Eh, I don't think it's HN being fond of Tesla. I think it's just that Tesla (rather, Elon Musk) is very good at grabbing headlines and people are sometimes not as well informed about the state-of-the-art as they wish they were.

Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.

It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.