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You're missing a part of the article (that supports your point) - here's a paste of two paragraphs straight from the article

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Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.

Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.

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He clearly states that the displayed range never reached the distance to Milford, and that he (essentially) ignored warnings to recharge. Nevertheless, the Tesla employee he spoke to cleared him to resume the journey.

There's a lot of nonsense being thrown around here, but THIS is where the stall occurred. It would be great to see a call log, if one was available - did Mr. Broder clearly state when he was cleared that the displayed range was not sufficient to meet Milford and did the Tesla employee clear him to go despite this? Was he cleared, with the Tesla employee assuming mileage was sufficient, and Mr. Broder chose not to correct this assumption?

I've seen a lot of people drive around with their 'check engine' light permanently lit up. This is because somebody told them it's ok, that it means their fuel cap is a little loose but it's not a problem, or whatever other reason that isn't serious. If the Tesla employee was aware of the displayed range and still cleared Mr. Broder's departure, then the 'correct' party in this case seems obvious, and his behavior is not in any way unusual.

If the data clearly shows that he never "limped along" at 45 MPH, there's really nothing in those two paragraphs I can believe.

Mr. Broder's reply in the other thread was "I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires."

I dont know how it measures speed whether GPS or wheel rotation or both and if that would make a difference. Anyone care to fact check?

The 19 / 21 inch is not the outside diameter of the tires, it's the inside diameter. Outside diameter would be about the same and would not make much of a difference.

Looking at the Tesla Model S website[0] both 19" and 21" wheels (not tires) are available. The 19" wheels have 245/45R19 tires and the 21" wheels have 245/35R21. Punching that in to a tire size calculator[1] shows the following:

Tire Size Comparison

Specification Sidewall Radius Diameter Circumference Revs/Mile Difference

245/45-19 4.3in 13.8in 27.7in 87.0in 729 0.0%

245/35-21 3.4in 13.9in 27.8in 87.2in 727 0.3%

Which is a 0.3% difference in total circumference. Which is not a significant source of discrepency.

[0] - http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs [1] - http://www.miata.net/garage/tirecalc.html (I used the non-java form at the bottom of the page)

The NYT upgraded their paywall this week, so there is a good chance that most of HN did not in fact read the NYT article before commenting on it.

Also, there is a disturbing amount of herd mentality in these comments; people are instinctively shielding/supporting Elon Musk, a fellow techie, rather than the "interloping" journalist, even though even a cursory Google search of other reviews of the Model S, the Roadster, and other manufacturers' EVs will show that they all suffer from the same battery charging/status problems.

It should also be noted that Elon Musk has made public misrepresentations in the recent past about competitors to SpaceX, in particular, about the cause of Boeing's battery problems, and he had a history of making similar remarks about credit card companies while he worked at Paypal.

Can you provide a citation for the mis-statements about the Boeing battery situation? I couldn't find any.

He's probably refering to this incident :http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/elon-musk-boeing-7...

Nothing in that article implies that Musk was wrong. It's just Musk's public statement that the battery design is faulty.

I am of course familiar with the incident and that article, all the rest, suggest that Musk probably is correct. An MIT professor confirms and a Boeing engineer does not dispute.

> It should also be noted that Elon Musk has made public misrepresentations in the recent past about competitors to SpaceX, in particular, about the cause of Boeing's battery problems

Really? As I recall, he speculated that improper isolation between cells allowed for failures to cascade to adjacent ones. Turns out, that's what it was.

there is a good chance that most of HN did not in fact read the NYT article before commenting on it

== yikes

Chrome incognito... not that I advocate that sort of thing.

My recollection is the same as stcredzero's on the battery comments. What are the cc company comments to which you refer? (Google results seem saturated with more recent events).

Well, if Broder's headline was "Tesla Employee Let My Car Run Down", he'd have been telling the story you can extract out of the text.

However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy.

Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refute. This might seem unfair but I don't think it is because the New York Time reader isn't going say "well, either the driver, the Tesla employee or the car made some mistakes or just couldn't understand each other, what does this prove?", a reader in these days of simplification will just get "Tesla doesn't work in the cold" and so Musk is correct to refute this arguably false claim.

Just so you know, journalists typically have no control over headlines. They are often incredibly surprised by them.

EDIT: it may be different on blogs

"Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it."

I will never forget when my friend and I released an iPhone app, and two years later Apple comes out with a product of the same name. My friend got contacted by a reporter asking these innocuous questions, for instance "do you expect Apple to remove your app from the App Store?". He said he doesn't expect any problems, but that we're willing to talk about it with Apple.

The headline? "Indie developer braces for legal battle over app named ###"

Looking back on it, the questions the reporter asked were absolutely leading questions to suit his own (anti-Apple) agenda. This is why anyone talking to the press needs to be very careful what they say.

I think "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" is actually a defendable claim, if we see the entire thing as a test of the current state of Tesla's recharging network. But claiming that their current recharging station network is not a drop in replacement for gas stations and gasoline fueled cars is of course a hugely unfair spin of a story about Tesla and electric cars in general.

This is consistent with other quotes from Broder:

"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.”"

Nobody is lying, but if you get in your car and it tells you that you can only you can only go 25 miles, do you really think it's ok to drive over twice that?

In my own car during day to day driving? Of course not. If I was reviewing a car and was told that it was OK? Of course! Don't curious minds want to know if the missing miles will actually return on their own? It's not like his life was in any real danger, or that he was late for work or something.

Of course it is. Stop at the gas station for five minutes, fill 'er up, and go on my way.

it actually does work. Cars usually have a fuel reserve and thus range up to 50km (5 litres) when it already shows 0km.

Well remember that the car "lost" 60 miles of range overnight. If the Tesla people told him that charging it for a bit would restore the range it is conceivable that he would think that the whole 60 miles would come back. Remember that not everyone has a detailed understanding of how cold temperatures affect lithium ion batteries.

Maybe. It's an electric car. I don't have a lot of experience with electric cars and I already know that the range estimate can be off by a lot. I'd probably call up Tesla and ask them, which is exactly what Broder says he did.

"Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford."

My car says zero miles left with three gallons in the tank. It's not all that unreasonable to assume.

Just to be clear, there is a very reasonable case to be made about the miles that did not "magically" disappear. Unless the battery was giving off heat all night, where else did the energy go?

The "conditioning" sounds like a explanatory shortcut to explaining that ambient temperature affects measurements, and therefore also estimated range.

Without really understanding the details, I think two things: The NYT should have more sophisticated reviews, Tesla should have better QA over its support services to make sure fewer people are given unreasonably optimistic assessments about their range.

Tesla and every other EV manufacturer recommend charging overnight. The author wouldn't have been able to produce his catastrophic breakdown if he'd followed this simple precaution.

It's also pretty clear from the data that he lied about the speed he was driving at.

Tesla says you don't have to plug in the vehicle overnight -- that you can leave it at the airport for a week. Maybe their marketing team overruled their technical team, but holding Tesla to something that Tesla claims to do isn't horrible.