Tesla loses plot, sues Top Gear
engadget.com
engadget.com
It'd also be good if they stopped pandering to Daily-Mail-reading-racists. The Mexican stuff in the last series was horrific. I wish BBC America had had the balls to include it in their version, if only so they'd have to deal with the enraged viewers.
I think the ancestor comment is simply saying that they need to say that they lie about the factual basis of the show. I don't think that playing conkers with caravans or driving cars of ski-jumps or whatever should allow them to make bare-faced lies about basic performance elements of cars that they review.
They have races and competitions between each other which are staged and adapted for dramatic results. The few car reviews they do are similarly dramatised. Does the viewer understand that the car didn't break down, that the person on the motorbike didn't coincidentally reach the same point as the person in the car, or whatever?
I suspect that most people don't realise that Top Gear is fictional entertainment instead of factual entertainment, because the extremely long-running brand of the show is rooted in factual entertainment.
Suing them over a fictional review is foolish, but if you were expecting an honest review of your product and got back a dramatised narrative you'd probably be pissed off too.
We're talking about a car company here. Are you suggesting that a car company are going to not understand what Top Gear is about? The sort of show it is and the significant chance that the review will be dramatised and tongue in cheek?
If Tesla sent them a car believing that then they should fire their marketing people who should have made it absolutely clear and then resign themselves for ignoring what 15 seconds thought would have told them.
I think that many viewers don't realise that TG is entertainment rather than factual because sadly most viewers have a pretty uncritical view of anything they see on TV.
And for this reason I think it could be branded entertainment, documentary, drama or children's and it wouldn't make any difference as it's all soaked up largely without question. If people aren't taking the hints from the tongue in cheek comments and the OTT stunts then I don't think a message at the front of the show or in the TV listings would make any difference.
Personally I think that that's under stating it but to be fair to them it remains a valuable franchise and one that they're really obliged to keep going so long as it remains relatively successful.
This will do nothing but hurt them...especially after Top Gear retaliates.
Sure it's electric, but it's still a sports car of sorts.
Basically, Top Gear is popular because it isn't all those other car shows. It's mainstream by popularity, but it's not mainstream in terms of typical car enthusiasts.
That they got covered on Top Gear is the car equivalent of a startup getting featured on TechCrunch -- good or bad, they got a LOT of eyeballs on the car, and while the review wasn't 100% positive, it wasn't entirely negative either.
The flip side of the equation is whether or not TopGear actually exerts any purchasing influence whatsoever. Since most of their reviews are of Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, etc., do people buying cars at that caliber actually buy based on practical reviews? I'm guessing not.
The Murcielago is a very impractical car, and I doubt anyone who was interested in buying a Lambo has changed their mind because TopGear exposed that its windshield wipers make noise over 100 miles per hour.
The point is that the Tesla Roadster has selling points that aren't invalidated by a negative review on Top Gear and that, even if it were, they did a good job of making it look like a ton of fun, if not entirely practical.
People paying 6 figures for cars are seldom looking for practicality in the same sense that most people do -- they're looking for something special, and there's no denying that the Tesla has that in spades.
Edit: Swapped 'hybrid' for 'electric'.
The Tesla Roadster is 100% electric, there's no hybrid technology involved.
None of this makes me want a Tesla any less, and I'd argue that this holds true for pretty much anyone who wants to buy a Tesla. It's a $100k+ two-seater car for crying out loud. You don't buy it because it's practical, you buy it because it goes like stink and is a technological triumph. It's as fast around their track as a Porsche 911 GT3, yet it's 100% electric! I almost fell out of my chair when I first saw that.
The editorial line on Top Gear (and Jeremy Clarkson's view in pretty much all media) has long been to mock environmentalists and their concerns. Maybe the viewers are all wildly interested in electric cars but it would be slightly odd as it would have them watching a show that spent a significant chunk of it's time mocking their beliefs.
Obviously were you to offer to give them a Tesla they'd bite your hand off - it's as close to a super car as most of them will get - but offer them any car of equivalent value and I suspect you'd find that the demand dropped to close to zero.
I'm rebutting this:
"I think your average Top Gear viewer is as far from a potential customer as you can get given the general stance the show takes on such matters"
Well, come to think of it, you're right in many respects. The average TG viewer simply can't afford a $110k automobile. I think you slightly misinterpret the TG editorial view though. They're not opposed to electric cars. They're opposed to slow, ugly, uninspiring cars. The net effect of environmentalism is that efficiency is put before all of these other factors. There wasn't one jab at the green aspect of the Tesla Roadster in that episode. It was all about the performance and the trade-offs.
In regard to it's view of electric cars I'd say it's position is pretty much to deliberately miss the point (that is that they are practical items rather than performance ones) and to play that for comic effect.
As you say, they like attractive, fast cars (and curiously the Renault Megane which I recall Hammond liked which is neither) and electric cars are designed to be practical and functional - two things which generally are lower down the list of what they consider worthy of note.
Where I have trouble (and I'm running the risk of contradicting things I've said elsewhere in this thread) is that while the presenters and programme makers exaggerate this for entertainment value, I'm not so convinced that it isn't a more accurate representation of the opinions of many of the shows viewers who do have an overly negative view of electric cars.
But maybe that's just me being biased against how I perceive a "typical" TG viewer (to be clear I do watch it, though not always and I'm really not typical in that I don't really care about cars, I just find it amusing).
The suit: http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/02/dan-snyder-lawsuit-a-com...
Edit: Still, it seems rather boneheaded to try to solve a minor PR problem from two years ago with a lawsuit that is certain to be very public.
Actually, I don't think this is boneheaded.
Tesla are probably finding no-one is touching them because somehow, ahem Top Gear, everyone has the impression that the car will run for 50miles and then pack in and your only option will be to tow it home and charge it for 16hours to get another 50miles.
This suit will at the very least raise the point that Top Gear misrepresented the mileage that one can expect to get and that they failed to mention fast-charging schemes. It's likely to get mentioned on Top Gear and in just about every motoring magazine and on every tech site everywhere. I think even a few million on the suit would be better spent than trying to reverse this perception through advertising.
If I were in Tesla's target population then learning that Top Gear lied and that the mileage is actually a lot better than it appeared would probably put me back on track for a sale whilst learning that Tesla is suing Top Gear wouldn't negatively affect my purchase decision.
TL;DR I think this is a win for Tesla overall.
And to claim that providing two cars to the TV crew invalidates the point about range is a little bit outrageous. It's like saying "they cheated by not letting us cheat."
ADDED IN EDIT: Is someone going around downvoting all my comments? This is really strange. Please, if you downvoted this let me know why so I can adjust my actions accordingly.
<FX: retreats, shaking head in confusion>
They have an answer for the range/recharge complaints (switching stations)
Top Gear makes fun of everyone...and it's not like they hinted at something that would never happen
Other manufacturers are mature enough to understand that TG is a comedy show about cars, and their stunts are covered by satire.
And of course Top Gear will retaliate...they always do in cases like this.
"But in the real world, it doesn't seem to work" was already decided before the cars were even delivered. It's cool to make fun of flaws, it's not cool for something percieved as a review show to decide something is flawed and write the script about how flawed it is before they have even tested it.
The show's main presenter has been well known as having politically conservative views for many, many years. If you watch, the vast bulk of his output is joking in that general direction when it's joking. Frankly, if I were Tesla, I wouldn't have let my car appear; it smacked of a set-up against the green bogeyman who was trying to stop their fun.
There seems to be a growing tendency at the moment in the UK at least for people with politically conservative views to express these loudly, prominently and repeatedly in a more forceful tone than they could otherwise use, with an I'm only having a bit of fun, it's just a joke, can't you just grow up and take it? tacked on to the end, trying to belittle those who might take offence at their assertions. If these people want to express their views from such a platform (by which I mean a prominent one, the fact of this being on the BBC isn't an issue for me), they should have the nerve to stand behind it.
So summarise, are you saying Jeremy Clarkson doesn't stand behind his political statements? That's simply not true, have you never seen his columns in the Times? Clarkson gets a terribly hard time for his views and he doesn't waver a bit, whether you agree with him or not, you have to give him some credit.
Watch Top Gear though (which I do and largely enjoy), and there's a relatively regular stream of reactionary material with a 'boys will be boys' tongue in cheek. The problem is, it's consistently in the same direction and at the same targets; it's using a cover of comedy and his TV persona to make attacks he couldn't otherwise make in such a platform. Jeremy Clarkson the newspaper columnist stands behind his positions, I agree; Jeremy Clarkson the TV character often tries to make much the same attacks while laughing them off as 'just a bit of fun'. That isn't intellectually honest.
Are you talking about the more extreme rubbish like "all lorry drivers are prostitute murderers"? His genuine political opinions like the ones he has on bendy buses, speed cameras, the M4 bus lane etc. strike me as genuine and not veiled in the 'boys will be boys' disguise you talk of.
I should probably bail from this conversation lest people mistake me as a JC supporter, I just think you're being a little unfair.
Just to give one example. Just saying.
We live in a welfare state. Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Every major corporation has lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to get as much pork as they possibly can.
Actually, "everybody" doesn't do it. You can't subsidize everyone because you run out of money long before that. The vast majority of us don't get subsidies.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
In the UK you'd probably have been stopped by the police and have several speeding tickets if you were lucky enough to do the 55 miles on public roads at track speeds (0-60mph in 3.7s, limiter hits at 125mph) without killing anyone or wrecking the car.
I can't say I was in the market for a Tesla, but the range wasn't what sounded bad to me, I was left under the impression that it just didn't have the quality yet.
Why on earth would you give it a second life?