That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t
wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
His action here is still hard to understand:
> The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino –told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored. I did not ignore their advice.
So it sounds like he didn't speak to Tesla personnel after he charged at the weak station in Norwich for an hour. If I were him, I'd call them back and say, "Uh guys, it says it only has 32 miles left and I have 61 to go. Maybe I should give it another hour?"
Yeah, I got the same impression, but that seems so insane I'm not sure it is right. I mean, surely he called them afterwards, right?
And someone who had an axe to grind, or who might benefit from pictures of a Tesla being towed, might decide differently.
He also explains that he drove past a station "because no one made him aware of it". That smells like wordplay too. He was probably aware of it, and any reasonable owner of the car would probably be aware of it, or be well equipped to look it up. The map of charging stations is quite easy to find. He surely had an internet capable phone for backup.
Instead, he made an extra support call, and when they gave him bad advice, he took the opportunity to maliciously comply. After 12 support calls, if you want to cherry pick bad advice that seems inconsistent with your expectations, you can probably find something.
I think Elon was wrong in some of his claims, but I think the review was still dishonest.
This is exactly the point of contention, and presumably, there should be a call to Tesla after the hour of charging if Broder's version is correct, and not if Tesla's is.
We'll see.
This is like saying "I ran out of gas because I couldn't find a gas station" when you're a block away from one. It's ridiculous and, in this 21st century, not an excuse.
Also, the amount of weasel words he manages to use on a lot of his other explanations doesn't exactly help his credibility...
Exactly, that is what I get out of it too. And that is probably conveniently unverifiable. Tesla really should repeat the trip with the same parameters as much as possible. Common sense dictates that if they waste power the way indicated that they should run out of juice and if they are conservative and follow the normal procedures that you could expect to observe when using any vehicle with a power source that depletes with use (which is all of them, including gasoline) that they should be able to complete the trip without a problem.
When driving in the North somewhere I came upon a sign that said 'no gas for 200 miles'. I had a half tank of fuel but I still drove back to the last town to make sure the tank was full. It seemed only prudent. In an electric vehicle with limited range and with a limited support infrastructure it would be folly to leave for a trip on a leg with an indicated range below the known distance to the next fuel source and to not know exactly where those sources are relative to the car and the planned route.
Broder claims that he was "cleared to drive" after an hour of charging with 32 miles of range on the car for a 61 mile trip.
But I don't think that actually happened (note how delicately Broder discusses this now). Tesla certainly denies it. And this is the reason the review was "bad", so this gets to the crux of the issue.
What at least happened, according to Broder, is that they told him to "plug it in for an hour, and then it should be good to go". Note the "should". Broder never actually says that he called Tesla back when the hour was up, explained there was only 32 miles of range left on a 61 mile trip, and that Tesla said "go for it, you are cleared for takeoff".
So Broder found his angle, thinking: I'll plug it in for an hour, then just leave, no matter what the range says. Hopefully it'll die on me this time. [Ed: I made up that last part, for flavor.]
Unfortunately, Broder wrote that Tesla "cleared him to leave", which doesn't seem to be the case, and according to Tesla, was not the case, and that's why he's in the hot water that he's in. If instead he simply quoted the reps and said he didn't call back, despite the data, he'd be in the clear (although the story would be far less compelling, since it'd be clear to everyone that Broder is either an idiot, or has an agenda -- or both).
Either way, all we need to do is see if Broder made a call to Tesla when the hour was up. His cell phone log is sufficient, and Tesla might have similar data on their side. We don't need to know what was said, we just need to confirm that Broder even had the opportunity to be "cleared" to drive by Tesla. Once we confirm that, then the tapes would be helpful. Otherwise, Tesla's version is the accurate one.
This is how most "journalists" operate. They're story-tellers who know what sells to their audience, and they gravitate towards that. Not the truth, but what their audience wants to hear.
Sorry, but your standards are a bit low. A lot of things like a 10-15% imprecision, all biased in the direction of making the car perform less -- that's exactly what I'd do if I were trying to fix the drive's outcome.
If Consumer Reports had multiple things 10-15% off, all pointedly to support a given agenda, there would be an outcry. I see no reason why the NYTimes, in an article in which they are reporting data, should be held to a lesser standard.
AFAIK, car reporters for the big media conglomerates usually get expenses paid review junkets from the automakers. Those reporters tend to never post negative reviews for fear that they wouldn't get invited again. I think the same applies to movie and video game reviewers from major publications.
CR does have its hands on a Tesla, and they jumped through some hoops to ensure that Tesla didn't know who bought it or cherry pick a review unit for them.
http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2013/01/our-own-tesla-m...
Given Tesla's focus on the tit-for-tat details, which I take to be a strategy of distraction, I suspect that someone at Tesla did indeed make a mistake--probably a high level PR employee with no expert familiarity with the car in cold conditions. Tesla's HQ is located in California, where the weather stays nice and warm, all the time.
This is a textbook example of how not to solve a PR problem — to get in a public, internet-driven slanging match with a journalist. Instead of "publicly refuting", Musk should have called up and got a full account of what went wrong; put the journalist on side, and got an at least somewhat positive follow up account from the journalist saying "I spoke to Musk and he had some questions and we talked through it and we realize that rather than the car being at fault, a database with current locations of chargers hadn't been updated etc etc etc".
Right now, instead, Musk can't win. And he's drawing a HUGE amount of publicity to a fact that's already in the back of a lot of consumers minds — that these EVs aren't ready for primetime.
I'm generally rooting for Tesla and EVs (where they make sense). But I didn't think much of their PR handling of a situation where they were at least somewhat in the wrong was good then and I don't think it's good now.
“No new product does absolutely everything in exactly the same way as the product its replacing,” [Chelsea Sexton] says. "And yet when it comes to electric cars that’s the expectation."
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/whod-win-fight-te...
Personally, after reading these tit-for-tat spats, I'm more inclined in considering EVs. (It's worth listening to Marketplace's reporting on this.)
But why is that the story? The story could just as easily be, "The NYT reporter stopped charging when the battery was less than 3/4ths charged and subsequently couldn't finish his trip. He experienced some unanticipated range loss overnight, but it was less than what he would have needed to finish his trip."
"When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range"
Do you think the average Tesla customer is going to want to wade through a bunch of plots of battery charge vs distance, etc? I think the takeaway for the average Tesla customer might be along the lines of "hmm, this seems really complicated.... am I going to have to keep the heat down while I drive even when it's 10 degrees outside?"
To me, Musk comes across as an out-of-touch engineer who keeps trying to argue the technical case and insists it's the customer's fault--it couldn't possibly be a faulty design, confusing U.I., or marketing not realizing a common (mis)use case. If I dropped $60-$100k on a car and run into problems, this is the last thing I'd want to hear on the other end of the phone.
Fully agree. This is a great case study for other startups on what not to do.
Jobs and Apple tried to make the claim that people were holding the phone wrong, without ever making the claim about the proper way to hold the phone. They never said anything about the "right" or "wrong" way beforehand, so while the comment is strange it isn't hypocritical.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...
It's a very strange response, and clearly foolish, but Apple never made a claim before the launch that the phone could be held that way. And of course, we can be generous in retrospect because Apple eventually gave free bumper cases. But Jobs didn't make a claim on the website which was contradicted by the behavior.
In contrast, Tesla claimed that leaving the car out for a long time shouldn't cause much battery loss: "The Model S battery will not lose a significant amount of charge when parked for long periods of time. For example, Model S owners can park at the airport without plugging in."
http://www.teslamotors.com/models/facts
It strikes me odd because the claim, prima facie, suggests that you can leave the car for multiple days without charging. Musk is contradicting Tesla literature here, which is why you should always be careful about the marketing material.
Thousands of newspaper are going to write an article everything that happens. They will make it more reader-friendly.
Repeat: It is not Musks' intent for customer to read his blog.
Thousands of newspapers writing about this is exactly what Musk shouldn't want! Thanks for making my argument for me. :)
I wonder about that. I mean, if you are a Tesla customer (or a would-be Tesla customer), I reckon this story has come across your radar, given the sort of online media coverage. Certainly, the average customer may not read Musk's blog, but again, given that this story has been picked up by quite a few outlets on the web, I bet customers are reading it.
I interpreted the blog post very differently. He says that the article is an outright premeditated lie, and presents an overwhelming amount of technical data to back up his claim.
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.
At the very least, his notes and the resulting article are not accurate. He confirms this himself.
This isn't surprising, and not necessarily malicious. But it's extremely common, as anyone who has ever dealt with a journalist knows.
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?
Take everything you read in the press with a huge grain of salt.
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)
It's one thing to present data that contradicts the article. But to suggest possible dishonest motivations was a step too far.
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.
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.
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.
This is one of the more bizarre statements in this whole discussion. Why would anyone with the slightest understanding of electric cars or physics believe that to be true - and I mean the reporter, as well? By extension, you could recharge your electric car by alternately gunning the engine, then slamming on the brakes. Perpetual motion!
> Beginning early in the morning of my second day with the car, after the projected range had dropped precipitously while parked overnight, I spoke numerous times with Christina Ra, Tesla’s spokeswoman at the time, and Ted Merendino, a Tesla product planner at the company’s headquarters in California. They told me that the loss of battery power when parked overnight could be restored by properly “conditioning” the battery, a half-hour process, which I undertook by sitting in the car with the heat on low, as they instructed. That proved ineffective; the conditioning process actually reduced the range by 24 percent (to 19 miles, from 25 miles).
If there is one thing that will use up large amounts of energy it is electric heating, I find it hard to believe that using a heater as a consumer would regenerate the battery capacity in excess of what the the heater is consuming unless most or all of the energy was directed at the batteries. The exterior of a car will drain heat energy about as fast as you can put it in under cold conditions (or faster...).
> It was also Tesla that told me that an hour of charging (at a lower power level) at a public utility in Norwich, Conn., would give me adequate range to reach the Supercharging station 61 miles away, even though the car’s range estimator read 32 miles – because, again, I was told that moderate-speed driving would “restore” the battery power lost overnight. That also proved overoptimistic, as I ran out of power about 14 miles shy of the Milford Supercharger and about five miles from the public charging station in East Haven that I was trying to reach.
That does not make any sense either. Any kind of consumption will ultimately reduce the available range, you don't restore by removing joules from a pack.
I've lived in a house powered with batteries, solar and wind for a long enough time to know that indeed temperature affects battery capacity, sometimes dramatically. But consuming power under cold conditions never put energy back in. Is this different for the kind of batteries that the Tesla uses?
Or is the 'Tesla said' claim just an effort to get out from under the apparently non-sensical decisions that were made here?
Or are Tesla spokespeople and product gurus totally clueless (which would seem to be very hard on the imagination)?
All the hard data from the Tesla logs except for the 'shutdown' is contradicted by words apparently spoken (and probably unverifiable except for 'he said/she said' style debate) rather than actually refuting the data.
If they did it through regular customer service, would it have been recorded? I suspect not or else the evidence would have been trotted out already.
How much the range goes up probably depends on how much the battery warms up; in the cold morning weather in Norwich, the battery may have warmed up less than the Tesla people were expecting.
Maybe the batteries Tesla uses recover better/faster but since it's all electric there is obviously no way to get more power into the pack so the only thing that using a heater will do is drain it, and it will drain it pdq. If I was driving an all electric car and I was worried about my range the one thing you can be sure of is that I would maintain as constant a speed as possible and the heat would be off. After all it is a lot better to arrive at your destination cold than it is to deplete you battery and spending even more time in the cold.
I'm pretty sure Tesla knows the exact power curves for their batteries at any temperature condition that could realistically speaking occur, if they were asleep at the switch that's a big bad problem for them but if they had this info and used it and this is turning into a game of words rather than a game of data then the only thing they should do at this stage is to have a Tesla engineer duplicate the trip conditions to see what the result would be if you behaved rationally rather than irrationally.
That way we'd get some usable information. Experiments are only valid when you can repeat them.
As I understand it a given number of molecules' bonds can be broken at any point to generate current. In colder ambient temperature the propensity to generate current decreases. However, the quantity does not. In other words, the apparatus for measuring what "charge" is available will incorrectly judge how much is left, but an intelligent system on the other hand may also take into account what the ambient temperature is doing to the sensor of how much current flows given a certain test circuit.
I'd guess that there is not an objective way to measure the charge left. I'd also guess that at a colder temperature it might not have as much power or as much torque, but that it would not affect the range, especially if the battery if artificially (or intrinsically) warmed once it gets toward the "bottom" of its capacity.
What the support people could have been talking about is how to game the system so that the sensors report a more reasonable gauge of the true range. That means that the supposed decrease overnight was not that the potential energy dissipated, but that the colder temperature lead to less accurate readings. Causing a current draw through driving slowly in the parking lot and running the heater might cause the battery to heat up, and thereby affect the current available to a test circuit, something that matters to the sensors' test circuits.
I'd like to hear from someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering, but without being informed on the field, it looks like a failure of imagination in assuming good faith and imaging possible scenarios.
gratuitous analogy:
Let's say it is a fictitious 1975 where Porsche has remote telemetry, and a NYT reviewer is skeptical about oil-cooled engines, because he states that you may run a little low on oil then also be low on coolant or vice versa. In the early morning of a freezing day, he looks at the dipstick. It says he is a three or four quarts low! He calls support, and they tell him that he will have more oil if he warms up the engine, and he'll be able to go for a drive without hurting the engine. (They should have said that he would get a more accurate measurement rather than get more oil) So, he starts the car, revs the engine, drives in circles, etc. Maybe he checks the oil again, maybe not. He takes off, and a couple hours later the engine seizes up. Apparently, it was both looking like it was extremely low on oil and was also actually very low on oil. The telemetry shows the reviewer appearing foolish, and possibly trying to ruin the engine. You could say that he is a professional and should have been able to parse the statements from support more intelligently. Yet they both look bad, but it may not be an inaccurate depiction of what end users would experience.
I think you're right when you say:
>In colder ambient temperature the propensity to generate current decreases. However, the quantity does not.
Presumably, the car stops running when the battery's propensity to generate current ("voltage") falls below a certain threshold. If that propensity to generate current does decrease when it's cold, then a cold battery will hit that car-stopping threshold earlier, right? Assuming the battery stays cold.
That's all I meant when I said "a cold battery has a shorter range".
And when the battery warms up, its chemical reactions speed up, increasing the voltage and pushing the car-stop threshold into the future. That's what I meant by "As the battery warms up, the estimated range should go up as well."
The battery's "state of charge" in the plot from Musk's blog post does go down overnight. Whether that's due to self-discharge, some system in the car that used a bit of energy overnight, or some temperature-related measurement effect (or a combination of those things), I don't know. I just thought it was striking that the "estimated range" dropped so much more than the "state of charge" (at the 400 mile mark in Musk's plots).
Does that put us on the same page?
I think what is happening is that he thinks the battery actually does have the charge, but the estimate is incorrect because of the cold. What he thinks is going to happen by driving is that the battery will heat up and become more efficient, and the estimated range will raise.
I do not find this an unreasonable mental model, even if it does or does not represent the actual workings of a battery-powered vehicle.
1. Battery has lost some charge for unknown reason, and has to be recharged. 2. Battery has proper charge, but the estimate is wrong.
If you act according to true scenario, client is happy in both cases. If true scenario is 2 but you act like it's 1, the client wastes and hour to recharge (which isn't necessary) but arrives at the goal. If true scenario is 1 but you act like it's 2, the client is stuck in the middle of the road and curses you.
Clearly, you should always choose to act as if the true scenario is 1 and recommend proper recharging, and try to debug why charge indicator was potentially wrong later. If the support person gave different advice, he was setting himself and his company for the mess up, and the mess up ensued.
This is why we need the call logs. And I fully suspect Tesla records them, so the fact that it wasn't released may suggest that Broder's account was indeed correct
If the Tesla people on the phone with the reporter had just erred on the side of caution with their advice, the whole debacle would have been avoided.
Broder complaining about a couple of extra hours charging would have just come across as a nitpick.
The point is that their standard advice should err on the side of caution, not leave motorists stranded. Regardless of whether they work for the NYT.
I doubt that. Say, you lend a car to your friend and let the navigation system log his/her route. The route includes compromising information about work related issues. Even the logging itself is questionable, but then releasing that information to the public - boy, I'd sure check my lawyers first.
As I understand, the 'European sensor' for privacy tingles at quite different levels than the US American one.
Furthermore, this situation is extremely dissimilar to a private individual lending a car to another private individual to do things where the borrower has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Not entirely, but if your product has a known (tiny) glitch, and a reporter calls up with something that sounds like that glitch, what are you going to do? One obvious choice is tell them it's a tiny glitch of no consequence and hope you're right. In the best case scenario (tiny glitch), responses like "Oh, dear, it sounds like our car is underperforming" leave a bad impression too.
Putting it into a "he said / she said" is a smokescreen.
The car might be a lemon but the idea that Tesla told him to run the heater to charge the battery is beyond credulity.
This is not exactly the first time the NYT has told lies for ideological reasons. The paper does it regularly, and really, the idea that it (or any paper in america) is an "unbiased" media is quaint.
The difference is, Elon Musk is willing to stand up to them and call them on it, so they are obfuscating.
I don't think so, it's just that one part of the HN crowd likes data more than 'someone said'.
So now it is up to Tesla to provide even more data, preferably with an exact re-run of the conditions in the presence of said journalist. That should clear up any kind of difference and would establish whether or not there is either a bug in the system, a bug in the procedures or a systemic problem with the car. If the problem can't be reproduced with proper handling of the car then there should be a retraction. Regardless of which it is the bickering should stop.
Can a third party verify the data?
And how do readers know that the data-collection itself works without flaws?
Do the same run a hundred more times, and nobody will fail as long as they exercise that basic amount of care. In that sense, reproduction is pointless. We already know the result, within a margin of error.
"Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”
Not exactly and objective view, or totally fair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/sunday-review/the-electric...
Fair enough, but let's not pretend that now that this reporter is in the spot light for possibly fabricating a story, his career isn't on the line. He (also) has every incentive to be extremely unbiased in his own defense.
Here's the thing though: the problem with the Tesla battery is the same problem that every other EV to date has had in sub-zero weather: they lose their charge and the charging meter gets decalibrated.
Tesla's bane is not a biased NY Times reporter. Their fundamental mistake was giving an EV to the NY Times to test drive in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record.
EDIT: Also one of the warmest winters on record in that area of the country, but not during the period of the NY Times' test.
No, he doesn't. It's one review out of many, the vast majority of which are far more favorable to the car.
There's some cost to Tesla to letting the review stand, but it's certainly not a billion dollars, or even hundreds of millions.
What is certain to happen now is that some credible auto review magazine is going to take a closer look at the way the car runs in cold weather.
If Musk is lying, he's going to get nailed. That's going to hurt a lot more than the one review.
The reporter, on the other hand, has no choice but to stick with his story now.
But I have to ask this: doesn't is take some 30-years to get a technology completely figured out and completely usable with no hassles or bugs and could Tesla be entering the second decade of that process? You mentioned the cold weather and that is definitely a valid consideration that has to addressed.
To use the web as an analogy, it took 12-years to create, 4-years to grow and produce a web-browser. 3-more years to commercialize and another 10-years to become part of everything we do.
With that in mind, perhaps TESLA is reluctant to admit that they are just in the "browser creation" stage and they still have work to do?
It's entirely possible that the amount of energy you can get out a battery depends on its current temperature, and that by sitting around to let it slowly warm up, the total power you can get out of it would be faster than if you tried to pull it all out as fast as possible.
The band where draining at a lower rate would warm up the battery to the point where the aggregate power taken from the pack would be higher if you drained it at a lower rate for a 1/2 hour and then at a higher rate is a very thin one if it exists at all.
The good news is that that is a thing that could easily be proven or disproven with a bunch of LiPo batteries, a freezer and a bunch of resistors.
I'd be quite surprised if the Ri of the batteries was low enough to allow sufficient current to flow, yet high enough to heat up to have this effect.
If it turns out Tesla denies telling him how he can condition the battery, that would be significant.
From what I remember (doing some electric car design a long time ago) a car that is cruising at about 50 miles per hour uses < 10KW, and that was 1980's car, I'd expect the Tesla to do a little bit better than that.
> If it turns out Tesla denies telling him how he can condition the battery, that would be significant.
It would be, and on top of that they could prove in a re-run that that was what did in the trip (and starting out on a leg with less range than the leg was long, that bit did not make sense at all in the previous article).
[1] Doing math for range / capacity at http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options
> The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles. He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense.
Anyway, I'd speculate that the Tesla person was thinking that if the battery got up to temperature it would go back to what it thought was the current capacity (as measured by open circuit voltage level).
I suspect something drained power from the car over night. In my case I've experienced power drain (non Tesla) from leaving an MP3 player plugged into the 'aux' jack of the center console. But we may never know for sure without better instrumentation.
Edit: This article http://electronicdesign.com/power/operating-conditions-get-t... says "permanent damage at -50 degrees C" which is way colder than the lower 48. It's a good thought though, and I'm sure if you were connected to the wall at night the car would heat the batteries to an optimal temperature. Just not sure why it might do that without power available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Minnesota_weather_recor...
Tesla has a bit of the Apple approach to software, where they intentionally limit the number of software options to not overwhelm the user. This may change as they continue development, but it's where they are now.
> I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking)
Someone failed at basic thermodynamics. Converting electricity to mechanical and back to electricity causes a terrible loss in power.
You know, i like a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but this seems like a genuine series of errors, intentional or not, who knows.
But, let me play a separate angle to this, which is that when I read this article, I immediately flash-backed to all the tech support calls i'd had with relatives where each of us made some mistake or made some assumption given the facts at hand. "turn down the brightness, stop using the cd drive, turn off bluetooth, limit wifi usage, oh, wait, it's plugged in? ummm... time for a new power supply then!"
I don't know why we should expect the 'average consumer' to have deep insight into the workings of batteries or electric car technology. This stuff remains new and I think the point to be gained from this article is that it's still not totally obvious what causes some failures and not others. It'd be one thing if this guy really tore into Tesla, but he seems ambivalent more than anything else.
And reading that is basically the same reaction i get from my mom about my iphone: it's nice, but it's confusing to me and i still make mistakes each time i use it—nice, but not for me.
All our tech makes some assumptions about what you know and the effort you're willing to expend to get something to work. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to step back and say "hey, something didn't work out and maybe that's a failure of the interface or our messaging or something" rather than jumping to claims of journalistic fabrication and oil conspiracies.
If temperatures are low and if the charging station can deliver more power than the batteries need to charge up, then using the heater may warm up the battery pack and allow it to charge more efficiently, then discharge more efficiently after leaving the station.
When batteries are cold, they neither charge nor discharge efficiently. Batteries benefit from higher temperatures (but not too high, as the recent Boeing Dreamliner battery story reveals).
Is it? The Tesla temperature chart makes a big thing about temperatures at a very specific point, ignoring that not much further in the journey the temperature dropped to the minimum for 50 miles. The infamous "32 mile" charge also shows that when the car was parked for the night it has 90 miles of range, disappearing overnight. Or complaining that he didn't know about a charge station that the car itself didn't know about.
Further, "hard data" is a bit of a stretch. No one but Tesla has the raw data, and they've carefully presented selective bits of it for maximum impact, which is naturally given that they're incredibly biased. Such as the "drove around a parking lot trying to kill the car" bit, when it was actually just five minutes looking for a unlit, unmarked charge station. It's also humorous that they take their telemetric speeds as gospel, when vehicle speedometers are notoriously unreliable.
No, its not hard to imagine this and might even be true. Middle managers know little apart from running daily affairs.
Its very much possible that when faced with questions they have no answers to they might have imagined a analogous set up(ordinary fuel car) and apply the question to such a thing and seek answers.
When you make uninformed guesses in the wild especially about new things, you generally make colossal mistakes- that is what seems to have happened here.
- not charging past 90% at the 1st station is defensible. Especially if Tesla warns it will shorten the battery's life.
- It'd be better if Tesla's software took temperature into account when estimating mileage range.
- Broder is being ridiculous about the cruise control and his speed estimates, and the temperature. He has partial accountability for the NYT graph. Turning the temperature down to 70 does not mean "sharply downward". He turned it down once more at around 250 miles, but that's far after the 182 that the article/graph indicates, and markedly different than "a little over 200 miles". He writes about how his feet were freezing and knuckles were turning white, but he didn't turn the heat down below 70 until (if my math is right) right about the time he got to Manhattan, which was mentioned afterward in his article timeline. On the other hand, it looks like it was turned down for most of the leg between Manhattan and Milford.
- The leg from Manhattan to Milford sounds legitimately stressful, but Broder claims low-speed cruise control that never happened. He tries to blame this on wheel size later, while simultaneously using Tesla's logs as showing that he wasn't driving very fast. That makes no sense.
- Tesla claims they told Broder to fully charge at Milford. He did not, and lists a lot of justifications for not following their advice.
- Broder complains that Tesla didn't tell him more about how to get the most out of charging stations, but Broder's a veteran at electric vehicles even if it's true that he hates them. And his defense for not charging overnight is laughable - plugging in overnight is not the same as plugging it at every Walmart stop. It's overnight in cold temperatures and the car was at less than 50% of its range. He's just being obstinate here.
- It's laughable to say that the Tesla fell short of its projected range when the projected range was from the day before, before not plugging it in on a cold night.
- Tesla and Broder directly contradict each other on whether they gave him the go-ahead to stop charging after an hour in Norwich. Broder's being vague in his wordings - he phrases it as if they approved him to unplug when they might have just said to plug it in for about an hour when they were trying to find him the plugin station ahead of time. Tesla, in turn, says that he unplugged over their objections.
- Broder just can't "account for the discrepancy" about the logs showing him driving close to 55 when he said he was limping along at 45, back from Norwich.
- Broder seems defensible on the parking brake - how is he to know not to turn off the car? - and the driving in circles, although it would be interesting to know just how clearly marked that supercharge station is. Musk is probably guilty of the "fundamental attribution error" here.
Anyway, even after Broder's latest response, it still reads like Broder was trying to stack the deck.
0.6 miles is not very far to travel, especially when 0.2 miles are accounted for by the offramp. A drive once around an unfamiliar parking lot in the dark, looking for a small charging station can easily account for 4 minutes and 0.4 miles. Every EV charging station I've seen hasn't had any signage or otherwise aside from what's written right on it, You can't assume he'd automatically know where it is.
Regardless of whether Tesla is right or the NYT is right (and I'm inclined to believe both sides are partially at fault), the fact that Tesla took such offense to a measly 0.6 miles I find laughable.
The graph seems to me to clearly account for the offramp. It doesn't start counting the 0.6 miles until his speed has slowed down to "I'm turning in now" conditions (0.1 mi after the origin point), and the graph itself tops off with the y-axis at 30mph—well below interstate offramp speeds—so at least some of the rest of the 0.2 mi long frontage is simply omitted off the left side of the graph.
I agree that this particular complaint is probably the weakest in Musk's post.
What really makes Broder's account unbelievable is that his original story was a review of the Supercharger network. His review completely omitted any mention of the difficulty of finding the charging stations. Why would he do that? As concerned as he claimed to be about not reaching the next charger, why did he never mention that he had to spend precious battery finding the damn thing until Musk accused him of driving in circles? Might it be possible that "searching for the charger" is just an excuse invented after his odious behavior was discovered?
From: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hz/correspondence_bias/
Also, this:
We tend to see far too direct a correspondence between others' actions and personalities. When we see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, we assume they are "an angry person". But when you yourself kick the vending machine, it's because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.
I disagree. I think Broder is doing what a lot of journalists do and has accentuated the overall negative experience to create a better narrative.
In spite of the poor communication and slight exaggeration, I don't feel like there was malice or a great deal of intent on Broder's behalf. He generally had a poor experience. The errors in his story do not negate that, and I don't get the impression that he had intentionally stacked the deck against the car.
Musk on the other hand has intentionally implied that Broder lied and was possibly motivated by a hatred of the Tesla concept. That is a ridiculous assertion to make by someone in his position. The data does not back that up.
Musk should have just presented the facts and let us interpret them.
If all Broder did was compile a list of facts, he wouldn't be writing for the NYT.
Musk is not in that position. He's the CEO of a company, not a writer. I think his argument would have had more impact had he not implied that Broder had a secret agenda.
I don't know much about electric cars, but I do know this: They aren't great for long distrance driving.
I have no doubt that Broder had a bad experience. When it's 10 degrees outside, I don't want to turn off the climate control. When I'm driving between cities, I don't want to stop at gas stations for over an hour. The list goes on.
This test was all about driving longer distances using fast (cough) charging stations. It seems clear to me no matter how you cut this up that the experience, compared to a gas powered vehicle was lousy. Who the hell wants to wait 1.5 hours at a gast station?
Tesla sounds great for driving around your city but I wouldn't think twice about buying one if I was driving great distances.
Sorry to be giving a negative opinion on electric cars. But hours together of charging, unpredictable battery performance, high prices of cars.
This just doesn't seem right.
Electric cars just aren't ready yet.
Not too long ago we had a week or so of 0-10deg [F] weather in the midwest, and my _petrol_ car didn't give me heat for most of my commutes.
What little heat I did have, I voluntarily left to the engine so it could get up to temp [knowing this is better for my car, and my emissions].
If it's going to be that cold, I bring an extra pair of socks and gloves. I don't blame my car that I _know_ is struggling to keep itself at operating temperature.
Not to mention, he had heated the cabin up to 74degF prior to that; no journalist can reasonably expect me to believe that a _brand new_ luxury electric car has worse insulation than an 01 Camry with cracked weather seals on the rear doors.
I'm sorry, but unless you didn't read the weather report and packed shorts and t-shirts, there is no way that 10degF ambient temp, in a well sealed cabin that has previously been heated to 72degF, is "white knuckle" weather.
---
I certainly agree with you, and with what I think was the larger point of Broder's review: this is not a _no compromises car_, even CNN's reviewer said that he had a bit of range anxiety on the longest leg.
Charging for an hour is a _compromise_, and criticizing it is well deserved.
A photo-op of the Model S on a flatbed truck, saying it broke down? That's no longer fairly deserved criticism: especially when you pulled out of a station with 32mi. of est. range for embarking on a 61mi. trip _knowing_ the battery was having range problems b/c of the weather.
That being said, considering this is a performance oriented car, I think the mileage was quite remarkable for an all electric vehicle. I'm honestly impressed, and I'm a petrolhead.
Once the fast-charge network is a bit more built-up? I can easily see myself planning long road-trips around it. -- On vacations we regularly spend 30-45 minutes at a filling station between tanks. Not because we _have to_, but because we need to stretch our legs, rotate seats, eat lunch, buy more snacks, maybe pick up a book, double check routes and reservations, etc. etc. I don't think an hour at a station that has plenty of amenities is unreasonable for 200+mi. legs.
This may not be an example of individual malice, but it is definitely an example of why journalism that still uses practices that pre-date video, let alone the internet, no longer commands any kind of respect.
Broder lied "because that's what journalists do". Think about that.
Most people expect journalism to be about the cold hard facts, possibly biased in it's tone and interpretation, but not altering the facts in favor of a narrative. Manipulating quotes is another journalistic favorite, because hey, just because it's between quotation marks doesn't mean they literally said that...
In the real world, that is called "lying and deceiving", unless it's marked "fiction" (or "advertising").
Every time people find out the truth doesn't match the reports, journalism loses a little more respect, but for some insane reason journalists insist on maintaining this completely outdated practice that is no longer justifiable in today's world of video, audio and instant global communication. And of course, logs...
I do agree that the nature of news is changing as are readers expectations.
this is a very old way of thinking about journalism and contrasts bizarrely with your assertion that building narratives is an outdated practice. in today's world of A/V/Instant communication, its becoming more and more clear that not only will people not pay attention to "cold hard fact" journalism, but what a lot of people actually want isn't merely narratives, its narratives that they agree with.
This doesn't make the 'new' way any better, and only shows how _wrong_ it is.
That's right, they don't expect it. They are merely disappointed if they don't.
Broder appears to have done that.
Not having a dog in this fight, I would also characterize it as lying. I have the expectation that a journalist will not construct a narrative, but will endeavor to faithfully report events as experienced and informed, as well as revealing personal biases and possible sources of error.
Driving like a normal person would - letting the car charge and trying to keep it near full - wouldn't have matched the narrative he had in mind, so he didn't do it. The narrative he had in mind involved desperately limping from station to station trying to get a little juice, so that's the experience that he constructed.
How an unbiased reporter would have done it: charge to full, pay attention to mileage and time to charge, repeatedly charge to full throughout trip, discuss the time limitations (must stop for an hour+ on long trips instead of a ten minute gasoline stop...), see if mileage matches expectations, and so on.
That wasn't the story Broder had in mind.
Fixed. A journalist's job is to present the facts as fairly and accurately as possible, not to massage (and sometimes distort) the facts into a narrative that triggers an emotional reaction. If anything, I expect the CEO of a company to bend the facts into a story, but I expect the journalist covering that company to unbend those facts, not to bend them the other way.
I think that's pretty much what "stacking the deck" means.
That's what journalists are supposed to do.
Musk on the other hand is expected to defend / market his product as well as he is capable.
What the heck? Does this guy seriously think that braking and then speeding up will conserve battery? Maybe the adage "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" is true.
Is this logical: cruise control ==> less (speed up / slow down) ?
So: no cruise control ==> more (speed up / slow down) ?
Do you believe the Tesla advice was to turn off cruise control to conserve battery? or do you think the times reporter is making that up?
Disclaimer: don't know much about Tesla implementation of cruise control.
1) We need more EV infrastructure, a point that seems to be getting lost and that I think should have been the thesis of the original article.
2) Broder was irresponsible for not taking seriously enough what the car was telling him and trusting too much the judgment of people 3,000 miles away.
3) Musk is on the defensive and perhaps overreacting because he feels he's doing good in the world and has produced a solid product that is now being unjustly (he feels) attacked.
4) External factors affect mileage, no matter what kind of car you're driving.
5) The attention this spat is receiving suggests to me people understand we can do a much smarter, better job of hauling our asses around.
At first I was 100% behind Musk, esp. when I heard they had data to back up their claims; but now, honestly I don't know what he was thinking, or what Telsa as a company was thinking letting emotions take control of the situation.
In the future I think Telsa would be well served by imposing a 72 hour minimum media silence while they do their investigation into the matter, and for F-sake keep Musk off Twitter/everything.
I'm still huge fan of Musk, I hope this can be turned into a positive for Telsa somehow.
There seems to be this assumption that just because he's clearly smart, and doing great things, that he can't also be self-destructively impulsive.
It's a shame, because un-varnished communications are much more interesting than generic corporate PR. On the other hand, he's doing his cause a disservice. He needs to sit back and shut up. His recent comments on the 787 battery, and this internet-esque flame war are at least unseemly, and more likely actively damaging his plans.
How interesting is that! Mr. Musk himself, noting his own perceived deficiency in Tesla's charging station network. Whether or not this is an admission of guilt, it certainly is quite interesting he would immediately offer a follow up test drive after additional stations had been built. Fast forward to Musk's blog post and it seems he's completely changed his attitude: now the fault is entirely with the journalists; now Tesla is the victim of an ill-intentioned agenda on the part of the New York Times...
Okay, someone please explain to me how tires with a smaller circumference are going to result in faster speeds?
John Broder already came across as someone who's hazy on basic physics. Maybe he's not so hot on geometry, either.
So, grade school geometry refresher. When you increase the diameter of a circle, what happens to its circumference?
Thanks for playing: "Do I think I am clever but just accidentally revealed I'm the level of dolt that needs basic geometry spelled out and assumes everyone else is as clueless as me?"
The overall diameter of the wheel is determined by the diameter of the rim + 2 times the thickness of the tire(!). Cars with larger rims usually have far thinner tires on them so the overall diameter stays almost the same. Whatever the case, the speedometer will need to be checked and adjusted. Human error in this case can swing either way.
D'oh! You win. (Not in the game mentioned above, either. I'm willing to be shown as a bit of a tires noob, so long as you're not painting me as a rube who forgot grade school geometry. EDIT: Never bought aftermarket rims in my life!)
In any case, this is enough to explain a 7 or 8% difference in the apparent direction the logs show?
you have the motor spinning faster to make up for the smaller tires, while the logging system just sees the motor spinning faster.
however, as counterpoint to this, the read distance would probably change as well (unless the logging system was only partially aware). Then again there was some discrepancies with the travel distance as well, but that discrepancy isn't nearly enough to account for it.
I don't mean to insult or slander Mr. Broder but how does one go from a White House correspondent, Washington editor, Los Angeles bureau chief and a political correspondent to reviewing cars and charger stations?
Instead of waiting until his tank is full enough, John instead starts driving. Why? Is he just stupid, and decides to ignore the gauge and risk his own safety based upon the ballpark estimate of a Tesla customer support rep? Or did he decide that now his ass was covered if the car did somehow end up dying, giving him his story? Either way, the story stinks.
When I first read Musk's piece yesterday, I thought Broder must be some sort of malicious a-hole, but after reading Broders first response and now this, his second response, I'm thinking its just a case of Musk being overly optimistic as to the capabilities of his product, and Broder being overly pessimistic.
Personally I think that Tesla looks bad here. They have been given so much praise over the last year that this one unfortunate review caused them to react with overzealous vigilance. Perhaps, if Musk had privately contacted Broder, shown him the data and make an understanding out of all this, they could have re-done the road trip and all would be well.
Instead, Musk attempts to embarrass him with internal logs and a blog post. It almost seems like he is implying that Broder has some ulterior agenda. I'm not saying Musk is right or wrong (I really don't know). I'm saying he could have handled the whole thing a lot better.
Had he come back with a more measured response (like OXO did with Quirky) and just politely pointed out the inaccuracies of the article and made his same offer of "We'll provide a car to any journalist to do the same test and see what happens", I don't think we'd be discussing this right now.
It would be like if I complained about my new Android not making it past 3 hours of web browsing and then HTC slams me for running 15 background tasks and only charging the phone to 85% the night before. The point remains that these batteries are not the greatest.
Musk comes across as too defensive and a bit of a jerk. I understand he probably has PTSD after the other publication screwed him, but get over yourself. Most people just accept bad reviews and move on.
I didn't think the article was that big a deal. Now we have what is essentially a "blogfight" with both sides parsing out every little word that the other published.
This is unbelievable. The advice is quite wrong, what remains is to discover whether Broder actually got this advice from someone at Tesla or made it up (or misremembered it). If Tesla offered this advice, someone needs an education in electric car technology (stop-and-go driving can only hurt battery life compared to driving at a steady speed). If Broder made it up, it casts into doubt the remainder of his account.
For the record, regenerative braking is not something that one can take advantage of -- it's always less efficient than not losing the energy in the first place. It's only a way to minimize the energy loss involved in braking, it can't eliminate the loss.
As to cruise control, in level terrain, it can only help the car's range by preventing the driver from wastefully changing speeds.
"... that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."
Ah. Well, then. Tesla should have phone records, but probably didn't record what was said (in many places, recording phone conversations is illegal without explicit consent).
That quoted sentence includes the interesting phrase "Tesla's spokeswoman at the time," seemingly implying that the company has a new spokesperson in just the last few days. Who speaks for the company to the press now? It appears that Christina Ra used to work for Honda
http://automobiles.honda.com/2012/cr-z/blog.aspx?Author=5
and LinkedIn suggests she works for both Tesla and SpaceX
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinara
with the title "senior manager, communications" for Tesla.
"I spoke at some length with Mr. Straubel and Ms. Ra six days after the trip, and asked for the data they had collected from my drive, to compare against my notes and recollections. Mr. Straubel said they were able to monitor “certain things” remotely and that the company could store and retrieve 'typical diagnostic information on the powertrain.'
"Mr. Straubel said Tesla did not store data on exact locations where their cars were driven because of privacy concerns, although Tesla seemed to know that I had driven six-tenths of a mile 'in a tiny 100-space parking lot.'"
So just what is the spatial resolution of the data stored by Tesla? Who can speak for the company on that exact issue, for the record?
I'm amazed, by the way, that commenters here and elsewhere claim that something is easy to see because it can be seen in a Google aerial photo in broad daylight in the summer, when the actual visibility issue is seeing the same thing from a car, while driving, at night in winter. I know lots of drivers who can drive right past things without seeing them, even while looking for those things, if they are driving in an unfamiliar location at night.
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several interesting comments in reply to this comment. I'll use my edit window to dump in some links from earlier threads on HN. There was an extensive, and on the whole rather favorable, review of the Model S from The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/12/3969260/going-the-distance...
submitted to HN while most participants were discussing the John Broder New York Times review. (Most participants missed the discussion on the article from The Verge, which is too bad, as the article has interesting photographs of the car and a lot of thoughtful commentary about its trade-offs as a vehicle for regular use.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5208154
The author of the report in The Verge takes care to mention, "Tesla hopes for its first quarter of black ink this year after a decade of operation, but make no mistake, it’s still in the throes of startupdom. Much of its working capital has come from nearly half a billion dollars in low-interest rate government loans. It has just a few dozen dealers around the world."
ONE MORE EDIT: Reasonable taxpayer and consumer minds can differ, and the differing opinions are widely expressed here on HN, but on the issue of the data-logging, I trust Tesla LESS after the back-and-forth about how Tesla thinks the reporter drove than I did before I saw Tesla's response. Tesla has HUGE taxpayer subsidies keeping its business afloat. Its response to questions about its technology's actual usefulness seems to be to go into attack mode whenever a reporter raises questions about the Tesla driving experience after driving a Tesla car. That doesn't make me think I want to drive a Tesla car. If the cars are really great for driving in places that have snow in winter, word of mouth should be able to tell that story, without any corporate P.R. spin. I note that there are many other news stories out right now, some of which have already been submitted to HN or mentioned in comments, in which onlookers express their opinion that Elon Musk has come out of this looking defensive. The product seems to be lacking in basic features I would need where I live, namely reliable estimates of remaining driving distance in winter, and that seems to speak for itself.
That bit is particularly curious. Is being able to spring a "gotcha" on a reporter for publishing a "fake" review preferable to sharing the info with the reporter so that, if malicious intent is suspected, the reporter knows that Tesla knows exactly what the facts are?
The problems for Tesla here seems to be that the batteries don't like the cold (unsurprising this may be) and that the Supercharger network is still sparse at this point in time. Regardless of whose spin you buy, those points remain, and are good to know.
Since they don't consume fuel they don't pay fuel taxes and don't contribute to surface maintenance of roadways.
Yes, if it helps us spot liars who are so far behind the times they don't realize we have the technology to catch them in their lies.
On the other hand, if I had very little monitoring ability, I would probably overstate these abilities so that the adversary doesn't test them.
Broder's implication that there is a privacy scandal there seems like a weak distraction. Elon said plainly that they do not monitor customers by default, but they turn this on for reviewers, citing the Top Gear review scandal. This is totally reasonable, and so is lying to a reviewer about whether or not it is enabled (even if they didn't lie). It's not comparable to lying to customers.
Also, how is this bad anyway? Google probably has this information already, if not google, your phone's carrier definitely does.
I do understand what you are saying (perhaps more than most people), I guess we just differ in opinion about how much it matters.
Why not just admit that he pushed the car to 80mph? If he bothers giving a really bad excuse for something benign, what's the rest of the article worth?
That sounds very very unlikely with the regenerative braking. They call it single pedal driving for a reason - the braking is pretty strong.
I don't blame Musk for his desire to reply and "clear his name." (I'd be surprised if he didn't identify personally with Tesla). But I think he let his inner-geek shine through too much. That post of there's was in the classic slashdot style of point-by-point refutation. You don't win friends that way.
Maybe a better strategy would've been to politely refute the conclusions about cold weather -- since when is this guy a batter scientist -- but then suggest that some bad luck and confusion had more to do with Broder's experience than the cold weather, and possibly invite somebody to spend a little longer with the car -- a week, a month -- to come to conclusions not as tainted by circumstance.
His defense is laughable: because someone on the phone the night before told me it would take an hour of charging.
Obviously, no one driving their own car would act this way, because then they would run a big risk of getting stuck on the road.
These are not technical support personnel.
I doubt that the specific operational advice that Broder received when he called Tesla's 24-hour customer support line was wrong or contradictory.
I can very much believe that if he placed a reporter's call to a press spokeswoman's cell phone late at night (as he claimed in his response of today), or to a product planner, or even to a CTO who's not in the weeds of the tech support database, that he might receive contradictory information.
I think this confusion between Tesla people who aren't technical giving Broder advice, and Tesla's tech support people (who aren't named in Broder's story) giving him advice, is a large part of the source of the contradictions.
http://www.colinbowern.com/posts/drive-smart-in-the-cold-wit...
That, and the fact that he has a fairly plausible explanation for each of Musk's claims, would put the burden of proof on Tesla. (I also get lost in parking lots; it doesn't prove he was trying to kill the car.)
But thats me... I find you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
I also find it highly improbably that a Tesla engineer would advise someone to improve range by speeding up and slowing down.
Some of it does ring true. e.g. The driving in circles vs searching for charge station. But on the whole it still sounds pretty weak.
- I think the pig here is the NY Times. But Musk didn't get to where he is by knowing when to take his foot off the accelerator (pardon the pun) and going less than 110% when he sees an obstacle to winning. So can't really expect him to handle this with restraint or reserve.
It was dark (5:45pm), on an I-95 rest stop during rush hour. That parking lot was likely jammed with cars and pedestrians moving around, it's perceivable that someone not familiar with the area could miss it (based on my experience trying to find air pumps at various rest stops).
Perhaps it was hard to find. Perhaps it was easy. It'll be obvious with a video, no?
But with these new cars, that trust is not there and hence the blaming of the system.
Yes, nytimes, please tell us, what does the Tesla data says, and what it doesn't. We shouldn't look at your original article ourselves, and then look at Tesla's reply. We should instead read the objective analysis of the situation. An objective analysis from the very party accused of lying. Oh god, the irony, it burns, the goggles do nothing.
Batteries aren't that great yet for long range travel.
This has made me respect the NYT and Musk much less for the mudslinging alone.
In a nutshell, the decais the root cause of the scandal.
Note that this problem is shared with all other EVs currently on the market (i.e., the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf). It's a basic problem of physics and chemistry.
In Elon's post, he states they have strong sales in nordic countries, we haven't seen any reports of failure from there. Just because they use the same underlying technology (Li-Ion) doesn't mean all battery packs are the same, Tesla's has a very different design.