Lies, Damn Lies, And Robots

While it gives me little pleasure to call out New York Times writer John Broder for his clearly weird Tesla S test-drive, I do appreciate the way Elon and the team at Tesla called him to task for seemingly falsifying his experience in the car. I’d like to give Broder the benefit of the doubt – range anxiety is a real and frightening thing – Tesla’s Nate Silver-esque retort is quite illuminating and could change the reviewer dynamic. Full disclosure: I write for the Times every few months and they’re nice guys, mostly. I won’t bore you with more detail on the case (Darrell did that here) but I will note the value of the data provided by Tesla essentially destroys Broder’s punditry. Broder is a car guy, and an opinionated one. He once wrote “yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate,? a line that Musk quotes in his blog post as proof-positive that Broder is biased. While his argument in that piece is far more nuanced, that’s what sticks out. A look at his other stories hows a skeptical eye towards electric cars. He also claims that his side of the story is far simpler than Musk describes: . He writes: Virtually everyone says that I should have plugged in the car overnight in Connecticut, particularly given the cold temperature. But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a ?normal use,? no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. Now that Tesla is striving to be a mass-market automaker, it cannot realistically expect all 20,000 buyers a year (the Model S sales goal) to be electric-car acolytes who will plug in at every Walmart stop. Perhaps his experience was just as he described it – a muddle of confusion, fear, and poor planning. But Musk fights back with actual numbers and the outcome isn’t pretty. In fact, Musk claims that Broder drove the car around in tight circles for a little while just to get it down to zero range. Broder came at his test from the standpoint of a dude who likes to hop in a nice sedan and expects to drive a few hundred miles on a tank of

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