Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery(theatlanticwire.com) |
Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery(theatlanticwire.com) |
But the section before he broke down it does look like he chugged along at a pretty low speed.
"It does look like"? This is a graph, it has data points, its not about "looking like" - these points represent facts. At no point in the facts is there proof of cruise control being set at 55mph.
She is taking a graph with real data and attempting to re-interpret it to fit the NYTimes story. This is an emotional argument, as with 'oh no, this was actually about testing supercharge stations'.
The particular facts may be "peculiar," even fabricated, but the overall experience rings true. There are going to be trips that you can do easily today on petrol that would be difficult to do with the state of the art electric car from Tesla.
It's time for Tesla and Better Place (betterplace.com) to join forces.
Now I have to go back to being upset about there being horse-meat in lasagna.
Tesla, thanks to the tracking, may have every tiny detail, but their users generally agreed with the reviewer--at a Tesla site forum no less.
Restaurant reviewer: Service was great but the food took an hour to arrive!
Restaurant owner: He is a liar, food was on the table with 50 minutes and I have order slips to prove him wrong.
Me: underwhelmed at the "evidence," 50min and an hour is essentially the same to me when waiting for food to arrive and I didn't expect the reviewer to hold a chronowatch.
He could easily have given round estimates, but he made the choice to appear more precise.
His choice, his error.
If you fill a ICE car up with less gas you need to get to your destination and attempt to make it anyway, you are going to need to be just as particular about your technique.
This should not be a news flash to anybody who has ever driven.
Bad analogy, this http://www.statisticbrain.com/gas-station-statistics/ says that they are 121,446 gas stations in USA. It takes 5 minutes to add fuel for another 300 or so miles and they accept credit cards :)
In Australia, you'll get a $100 speeding ticket for going 7MPH over the limit. You need to drive more carefully.
http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/usingroads/penalties/speeding.html
The road is not a personal time transport no matter how late you are!
> 45 mph or 52mph, it's the same crap to me.
Would that work with traffic police?
who cares, but usually yes, at least in US (you go fast, you slow, fast...and police are looking for the worst offender) . My point is: a car that has to be driven with a gazillion, million, billion specific instructions or else it's a brick, maybe it isn't for me or many others. "Your car died and you're in the middle of nowhere because you went 5mph over the recommended by Tesla speed," isn't for me. Isn't this an expensive car too?
If you want to make the point that charging takes to long, or that there are not enough chargers, go right ahead. It is pretty easy to make that point convincingly without resorting to intellectually dishonest bullshit about the car requiring hypermiling techniques.
I find people's claims that the car is somehow "inadequate" because it needs a full charge every 200 miles to be strange. I guess probably because I ride a motorcycle which gets pretty much exactly that range from a tank, and when I'm riding I've always go a pretty good idea of how much further I can go, and while I'm on a long trip I've always got in my head not only the furthest possibles fuel stop I could make, but also the "sensible" stop before that - on the off chance tha the max-range fuel stop is closed or empty. (and that happened a few weekends ago the other way round - my intended "second last" fuel stop had a blackout so the pumps weren't working, so I safely made it ~20 miles to the next town. No problem.)
You know that cars need to be filled with gas, right? And that using diesel in a regular (or vice - versa) is a big problem? And they need you to check the oil, and top up the oil? And that not topping up the oil is a big problem, right?
> "Your car died and you're in the middle of nowhere because you went 5mph over the recommended by Tesla speed,"
Well, no. "Your car died because you didn't charge it. You didn't charge it even though you knew you had a journey of X miles to go, and you knew you didn't have enough charge, and you were given strong advice (from the car, and from the car makers) that you hadn't charged it enough". Plug the car in - that's not a gazzillion million billion specific instructions. It's just one. Plug it in, let it charge.
Why did they do that? To prove that he didn't write a book (a story wouldn't fit it) and detail every speed he drove or because they speed matters?
He claimed to be driving at one speed. He was driving not at that speed, and sometimes significantly faster.
How many words have been expended in the other HN thread to allege that Broder -- after most have already established that he is a charlatan -- is receiving oblique funding from his Big Oil paymasters? It may very well be that Broder got a swimming pool full of BP-money in his offshore hideaway...but isn't it possible that just maybe, that Elon Musk has a vested interest in advocating for Tesla? Like, just a little bit?
It doesn't have to be that Musk is trying to cover up the truth. It could just be that this is his big project and he is overly sensitive to (some of it admittedly unfair) criticism to the point where he'll see malice where there is none. It's possible: bias from sentimental influence is not unheard of in the scientific community.
One of the most disappointing things about Musk's response was how he closed it with an out-of-context anecdote:
In his own words in an article published last year, this is how Broder felt about electric cars before even seeing the Model S: "Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”
If you read that article, Broder was clearly referring to the controversy behind the Chevy Volt, which he also compared unfavorably to a "lawnmower".
Oh wait, that was Elon Musk who said that: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-05-11/green_sheet/2...
So basically, if you think Musk knows what he's talking about, then Broder spoke the truth about the Volt. Yet Musk uses Broder's assessment as a closing statement of damning circumstantial proof that Broder is decidedly anti-electric car.
Oh I know, this kind of cheap rhetorical trick is what all politicians and businessmen do, and it's OK if someone we all really admire does it, as long as his heart's in the right place. Maybe so, but I don't think it hurts to be a little more objective towards our heroes and realize that they can be prone to misjudgment too.
This reporter clearly barely made any attempt at recharging his empty vehicle in Norwich, and then attempted a drive well beyond the car's capabilities, then made the "running out of fuel" his headline.
If he would have done this on gasoline, the result would have been the same, and I think that is getting lost in the clutter of all of the other points being made on this subject.
"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"
"I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy."
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.
But the Model S had other ideas. “Car is shutting down,”"
---
Sounds like he was in constant contact with Tesla and they incorrectly stated that the ~65 miles lost overnight would magically return, and Mr. Broder, unfortunately, took them for their word and left the charging station with the dash showing less than the amount needed to make the trip.
Who is the real "liar" here?
Ergo, the likelihood of (1) the reporter not fully charging his car's battery and (2) the fuel guage inaccurately reporting a fully charged battery is the realm of more likely than not.
If the car tells you it has half a tank left, and if you find out 10 miles later that the car is almost empty, who do you blame? Do you blame the driver for not having filled the tank or do you blame the car for potentially misreporting the levels?
In context, I wonder if the data recorded by the tesla is indeed the same data reported on the dashboard. What would be cool and definitive is if they could present "screenshots" of what was displayed.
More general, what I would like to see, given the detail Tesla kept on the car, is a log of the phone calls that Broder made to Tesla during the journey.
Why doesn't Musk focus on that? Instead of trying to discredit the reporter by saying he maliciously lied about when he turned the heat on or off by a couple miles, or whether the car had actually run out of juice at the very end.
> After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. 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.
So if you read just Musk's piece, you get the perception that Broder lied about not knowing that he was under-juiced. To paraphrase:
Broder: "I should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
Musk: "Broder is an idiot who should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
OK, no argument there. But if Broder is trying to show what a lemon the Tesla is, he's sure doing about it at a roundabout way (which I guess I what we'd expect a well-heeled Big Oil secret agent to do).
So Broder is a professional journalist at the Times, but as far as I can tell, his role is to not describe what it's feels like to be a tech-expert who owns a Tesla. His scenario is not at all alien to anyone who's driven a gas-powered car and skipped "just one more" off-ramp even as the fuel meter hovers at 0.
Irresponsible? Sure. But this is how an average car owner might act. Not every car owner has, on a given day, the ability to wait around an extra hour after breakfast at a diner for the car to keep charging. If the charging stations are as commonplace as the map Musk produced indicates, then Broder may have thought (and misjudged) that he could make it to the next public station.
I think a passage from earlier in Broder's review is a good insight to what he was thinking:
> I drove a state-of-the-art electric vehicle past a lot of gas stations. I wasn’t smiling.
Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan.
The success of Tesla depends on the electric infrastructure improving dramatically. Until that comes about, there is apparently a lot of babying and thinking ahead that a Tesla owner has to do even when the car is running just fine.
I find it funny that so many people here are so quick to jump on Broder for not being so patient and tech savvy. While not everyone here is a huge Apple fan, I think most would laugh at a hardware manufacturer who delivered a high powered laptop that performed with variable results depending on the conditions of the day: it's powerful, and cutting edge, you'd just have to remember to plug it at night remember that the battery's decline won't be at a constant rate for more than the usual range of reasons.
It's not Tesla's fault that charging stations aren't ubiquitous, and Tesla deserves a lot of credit for trying to change it. And it's not Tesla's fault that people are sometimes dumb, impatient, and not constantly vigilant. But that's the reality of the market Tesla is selling its $100,000 vehicle for, and this is the market that the media writes for.
However, after reading this article it's clear to me that the data shows Broder flat-out lied about several things (like turning down the heat or setting cruise control to 54 MPH). He also clearly did not just use one of myriad charging stations on the way, even when it was apparent that the car would run out of juice soon. He chose not to recharge. He also chose not to charge the car fully at any of his other stops. While it's fine to play fast-and-loose with your "gas tank" like that (heck, I've done it with normal cars), it's another thing if you do it deliberately to write an "out of gas" headline.
It doesn't matter if the author finds several of these points convincing or not. If the log data is to be believed, it shows that Broder did several things that actively contributed to his running out of energy, and then he lied about doing them.
This is obviously the case. Musk overreacted and will end looking like a fool.
But he has a lot of goodwill; he can afford to spend a little.
Musk comes across more as a Preston Tucker or a John DeLorean than a Henry Ford.
The lawnmower comment is out of context and the link you provide misquotes it as much as you do. Specifically, "And then when you have consumed your 40 miles, which is not going to happen every day, but maybe every third day, you are going to have an engine that is really underpowered. It's kind of like a lawnmower engine trying to power my sedan. So it's going to be running at very high RPM, it's going to be working really really hard..." (with some stuttering taken out).
You can in fact question a lot of what he said. The Chevy Volt does not have two drive trains. The engine does not power the wheels directly, but is connected a generator which powers the electric motor. The gas engine in a Chevy Volt spins at three very comfortable RPM levels, and I believe the highest is 4500 RPM or so. I think what he did is slyly switched the topic from the Volt to other plug-in hybrids like the Prius, where I can see some of these problems being an issue. In other words, you are right, he definitely is trying to downplay any competition. However, he did not say that the Volt is a lawmower.
I am also somewhat confused as to why a 40 mile powerpack needs to exert 5x the power of a 200 mile powerpack, though this may be my own lack of understanding.
"After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. 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."
At every previous charge, he noted the exact mileage remaining when he headed out. Why not this time? Because the estimated range when he left that charging station was less than he needed to reach his destination and he knew damn well that that was the case.
http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/r...
(How he convinced the Tesla people to "clear" him at that point is a mystery that hasn't been followed up on by either party.)
Later he hand-waves past this by saying he was testing the superchargers, not normal chargers. But the fact is he knew he would run out of charge midway to his destination if he didn't charge the car longer. Instead, he decided to intentionally set up a situation where the car would be stranded.
Elon might have been better off concentrating on this point more, rather than some of the smaller inaccuracies. But the data is clear: the reporter was in full control of the situation and manufactured the failure himself.
Of course, the entire debacle can be summed up with the following exchange:
Q: "How many miles did you have left to drive on the final leg?"
Broder: "61"
Q: "And how many miles did your car tell you that you could travel before recharging?"
Broder: "32"
Of course, Broder claims that Tesla told him it was OK to leave. I think this is bullshit, but will never know. The fact is he basically was stupid enough to essentially leave a gas station with half a tank when he had a full tanks worth of distance to travel. The only way you would do this is if you want to get stuck. I don't care how scientific you are trying to be, you wouldn't risk being stuck out in the cold with a dead car unless you really wanted that to happen. Why we should take anything this man writes about cars seriously is beyond me.
Wow, I wish I could be as sloppy and awful at my job as these journalists are. Had he actually bothered to truly read the response he is commenting on, he would see that Musk states that, when the car's range dips below zero, it is running on reserve power. It takes some miles after "zero" for the car to actually stop moving.
What a hack. There is truly nothing worse than reading something by someone who has no education in comprehending quantitative data try to critique it.
However, I do agree with his statement on the climate control. That was something I noticed when I read Musk's response. Clearly, the Broder turned the heat down, just not as early as he thought/claimed.
As of January 2013's run rate, it takes GM 72 hours to sell that many cars. (2)
How about a comparable luxury target?
MB did 305,072 vehicles in 2012, so they do Tesla's sales every 2-weeks. (3)
Perfect comps? No way, but still . . .
To call Tesla an "early adopters" brand where you're going to run into some bullshit, is an under-statement.
I was considering a Model S as my next vehicle, and even if the NYT article is accurate that dissuades me zero percent. I get that this vehicle is going to have some problems - BUT IT'S ELECTRIC AND BIG AND SEXY AND FAST AND NOBODY ELSE HAS ONE!
But watching Musk's response to going full-Nerd-Nuclear (without CONCLUSIVE data) to trash a journalist and the institution of the NYT actually does give me pause in wanting to support that brand.
In other words, in my personal case (of one person, one piece of data) Musk is damaging Tesla's goodwill more than he's helping it.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S
(2) http://www.gm.com/content/gmcom/home/company/investors/sales...
* Low volume, high price car.
* Mid price, mid volume car.
* Low price, high volume car.
I own a Roadster, and after 2.5 years of daily driving, my battery capacity is down by 6%. That's not 0%, but it's also not a big deal.
The story was "Electric cars suck". Broder is well known for having anti-electric car opinions, so it's not surprising that he would want to write a negative review.
Argument 1: The length of the detour is not as important as the type of driving during that detour.
Argument 2: "But Broder never claims he turned down his heat at the 182 mile mark." - well, he does claim he turned it down and doesn't mention he had turned it up. People can lie by omission.
Argument 3: "But the section before he broke down it does look like he chugged along at a pretty low speed.", perhaps. But not at the 45 mph claimed in the article.
Argument 5: "No. His other chart shows the mile range dipped below zero, which would indicate the car could not move." The car has a small reserve. 0 charge would mean "charge the car right now".
Argument 5: "Broder also explains that he did not charge fully because of the time it took to charge. He wanted to show the real world experience of a real driver, who might not want to endure the hour and a half it takes to charge up, when only needing a certain amount of energy to get to point B." I hope any real driver would know that a distance of 60 miles would need enough charge for a 60 mile journey, and that giving 30 miles of charge would be a stupid thing to do. Just as if you needed to drive a distance needing 20 gallons you'd be stupid if you only filled with 10 gallons.
This article is, frankly, idiotic.
All it takes is one person to drive the same journey, but with proper charging, and to release the logs to disprove Broder's points.
If you already know you don't have sufficient range, why would you not try to be more efficient to extend your range as soon as you can? He knew what to do to make the car more efficient, he just chose not to until he could get the result he desired.
I don't fully trust Musk and his counter claims, but this article and the other NYT pieces are obviously very Top Gear in their formulas... Which is very unfortunate for the EC revolution.
Key point that you need to add. They need to do it in the same weather.
There is no clear winner or loser here.
I wish that Broder had been running a few cameras in the car during the whole trip. Then we could have some data to compare against Tesla's. For example, we could correlate the readings from the car's speedometer with video evidence from which we could calculate speed.
"In his article, Broder claims that “the car fell short of its projected range on the final leg.” Then he bizarrely states that the screen showed “Est. remaining range: 32 miles” and the car traveled “51 miles," contradicting his own statement (see images below). The car actually did an admirable job exceeding its projected range. Had he not insisted on doing a nonstop 61-mile trip while staring at a screen that estimated half that range, all would have been well. He constructed a no-win scenario for any vehicle, electric or gasoline."
The car said it would go 32. It went 51. Broder claimed this "fell short". Clearly it didn't.
Maybe Musk's data doesn't add up (I doubt it). If that's the case, present something other than 'I plotted a route in Google Maps and it said 500. QED.'
I thought this was all pretty convincing. What are your complaints?! I really don’t get it. How would you suggest measuring distance? Is Google Maps really not a good tool for doing so? Plus, Google Maps wasn’t really the centerpiece here, for any argument.
In that, they are making valid points, supported by facts. That it's the best they can do is telling. I look forward to replication attempts.
Sometimes the reality is simpler than the conspiracy.
When a company reviews your car, they don't use the standards which you want them to use. They don't do things precisely as you want them to. Reviewers make mistakes, they are new to the equipment, they don't know everything about your car. And you know what?
That's a great thing.
Electric cars, specifically, are unique products. They are novel, new (well, technically they've been around for a hundred years, but haven't been common for the past eighty or so). People don't know what to think about them. Average Joe Sixpack from the NYT treating this car as a normal driver would, and providing us his opinion, is a godsend.
In that, they are making valid points, supported by facts. That it's the best they can do is telling.
I look forward to replication attempts.
-Turn the heat down for more range? Who the heck wants to drive around cold in an extremely expensive car?
-Drive slowly? Again, what?
Elon is simply agreeing with the reviewer's most damning findings: The consumer must make considerable sacrifices - in addition to spending more money - in order to properly use their Tesla car.
No, we do. The photo here is of the northbound charging spots: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/tesla-begins-east...
Assuming he took the car lane, even if he drove past every single parking spot all the way back out to the road to the highway, he would only cover 0.4 miles. http://goo.gl/maps/VzRjc
Instead he's muddying the issue like so:
"As the State of Charge log shows, the Model S battery never ran out of energy at any time, including when Broder called the flatbed truck." (Technically true and useless)
Broder's towing company further backs him up:
http://jalopnik.com/towing-company-the-nyt-tesla-model-s-was...
James hasn't tweeted since February 8th, but retweeted John Broder today about 9 hours ago (screenshotted for posterity in case someone following up to blog about this wants it later) https://twitter.com/JBennet
This now calls in question the integrity of James Bennet and Rebecca Greenfield. I haven't been able to determine a link between Rebecca and James other than that of subordinate. She's been at the Atlandic since July 2010 and he's been at the Atlantic since 2006. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=43905376 https://www.facebook.com/pages/James-Bennet/112357645448306
I tried finding the Facebook profiles for these three people to confirm connections, but it doesn't look like their profiles are publicly discoverable.
Any journalists care to take on a story of examining the relationships within the third estate here? There's probably a story.
I think it boils down to this:
1) Does Broders trip represent a typical experience driving a Tesla Model S?
2) Could Broder have avoided running the car down to empty and having it toed?
1) No, but Broder wants you to think it's yes.
2) Yes, but Broder wants you to think it was no.
Musk's job is to sell his cars, we accept that he might present things in a manner that is most flattering to his products. That's ok as long as he doesn't outright lie or mislead, we wouldn't expect anything else from any other company. But the reporter's job is to present the truth to his readers, and if he not only fails at that job but goes out of the way to present falsehoods what faith can his readers have in him? At this point, what makes him better than a reporter for a tabloid? Why should anyone believe anything he writes? If a reporter doesn't have a reputation for factual accuracy what good are they?
P.S. I'm reminded of Dateline NBC's "investigation" of the GM C/K series pickup trucks. The trucks were fundamentally of an unsafe design, with side mounted external gas tanks. But Dateline's crash tests included adding model rocket engines to ensure that the rupture of the gas tank caused an explosion, without revealing that to the viewers. And that, I think, is the problem here where the reporter was not content to let the facts stand on their own and went to every effort to juice up the story (although not the car). Investigative journalism is a hard job, but when you make that leap and start adding embelishments you are no longer doing journalism you are entertaining.
I haven't seen anyone attempt to verify actual speeds based on computing the area under the speed graph, but I suspect that this won't help Musk's case. 19/22 (ratio of the wheel size of the car driven and the wheel size specification) is actually the perfect ratio to explain the variation between recorded speeds and reported speeds. Perhaps one is based on GPS and another on wheel rotation.
The correct response to this story was: we need to improve our customer service, software, reporting of range (especially w.r.t. temperature) and messaging; customers need to better understand the tradeoffs of gas vs. electric cars, and not claiming a senior NY Times reporter will lie to generate some extra hits on a pretty minor story.
Area under the curve -- then that would be to establish average speeds, yes? I think the recorded road distances and travel times would be a simpler way to establish that.
> The correct response to this story was: we need to improve our customer service, software, reporting of range (especially w.r.t. temperature) and messaging ...
Yes, that would have been a nice alternative to what actually happened. My pet gripe about Tesla in this affair was their advice to Broder to engage in stop-and-go driving as though that would help the car's range (it can't do that, it can only hurt compared to driving at a steady speed).
The reviewer left Norwich with the car telling him he could travel 32 miles, when he needed to go 62 miles. If he hadn't done that, he would not have had an issue.
The atlanticwire article doesn't address this point at all, and how could it? The car said it would go 32 miles. It went more than that, but less than 62. Any reasonable person, needing to go 62 miles, would want the number the car says to be greater than 62, because what kind of idiot tries to go 62 miles with a car with 62 miles of range left? Now, what kind of full on retard tries that with 32 miles left?
Also, their target market here will probably research this enough that the negative PR won't matter that much. It'll ruin public perception...just like they've done with diesel over the past decades. Now where's my diesel/electric car? Diesel/electric hybrid technology has been around since the first few years of the 1900s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel-electric_transmission#Sh...
I am not impressed with our "progress".
I agree. Often when you're arguing, you have a really strong argument and a few weaker ones. You'd think that making both the strong argument and the weaker ones would be the best case, (ie, that the strength of your case equals the sum of the strength of its components). In fact, in public discourse often the opposite is true. People will knock down your weaker arguments, making you and your case look bad. So I think the strength of your case might actually be closer to the minimum of the strength of its components.
For this reason, Elon would likely have been better off to emphasize and shore up his strongest argument--that Broder knowingly did not charge enough at Norwich--rather than try and nickle and dime Broder on a lot of smaller issues.
I would argue it's nearly always best, both rhetorically and analytically, to reconstruct your opponent's case as generously and sympathetically as possible, and then bear down very hard on your strong point.
This isn't just true in public discourse by the way. It's true in proposal/grant writing, legal argumentation, or even just arguing with your parents. You should always lead with your strongest arguments, and think very carefully before including any weak ones. Humans are just bad at doing weighted analysis of persuasive arguments. Say you have an argument, with three points, with weights: 0.9, 0.05, and 0.05. Your opponent destroying your two weak arguments is going to convince the reader or decision maker far more than the 0.1 combined weight of the arguments.
Given all that they had at stake, namely a disastrous NY Times review, how likely is it that Tesla would knowingly say "Oh, your reading says 30 miles, but you have more than twice that still to travel? Meh, it's probably just a computer glitch. Carry on."
Not bloody likely.
>"...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."
Tesla themselves cleared Broder to make the trip. If I was driving a BMW with a BMW engineer in the front seat, and he told me that I would be able to make my journey despite the "empty" or "check engine" lights flashing, I would believe him and keep driving. I don't see why this scenario is any different.
To people who say that Broder is just making it up, and that Tesla never cleared him to make the journey, I ask you this: why won't Musk release the call logs to prove it?
But the Times article does say exactly that, right? "The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford."
It's interesting that you choose that wording, that Broder "convinced" Tesla to clear him rather than Tesla telling him what to do and giving him the go-ahead after an hour.
The most sensational part of the article was the photo of a cutting-edge luxury car on a flat bed. That situation was directly caused by ignoring common sense. That's the main point Tesla's blog entry should have made; the rest is noise.
Part of the problem is that apparently the Tesla's displayed range can show one value after a cold night, then will increase when the battery warms up and is providing more energy. So you legitimately can start driving with too little range, and then it will come back. I assume that's why the Tesla rep cleared it too.
If he was in death valley, or the arctic with no cell reception, and it was 61 miles to the next station and the car said 32 no sane person would ever begin that journey.
> [for why he didn't fully charge:] He wanted to show the real world experience of a real driver, who might not want to endure the hour and a half it takes to charge up, when only needing a certain amount of energy to get to point B.
> [for why he didn't use any of the non-supercharging stations:] Broder wanted to see how the car would do on a long range road trip relying on Tesla's two official Supercharger stations.
These two goals are simply not compatible.
still its a 100k car and Musk is quibbling over temperature settings... really?
It's a 100k car and it won't make that feat either.
Measuring usable capacity left in a battery is much more art than science still. You can model the drain rate and change your estimates based on historic usage and do all kinds of fancy FFT and other signal processing, but in the end it's still an estimate, batteries are not immune to physics, and li-ion batteries won't save the world (but they will create lots of hazardous waste in creation and disposal).
What's interesting is that Rebecca Greenfield doesn't see it as convincing argument at all. Here's her explanation for siding with Broder:
"Broder also explains that he did not charge fully because of the time it took to charge. He wanted to show the real world experience of a real driver, who might not want to endure the hour and a half it takes to charge up, when only needing a certain amount of energy to get to point B"
What?? In what 'real world' would someone needing to travel 61 miles leave a charging station with an estimated range of 32 miles?
I get the feeling that Rebecca Greenfield realised that an article titled "Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims" would generate more interest than "Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up Most Of His Claims, But For One Of His Claims the Data Is Compelling"
A lot of comments here seem to miss that the reviewer was putting the car through a test, and the test required only abiding by certain parameters (the super charger stations).
Can I add on argument 6.: >>No. That wasn't the point of the article. Broder wanted to see how the car would do on a long range road trip relying on Tesla's two official Supercharger stations. <<
Ok, he wanted to rely on only official stations, but did he really have to completely discharge the car? Why couldn't he just stop and charge when he was super low at any normal charge station, and explain in the article that the two supercharge stations, failed? Well that's because then he couldn't post a nice article titled >>Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway<<
Broder knew it, and he wanted the car to die. We all know that. What is in debate here is to what degree he went to make the vehicle die that differs from what an average driver who wants to get to point B would have done.
Given that his job was to write an accurate review, the fact that he didn't really want to wait until the car is fully charged and was bored driving the car at normal speed and so on, we can say he did a poor job with the review.
To us geeks, often, stuff is either true or not true, with no room for maybe.
To reporters, they're both trying to understand what's happening without direct knowledge as well as convey that in a way a layperson can understand. Unfortunately, in that game of telephone, a lot of important details get lost.
I also think reporters deal with imperfect information and rely on their judgement to determine if any particular detail is important to the overall narrative, often influenced by the competing agendas of the players involved.
What's great (rare) about this story is there's published data, the validity of which no one disputes (yet), to chew over.
Why do you assume that?
His job was to attract readership and hits for the NYT. Nothing does that better than controversy.
You need to a degree to understand a pretty basic line graph ? Give me a break.
People on here (and in the article's comments) need to stop acting like sanctimonious assholes. Electric cars are not some advanced technology that only the precious genius of Musk and IT nerds can comprehend.
The fact is that the truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle here. Big surprise.
But to be fair, I have no way of knowing the author lacks this experience. My intuition told me this with the numerous mistakes made in the article.
I expect Tesla employees to be biased toward Tesla. I expect journalists to tell the truth.
This is true even if you assume the best intentions from this reporter: he should know that Tesla is his adversary in his search for the truth and they will not suffer criticism passively. Many on HN and in the general public do not assume the best intentions of any reporter, and in light of that reporters should conduct themselves even more rigorously.
Your statement is on point only if you don't consider what was in the actual graphic:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/02/10/automobiles/10t...
An excerpt:
"Driving a 2013 Model S with an 85-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which has an EPA range rating of 265 miles...the car barely reached the next Supercharger, 206 miles away in Milford, Conn. The next day, in 10 degree weather, the car fell short of its projected range..."
So when you read the statement in context, and you actually look at the graphic, you realize that the "fell short of its projected range" is a claim made in the summary of the graphic, in which it is clear that, because of space reasons, the journey is described as day by day segments.
So the NYT does not assert that the Model S's final leg was just the 32 miles left on the car. That "fell short of its projected range" is referring to the 265 EPA that the car normally would've had had it not been so cold out.
Should the NYT have been more verbose? Well, maybe. But I guess they also expect readers to actually look at the infographic, the purpose of which is to show greater detail.
It's quite misleading for Elon Musk to harp on a summary-statement in a different context.
1. The Tesla lost ~65 miles worth of range overnight 2. That their staff told Mr. Broder that the lost miles would return on their own.
#2 has been denied by Tesla. I'm not saying I believe them, but right now both sides say something different happened at that key point.
Capacity should decrease 5-10% per annum, from what I've read.
The particular mistake you cite results from a lack of domain knowledge, not analysis skills. The chart says "rated range remaining." If you're not familiar with EVs, you'd think that means the car will not move anymore. That assumption has zero to do with chart-reading abilities.
I will wait for more evidence before I believe that to be the case.
The reporter's behaviors are indeed consistent with what he claims he was told by Tesla when he called them during the journey. If the car manufacturer told me that regenerative braking can help extend the mileage, as dumb as it sounds I absolutely would repeatedly brake the car. I'm not an expert in electric vehicles, and if the company is telling me this is good for the car I wouldn't be in a position to refute it (especially under duress).
This is why I want to see the logs of the conversations. If the guy is running low, calls tesla and they say its not an issue, I can't blame him for malice. If he intentionally misdiagnosed the situation and presented it in a way that he would have received the advice he got, then we could blame him for malice (and it would be apparent from the log)
On the driver side, I'm surprised he didn't stop and take photos of the dashboard showing the range drop (especially if he thought it wasn't normal). I do this all the time (taking a picture of the dash, including odometer and fuel level) because I park in garages and I've noticed that, every once in a while, I'll come back and see the gas levels fall much more than expected.
Wow. Just Wow!
I've only seen precompiled analyses, including the charts and graphs from Tesla's blog.
There is no real data per se - Wired requested the raw logs several times and have been declined by Tesla (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/02/tesla-logs-nytimes/ - last sentence).
And I don't get how there's this perception here on HN that Tesla's data is ironclad.
The logging routines were probably written by humans, so there could be bugs in them. Logs are usually written to text files, which can be edited. The people interpreting the data could be making mistakes with the analysis before it even gets to Musk (look at all the posts about the problems with Excel on HN in the past couple of days).
Tesla's a startup. Startups can be a little chaotic. Their procedures and controls with respect to their data may not be as robust as, say a credit card company's, yet there's this big presumption that the data is all good and pure.
I would give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, since it would be very stupid to doctor up the data, but let's not all kid ourselves and not assume that Tesla's not going to shade their "analysis" in a way that is favorable to their argument. It's not much different than what the NYT reporter and the NYT are doing.
Well, he can't provide all possible data all at once in the original article.
Since your post, he has said who he was talking to: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-w...
"[Quoting Elon]'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.'
"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."
If I had to guess, I'd bet they talked to him on the phone, saying "Try plugging it in for an hour, that should fix it", figuring after an hour he would call them back if it needed more charge. He didn't call them back, and instead set out knowing he was about to be stranded and have a great story, since he could always claim "Well I followed their advice to the letter! It's their fault!"
Plus, your framing is completely out of whack. You charge in there with your preconceived notions.
As far as I can see, the only thing weird or unusual in the data is the speed. It’s not at 54 mph, it’s higher. That’s pretty inexcusable in itself.
The rest seem like total non-issues to me. He never said he turned the temperature down at exactly mile so–and–so. The drop in estimated mileage from 90 to 45 actually happened (plus he is not contradicted by Tesla in his claim that customer support told him just driving even if the estimated range is so low would be ok). He did slow down to 45 mph. The explanation of being unable to find the charging stations and circling around is completely coherent and makes lots of sense. (Have you seen photos of those charging stations? They are pretty small.)
So, the speed is the only issue here. We can ignore all the rest as FUD from Musk. Sad, really.
The fact that you find replication weird, is weird. It would give me pause if I were in any empirically based project.
The main important points of contention aren’t even disagreed over here. Those you could figure out by replication.
It’s the interpretation of those results that’s the sticking point here.
Some details that cannot be replicated are also disagreed on (heat, circling in parking lot, …), but replication won’t help you find out which is the correct interpretation.
Yes, the author can write whatever the author pleases, but it is unethical to not print the truth and it is not unreasonable for readers (and Tesla) to expect the truth (and not exaggeration).
The next day, in 10-degree weather...
In fact, it's easier to look at Elon Musk's annotated version to see how it was misinterpreted: http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/a...
Notice how his red highlighted area encompasses the summary (which is in a different font-size) and the bullet-point-like annotations...yes, I guess if you read the infographic in that left-to-right fashion, you would make that connection...but if you read it in numerical order (as indicated by the numbered bullet points), you would not associate the two statements.
Do you happen to have book recommendations maybe that talk about this at a greater length?
My exposure to the subject has been in the legal context. This is a popular textbook on legal argumentation: Gardner, Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy. Someone has an older edition for cheap on EBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LEGAL-ARGUMENT-THE-STRUCTURE-AN-/310.... The text is quite general, not all that specific to the legal context.
Your last paragraph is making a bad comparison to try and put down this point: a laptop operates off of all one reservoir, while the current ICE car uses gas to drive and a battery to operate the "other stuff". We watch the gas gauge and see that it drops in a direct correlation with our driving and for the most part ignore the battery charge gauge.
When an EV starts pulling both driving and "other stuff" power from the same reservoir, we're surprised because we weren't aware before of the usage of the other things. Thus, a bit more mind needs to be paid to aspects that we didn't care about before. Though it's not the best comparison either, travelers switching from horses to cars had to start thinking about things like fuel reservoirs; it can just be the nature of disruptive advances.
Its something like this, before mechanical vehicles came in you could ride your horse cart even if the horse was a little hungry. When cars came along it was the responsibility of the car maker to provide with an accurate fuel gauge so that the customers could refuel when needed.
Very clearly Tesla's charge indicators have a bug. They don't take into consideration or in correctly calculate mileage when temperatures change.
I worked at the Dell technical support call center some years back and our training said very specifically until you ascertain the caller actually knows what he is doing, you need to assume they are dumb. This saves a lot of trouble.
There are countless times when some one calls and I have to explain them they can get internet on their computer only if they a internet connection. It takes a lot of patience, to explain to someone that the the CD needs to be put in the CD drive with the shiny side facing down. Many people don't understand that they need something like VLC player or a codec to play a video.
Many people would view a computer as something similar to a TV. They simply expect things to work out of the box. There are times when I have assisted the elderly in creating email id's and teaching how to use email. There was one elderly woman who had literally become friends with me, I had to call her everyday and practically tutor her. The managers were OK, because many times this sort of calls bought in sales.
And this is beyond real issues that we would solve.
You can't adopt a programmers approach of RTFM or get lost approach or act like 'I know it all' with ordinary people.
In this case not everyone will understand enough chemistry behind how batteries work. That is simply too much to ask from an ordinary user. Your product automatically needs to check for the temperature around, do the magical calculations and tell the user EXACTLY what they need to do. And when someone calls you for help you need to first ensure they are safe before beginning to do any trouble shooting. At the call center, we would specifically instruct the customers to shut down their machines before trouble shooting for any thing more than a trivial software install. In this case the guys at Tesla should have asked him to get this batteries to be charge to 100% before investigating or advising him any further.
And yes customer support is a part of the product not something apart from or outside it. Its all a part of the package. If you a sell a great car with bad customer support, you are ideally selling a bad car.
It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.
But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.
In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.
As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?
Your new car's fuel indicator says you have more than half tank full of fuel in the night. You sleep, when you get up in the morning it says you only have something like 4 liters left. Something like half tank worth fuel vanishes overnight.
What will you do? Will you suspect fuel leakage, faulty fuel gauge or something else. Since the car is new, you are likely to call the dealership. The guy there says, just add an additional liter and fuel gauge should be pushed enough to show the last night's reading.
Clearly the customer is at no fault here. A bug in the fuel indicator due to temperature is not his problem.
>>As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?
Its one thing to have a empty fuel tank out of absent mindedness and totally a different thing when your fuel indicator says you can go 90 miles before parking for a night and then 45 miles in the morning.
You are confusing the user.
Still my fault?
EDIT: To be clear, it is extremely stupid to do so.
I never try to play that game though because I don't want to dry out my fuel pump.
Leave that same BMW overnight in a parking lot and it's range wont go from 90 miles down to 32 either.....
"... it is imperative that The Times and its staff maintain the highest possible standards to insure that we do nothing that might erode readers’ faith and confidence in our news columns. This means that staff members should be vigilant in avoiding any activity that might pose an actual or apparent conflict of interest and thus threaten the newspaper's ethical standing. And it also means that the journalism we practice daily must be beyond reproach."
[1]http://www.nytco.com/company/business_units/integrity.html
The integrity of their work is important because that is what is keeping the paper alive whilst the others are falling by the way side. Maybe you should actually try reading it sometime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#New_York_Times_ca...
My point was that they aren't the type of paper who writes flamebait articles just to get more online hits.
The default way in which any user thinks before acting is to trust the customer support guy. Just like how you trust your doctor, or lawyer, or your teacher.
Besides no ones studies chemical engineering before buying an electric car just to use it.
In other words, crazy maneuvers like that are only going to drain your battery. The lost energy will go into things like friction heating up your brake pads as you wear them down pointlessly.
More importantly: battery chemistry is weird and differs widely between technologies (for example, should you completely empty lithium ion batteries every now and then, or is that disastrous for the batteries? How is that for NiMh batteries? Does the memory effect exist? Etc.).
That overnight loss likely was (mostly) not a loss at all, but due to the difference in mileage you can get out of a warm vs a cold battery pack, or maybe even out of one that had recently seen small charge cycles due to regenerative braking vs one that hadn't (IMO unlikely, but as I said, battery chemistry is weird)
If Tesla told me that regenerative braking would improve available range in this situation, I think I would take them for their word.
In the second paragraph you state they are not a bad paper.
You are very confused.
---
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.
---
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.
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?
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.
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.
== yikes
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.
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.
EDIT: it may be different on blogs
"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.”"
"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."
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.
It's also pretty clear from the data that he lied about the speed he was driving at.
Think about what you're saying.
Thesis: periodically pressing on the brake pedal and allowing some of the car's energy to be captured by flywheel generation actually improves battery life and vehicle range compared to simply driving along at the same average speed. True or false?
In order for the above to be true, and given that acceleration takes battery energy and regenerative deceleration delivers battery energy, to argue that pressing on the brakes improves battery life is to argue that braking produces more energy for the battery than acceleration requires from it -- in other words, that the car is a perpetual motion machine, free of all natural constraints and scientific laws.
But the second law of thermodynamics -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics -- says one cannot get more energy out of a system than you have put into it, in fact, you always get back less than you put in.
Beyond the above-quoted thermodynamic law, there is the energy conservation law, to wit: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_energy_conservation). Therefore it is impossible for the car to deliver more energy by decelerating than it acquired by accelerating.
Therefore if someone at Tesla actually offered the advice that stop-and-go driving actually increases battery life and vehicle range, that person needs remedial physics education before being allowed to speak to customers again.
Let me retry: the amount of energy you can get out of a battery will drop slowly, but we can ignore that.
Because of the properties of the battery, the amount of energy you can get out in a form that can drive the car may be a lot lower (extreme example: 1W of power may not be enough to even drive the electronics that control the starting of the engine. If so, a 1GWh battery that is full but delivers at most 1W will not take the car anywhere)
Secondly, the amount of power that you can get out and use to drive the car will depend on the environment (temperature, in particular) and, likely, on previous charge/discharge cycles. I know I am not an expert on this, but I know this isn't simple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Conditionin... shows I am not alone in that. After scrapping the 'may's, 'belief's and 'debate's, little information, if any, is left.
Also, I understand the battery control software has safeguarding against full decharging, as that would be a costly affair. That software may have quirks. Given the age of the car's design and the number of hours all cars combined have been on the road, I think it is a safe bet that it does have quirks, especially for uncommon scenarios.
If the battery had more power than the software estimated, and that that power would be able to drive the car, once the battery warmed up, it all was a matter of convincing the software about that.
If the car's manufacturer suggests multiple small recharge-charge cycles (using regenerative braking) to do that, why would I distrust them? I know almost nothing about the chemistry of the batteries, and even less about their control software.
The answer is simple -- they're wrong. Regenerative braking cannot recover more energy than was lost in getting the car to its present velocity, so the advice to engage in stop-and-go driving emanates from someone who doesn't understand physics.
Phase 1: Acceleration -- energy is provided by the battery to the car's electric motors. The battery energy required is greater than or equal to the car's final velocity as shown in m * v^2 / 2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy).
Phase 2: Braking (deceleration) -- energy may be recovered from the act of braking and delivered to the battery. There are two choices -- either turn the car's energy into heat with brake pads, or turn some of it into electrical energy that flows back into the battery using a method called "regenerative braking".
Can the energy recovered by Phase 2 equal the energy expended in Phase 1? No, this is not possible -- because of the second law of thermodynamics, one cannot recover all the energy, there are inevitable losses.
Therefore (read carefully) stop-and-go driving is always less efficient than driving at a fixed speed. Always.
> I know almost nothing about the chemistry of the batteries, and even less about their control software.
I'm not addressing what you may or may not know, only what the facts are. And if someone at Tesla actually offered the advice to engage in stop-and-go driving in order to increase the car's range, someone needs to go back to school.
You lack knowledge of physics, not chemistry. The implications of entropy are what you do not seem to realize. These things are independent of the car's inner workings.
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)
Sorry, but not only John Broder's intentions are in question here. If a bunch of other journalists replicate the trip, but come out with results more in line with Tesla's view, then this calls into question Broder's accuracy, intent or no.
You know, there's an empirical context underlying everything here.
Is it really a replicable test? They'd need the same weather patterns, traffic conditions and the same car (untweaked or modified since Broder's drive), not a different, "equivalently equipped" model.
In the documentary Revenge of the Electric car, there's a scene where Musk walks into a warehouse full of cars, all having different issues preventing shipment. For all we know, there was a problem isolated to the particular car Broder drove AND, at the same time, Broder was embellishing his story. In other words, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Of course, we'll never know because we'll never get access to the raw logs.
Yes.
> They'd need the same weather patterns, traffic conditions
Okay.
> and the same car
Find an honest 3rd party who already owns the same model.
> not a different, "equivalently equipped" model.
Now you're just being obtuse. Consumer Reports gets to test a car that's the same model. They're not required to come to your house and test your car!
> In the documentary Revenge of the Electric car, there's a scene where Musk walks into a warehouse full of cars, all having different issues preventing shipment.
That's a completely different car! They were taking Lotus bodies and fitting them out with batteries and motors, somewhat by hand. This one is built on a bona-fide assembly line and designed to be electric from the ground-up. Sorry, but this is a huge stretch.
> For all we know, there was a problem isolated to the particular car Broder drove AND, at the same time, Broder was embellishing his story. In other words, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I'm sorry, but this tactic of thinking of all the confounding things you can, then throwing up your hands and saying "middle!" is the sort of thinking you expect on Fox News or on the playground. If replicability can't settle such debates, then science is in deep doodoo. However, we know from the history of science that it can settle debates 10X more acrimonious than this.
To be fair, you are right that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Exactly where is important and something we can get a good locality of through replicating.
The main questions that could be replicated are not at all disputed. The rest cannot be. Simple as that.
If someone takes the same car and follows the same route and gets the same results, then it's going to prove the reviewer correct. If repeating the trip by someone else who isn't trying to wreck the car gives different results, then that is very much a valid point here.
Why? Even individual cars produced in assembly lines can have problems.
When I worked at Toyota, there was a problem with a Lexus model that was so hard to isolate. Eventually, after a long data collection period, they found that the problem was only existent in cars painted in a certain color.
So? If there's some conflicting results, we can then turn around and test the same car as well. If there's a problem, those are measurable.
> When I worked at Toyota, there was a problem with a Lexus model that was so hard to isolate. Eventually, after a long data collection period, they found that the problem was only existent in cars painted in a certain color.
Color and whatever other factors were measurable. Empiricism is possible. Your example supports my point.
Sure, but it was such a rare problem that they tried to reproduce it using the same model and year and production run, assuming the problem would show up but it didn't. They didn't think colour would have been the identifying indicator of the problem until they had amassed enough data to lead them down that path.
Broder drove a car that has probably been used several times for review and other uses, and may have had more wear and tear and/or maintenance and service than a car sold to anyone else. It could also have been driven under stress conditions that a brand new model may not have been.
All I'm saying is that there's a lot about that car that could be different from other review cars. It could have been a freak occurrence and Tesla was unlucky enough that Broder was reviewing that car when it happened.
In any case, if you go to the Tesla owners forums talking about the NYT article, you'll also see actual owners who live on the east coast were not surprised by what happened to Broder (http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/13633-NYT-arti...).
