Hacker News Reader

Comment by robterrell | Hacker News Reader

I really like Tesla and want them to succeed, but they've got some weird ideas about good PR. The cost calculator that factored in the cost of pump time at your billable rate; the over-the-top posture against the NY Times reviewer who discovered that the battery heater could draw enough power to affect range; and now this, where they made up their own methodology to convert VSS into stars and found themselves to be the best. (I'm not even considering the weird stuff like Elon Musk offering publicly to consult on Boeing's batteries, although I think that points to the source.) Aren't the "best car ever made" reviews enough?

View on HN

You mean the reporter who drove around in circles trying to kill the car off and lied about the heater settings he used, also in an attempt to kill the car? I think you missed the whole week there where the actual drive data proved he was a fraud.

I don't like that reviewer, because he's evidently a very sloppy reviewer with a pretty poor understanding of physics and mechanics involved. However, I no longer think he was gaming the system deliberately. Assume incompetence before malice.

He may very well have been incompetent, but at the very least he was dishonest too. He put a serious bias on what he "reported" in his article. It may have been a malicious attempt to kill the car for a better story, or it may have just been an attempt to cover up his own incompetence, but either way, it was a pretty bad article and deserved to be trashed.

He drove around a parking lot once, searching for the charging station.

You left out Tesla suing television show Top Gear for libel. (Which they lost despite the UK's infamously plaintiff-friendly libel laws.)

I think that may have been less about winning the case, and more about getting the word out that the 'test' Top Gear did was edited in a way that maximized humor vs. being 100% accurate.

Sure, and that's probably a fair point. They should have said exactly that. Instead they implied the show maliciously falsified a review and then spent months (years?) unsuccessfully litigating them.

Right, and Tesla lost because Top Gear argued (successfully) in court that what they aired was not a review but a comedy show. And being that the review was not a review, it could not be a malicious review. That's very thin ice to be standing on.

I really think you are mistaken. Do you have a source that says that's why the case was dismissed?

The Top Gear review was essentially accurate, at least IMHO.

Tesla argued in court that it was unfair to mention the car's disappointing range on the test track because most people won't be driving on a test track. A strange argument, especially for a sports car. Note that they did not argue that the range number cited was wrong -- just that it might confuse potential buyers.

The judge ruled that: "no reasonable person watching the programme could understand that the performance on the track is capable of direct comparison with the performance, including the range, on the road"

I thought the problem was Top Gear showed them pushing the Tesla, as if it had run out of juice, when in fact it still had battery and could have driven under its own power?

part of the issue is how quick people are to judge, combined with the particular historical perception of electric cars. Tesla has to be very aggressive about the image of its vehicles, otherwise the prevailing prejudices about electric cars in general will override the image of its own cars regardless of how awesome they may actually be

Their vehicle safety score was 0.42, the closest one was 0.50. That's a big difference. The lowest with a 5 star rating was 0.66 and the average was 0.60. That's totally something they should be allowed to brag about, but they should have just used those numbers or clearly explained their methodology. I think they were just trying to show off that number in a familiar way, and I can't blame them too much for that.

Lower VSS is better? I wouldn't want to try and explain that in marketing.

> the over-the-top posture against the NY Times reviewer who discovered that the battery heater could draw enough power to affect range

Actually he claimed to have the heater keeping the cabin at near-freezing temperatures, and the cabin temperature graph captured from the car strongly disputed that. Going over-the-top at the guy was all they could do after he had made so many different false claims. He was probably right with some of the claims, and the proof of him circling around in the parking lot wasn't as open-shut as initially presented, but when you are hit by that many misrepresentations at once you have to fight back fast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com