I find this extremely frustrating. It must be hard enough attempting to push forward a big change with a new product that many consumers don't know about and when a program with such a large audience actively tries to sabotage the effort I just don't understand it.
At least this time they're not trying to take down a new company, but the damage they try and cause to electric vehicles' reputation is unfair. The strange thing is that there are some reasons not to get an electric car (if you need to make extremely long trips often, the potential battery replacement issue after ten years) and rather than discuss these they make up reasons and fake failures. For many people electric vehicles are a great option and hopefully the direction manufacturers continue to go in.
If you read into the Tesla incident a bit more you find there's a lot more to it and Tesla have also lied (claiming that the brakes didn't go when their own engineers confirmed it on the filming day).
A hundred mile trip is not an extremely long trip, my Dad used to regularly commute that for example. You seem to be forgetting you need to drive back.
Also this article's extremely biased too, quoting from Tesla's press releases and not even mentioning any of Top Gear's rebuttals.
So an article complaining about editorializing to make a better story is, shock horror, editorializing to make a better story. I mean what's all the nonsense at the end about boy racers dying.
But 'Of course I'm not blaming only Top Gear for this'.
Only? He does actually blame Top Gear? Even though the Tesla's a sports car. The guy's a bit of a plonker.
The Guardian's a very left wing paper in the UK, don't think that this is a balanced piece.
I found the ending to this article annoying as well and off topic.
I have read into the Tesla piece and the breaks 'going' didn't actually make the car undrivable the pedals were just harder to push. Since they actually had two vehicles there to test it also shouldn't have been an issue.
The 55 mile range the claimed to get was also completely made up based on what 'they determined' to be accurate. The Tesla actually has a 250 mile range so a 100 mile commute would be fine. Few people drive as much as that anyway (http://news.discovery.com/autos/range-anxiety-nissan-leaf-11...) and for most people the range of a Leaf is good enough. Electric vehicle ranges will also only continue to improve.
The Chevy Volt which uses gas to power a generator for the electric motor has an all electric range of 40 miles and then will just use gas to power the generator until the next recharge.
Top Gear's rebuttals from the Tesla issue were weak, whiny and largely ignored Tesla's complaints, this situation with the leaf only serves to show they really are trying to make electric vehicles look bad.
> Top Gear's rebuttals from the Tesla issue were weak, whiny and largely ignored Tesla's complaints, this situation with the leaf only serves to show they really are trying to make electric vehicles look bad.
Tesla's rebuttals to the Top Gear complaints were largely the same. They said the brakes didn't fail despite being broken. Power assisted brakes in any vehicle ARE broken if the power assist fails. It doesn't make the car undriveable, it does however make it untestable. You can't have non-power brakes on a high-performance sports car.
IIRC they did use the other vehicle. Because the Tesla needs time to recharge, whilst other vehicles just need a fuel change, one vehicle was for testing and one was for filming. This would provide them enough mileage for the one-day filming they do for a review. However with one vehicle down they used the 'test' vehicle they used to get a feel for the vehicle. This put the car into the recovery mode, which the Top Gear crew made fun of.
Tesla wanted a review. Top Gear isn't a non-biased program, they don't advertise to be. Tesla's vehicle had failures, they got exploited for a show KNOWN for being satirical, humorous and exploitative in its reviews. Tesla gave Top Gear a match, and Top Gear used it to burn them. They supplied their own failure, simple as, because ultimately they provided vehicles that failed. You review the material you have and not some idealistic bullshit green-freaks want to see.
Top Gear has a viewership higher than the population of the US. If you're reaching that many people, get your marketing and advertising execs to fork over some money to give additional vehicles when you're not able to fuel up the vehicle.
Tesla was dumb. Tesla got burned. Sucks to be Tesla.
Edit: Note that Tesla failed to recognize that they had almost a 5-minute spotlight on their vehicle, in front of an audience of approximately 350 million simply for the use of their vehicles (that is top gears only condition, is that the vehicles are provided for testing).
If you think the review is harsh, go watch reviews Top Gear has done for Hummer and for the F150. They make fun of the impracticality of vehicles.
They showed them pushing a Tesla into a garage as if it couldn't be driven, that's misleading. The 55 mile range figure was never justified even at track levels of abuse.
They make fun of other vehicles practicality, but with the Hummer and F150 it's different. Their impracticality and large size are part of their brand and well known by their target market.
Exacerbating minor issues with the Tesla to make it look unusable was mean and unnecessary especially considering the company was new. This alone would have been one thing, but when adding fabricated facts along with it and then doing a similar thing for the other electric vehicle that came out it looks like a pattern of bashing on EVs.
>some idealistic bullshit green-freaks want to see
That isn't necessary, if they just stuck with the truth it would have been good on its own.
In a decade run they produced little over 100 vehicles, that's barely past a concept vehicle. Most vehicle manufacturers provide more vehicles for safety testing than McLaren likely ever produced of the F1. Oh, and it's almost two-decades old on initial release.
"On March 29 2011, Tesla filed a lawsuit to stop Top Gear’s continued rebroadcasts of an episode containing malicious falsehoods about the Tesla Roadster. Top Gear’s Executive Producer, Andy Wilman, has drafted a blog to present their side of the story. Like the episode itself, however, his proclamations do more to confound than enlighten.
Mr. Wilman admits that Top Gear wrote the script before filming the testing of the Roadsters. The script in question, concluding with the line "in the real world, it absolutely doesn’t work" was lying around on set while Top Gear was allegedly "testing" the Roadsters. It seems actual test results don’t matter when the verdict has already been given -- even if it means staging tests to meet those predetermined conclusions.
Now Mr. Wilman wants us to believe that when Top Gear concluded that the Roadster "doesn't work," it "had nothing to do with how the Tesla performed." Are we to take this seriously? According to Mr. Wilman, when Top Gear said the car "doesn't work," they "primarily" meant that it was too expensive. Surely they could have come to that conclusion without staging misleading scenes that made the car look like it didn’t work.
Mr. Wilman's other contentions are just as disingenuous. He states that they never said the Roadster "ran out of charge." If not, why were four men shown pushing it into the hangar?
Mr. Wilman states that "We never said that the Tesla was completely immobilized as a result of the motor overheating." If not, why is the Roadster depicted coming to a stop with the fabricated sound effect of a motor dying?
Mr. Wilman also objects to Tesla explaining our case, and the virtues of the Roadster. Top Gear has been re-broadcasting lies about the Roadster for years, yet are uncomfortable with Tesla helping journalists set the record straight about the Roadster’s revolutionary technology.
Mr. Wilman seems to want Top Gear to be judged neither by what it says, nor by what it does. Top Gear needs to provide its viewers, and Tesla, straightforward answers to these questions."
I hadn't heard that Tesla calculated that range, the direct quote from the show used the pronoun 'we' and I thought part of the suit was because the 55 mile range statement from top gear defamed Tesla and made them look as if they were lying about the range.
I agree that it is not a balanced piece, and I also found the ending overwrought. That being said, if the facts are as Nissan suggests, I am happy somebody called Top Gear out.
JM2C, of course, we have voting and discussions precisely so that everyone can express their views...
> not even mentioning any of Top Gear's rebuttals.
George Monbiot is often like that. Thankfully the article linked to in that paragraph does give Top Gear a fair opportunity for rebuttal.
> He does actually blame Top Gear?
Well, that's generally what is implied by "I'm not blaming only Top Gear". And even if most of those boy racers had sports cars (they don't - think cheap Volkswagen Golfs with ridiculous spoilers, or even worse[0]), sports cars aren't inherently designed for you to break road laws any more than a gun is designed for indiscriminate murder. In any case it's just more wood for Monbiot's Top Gear bonfire rather than anything of real substance.
While I agree with you about the editorializing within the article (choosing not to include certain details like the show's rebuttals of some of Tesla's accusations, linking in the boy racers bit that is largely irrelevant to the subject at hand) it is not the same as what Top Gear themselves have done.
The show did not just chose to only present certain facts, or just chose to ignore certain opinions/interpretations. They actively mislead. They falsified evidence.
While the line can be pretty fine, there is still a line between editorializing and bare faced deception.
At least this time they're not trying to take down a new company, but the damage they try and cause to electric vehicles' reputation is unfair. The strange thing is that there are some reasons not to get an electric car (if you need to make extremely long trips often, the potential battery replacement issue after ten years) and rather than discuss these they make up reasons and fake failures. For many people electric vehicles are a great option and hopefully the direction manufacturers continue to go in.
Why try to destroy them?