>that Tesla would go through their trip logs
Above link was the first time I'd seen that, looks like it's from 2013. But even just reading Tesla's response alone I noted they said "media drive", as in this wasn't the reporter buying his own car and then writing about it, but getting a temporary loaner from Tesla. It's completely normal and within the rights of a manufacturer offering a loan of something valuable for review purposes to keep logs or check it for reported problems on return, it's their property after all and if there were real flaws they'd want to be able to work on fixing them. After I read further comments made at the time it was stated that private owners logs are theirs in turn, no Tesla cannot go through their trip logs if they write whatever they want. But if you want to just try something out for free, well it's not yours. This would be the same as if you used a company car or system or equipment or whatever, the company may monitor that. And loaners aren't the only way for journalists to do reviews either, Consumer Reports for example famously buys things themselves (with confidential shoppers to boot) precisely to avoid bias or cherry picking or whatever from either side.
Given the above, I have doubts about your assertion of "a lot of potential customers" too. If you have some newer information indicating that Tesla was lying about not logging data of private cars without consent (real consent, with a signature) maybe include that in your post?
But in this case: at the time of the NYT article, Tesla's PR department was operating on hair-trigger reaction mode: even the slightest critical comment would send them into overdrive in response. They've since learned about the Streisand effect, and no longer respond to criticism in the way they did before. (This is likely because Musk no longer directly oversees the day-to-day of their marketing.)
As for the trip logs: it's not just the NYT trip. It was every time there was an accident involving a Tesla. Or a negative review. Even Tesla's response to the Consumer Reports review included information from the CR vehicle's trip logs, even though CR acquired those vehicles from third parties. The problem isn't that Tesla is logging the cars (most new cars do), the problem is how Tesla is using that data in ways that violate cultural (and in the case of Europe, legal) norms regarding privacy.
Finally, as to "a lot of potential customers," I count more than a few dozen in LA alone across a number of industries. Jaguar has seen the biggest windfall in terms of putative Tesla buyers switching to the iPace, followed by the BMW. A lot of the rest are simply waiting until the next generation of EVs and are sticking with their current luxury/mid-range vehicles. I am aware that on an absolute basis a few dozen customers isn't much, but it's a few dozen potential customers in the market segement most likely to buy and evangelize their cars.
>even the slightest critical comment
But I mean, I wouldn't categorize something like that NYT piece as "the slightest critical comment" it was pretty brutal. Maybe correctly, but not nothing. Same with the Top Gear, though since that's more a comedy show it shouldn't be an expectation (but I think a lot of Americans at least don't know that). Unless you can really link to something showing say a bunch of random owners doing little blogs or tweets along the lines of "the color wasn't quite what I expected" or "range is overall fine but a few miles lower then was represented" resulted an "overdrive response" your argument would be stronger if you just stuck to a basic "negative reviews". And as far as the "a lot of potential customers" you must realize that we've all seen the anecdote/data thing a ton of times right and a few dozen out of hundreds of thousands of sales and an enormous backlog of demand kind of seems not very compelling either? Particularly given all the confounding factors of their genuine other fuckups?
Anyway, that's all. I'm not saying you're wrong to be critical, but I don't think you did as good a job of it as you could have.
So gamblor956 didn't reply (EDIT, did while I was writing this) but I was actually kind of curious about this (and I did bring up the question), so I took a stab at researching it a bit myself. Tesla has engaged in their own hyperbole after all, the cars do have online connections I think since there is some sort of remote maintenance that can be done, and they've talked about logs with autopilot before. And in fact it looks like (I am basing this purely on brief searching, I don't own one so corrections welcome) there is some real cause for concern though in a different way: sometime in the last 5 years it seems they've changed their privacy policy from opt-in to opt-out. It's still possible to uncheck general data sharing, but by default information is sent back to the mothership, and at least for trips with autopilot enabled it looks to be pretty damn granular (and AP apparently can't be opted out of now even?). A 2018 thread [1] I found in Tesla forums (which also links to some others) shows some pretty clear trip maps, and also claims the anonymization is pretty garbage (though with spatial information of that resolution I don't know if it's possibly anyway, it'd likely become instantly obvious where someone's house was and that's that):
>"What other things I have noticed: the "anonymization" is actually pretty superficial. Every trip (from the moment autopilot started to the moment autopilot is powered off) is given a unique uuid, and every snapshot taken during that uses the same uuid, even if some internal fields are cleared for "anonymized" uploads, internally the trip id is still stored, combined with camera calibrations uploaded every other minute under the same trip id without any anonymization - connecting the dots back together is actually pretty simple. And of course looking at enough trips it's also pretty easy to see that "this must be home, now who lives there from our customer database"? Obviously timestamps are also all there."
Finally Tesla is apparently not even at all transparent about sharing this with owners. So absolutely worthy of concern, and I wish all this had been in OP and they'd been more measured and precise because that 2013 post touches on none of that at all, nor naturally do comments from back then touch on anything that has changed sicne. Like at other companies, ML learning benefits from huge data intake and in turn is driving (harhar) a hunger for maximum data at maximum resolution. There is a real direct tension right now in a lot of areas of tech between that and privacy (witness Apple's issues trying to juggle that). A good step (if it hasn't happened already, seems like it must have but I can't find something on it) would be for an EU Tesla car owner to use the GDPR to force them to disclose everything they've got on them.
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1: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/data-sharing-and-pri...
After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives.
Tesla does not hold itself to the same standard of truthfulness it insists on from others. The Top Gear segment was benign compared to Tesla's coast to coast FSD boast, designed to extract FCF from selling a product that may or may not eventually exist.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a19649...
> otherwise Tesla wouldn't magically have the data to put together a PR response denying culpability whenever something goes wrong with Autopilot.
NTSB -> crash scene -> find black box -> send to TSLA? Just one possible non-nefarious mechanism for this information to make its way to Tesla.
Is co-opting a crash investigation performed by the government and cherry picking data from it in order to cast the blame on their deceased former customer meant to be better or worse than collecting everyone's data indiscriminately?
> who realized that Tesla would go through their trip logs if they made even the slightest critical comment of the company
which is likely false. It's irrelevant in this branch of the conversation how Orwellian my more likely explanation is, because what's being contested is the truthfulness of this claim, not how bad of a company Tesla is.
So you can easily data log any driver. So any government agency or any "partner" paying enough could have access to this data.
I think most potential customers would be smart enough to realize Tesla's actions don't generalize from reporters to all customers.
Especially since the reporter describes it as a "wondercar with California dealer plates", which means Tesla lent him the car. I don't see anything wrong with Tesla going through the logs on their own car after they got it back.
I don't know about you, but I usually check how much gas I have in the fuel tank before going on a trip.
Maybe you just didn't know crux means the most important part of the story, not just a small point in the story
Maybe you just need to defend mega corporations less and not assume other people are dumb.
A normal petrol car gives you zero anxiety about finding a refuel station, and it happens in under five minutes. Even in the smallest cities and towns in American.
I had about a quarter of a tank left and saw a sign as I approached an off ramp which said "last service station for xx km". I did some mental arithmetic and decided not to pull over and refuel I'd be able to make it to the next service station.
Sure enough I got to the next service station - however when I pulled in the single pump was out of order. I ended up having to call roadside assistance.
That happened to me about 8 years ago and ever since I've been absolutely paranoid about range I'm very hesitant to let my tank drop below half nowadays.
As Tesla's own mechanics on the scene indicated that the car was malfunctioning, Tesla's subsequent PR statement has absolutely no value whatsoever and cannot be relied upon as an accurate statement of what the NYT driver did. Because Tesla's own people, on the scene, indicated that the Tesla software wasn't working, which means that the data Tesla used to "refute" the NYT article was simply untrustworthy, bad data.
Oh shit. WTF? This is the first time I'm hearing this. What? Tesla has access to the car's trip logs?????
Whether they have access to the logs of any random customer's car, I have no idea. But this doesn't prove things one way or the other.