A Most Peculiar Test Drive | Hacker News Reader

A Most Peculiar Test Drive

teslamotors.com

1,859 pointsreneherse578 comments

Wow. I was as skeptical of the wisdom of Tesla attacking NYT's journalist for their Model S review as all the other HNers - but this is incredible.

First: I realize the fact that what the hardware logs show and what the user was shown may not be one and the same (i.e. hardware sensors may indicate charge at 28% but due to a bug (it's possible!) it may be shown to be full). But their travel logs shred, I repeat, shred Broder's credibility and claims alike.

It really does look like he was hell-bent on ripping Tesla a new one in his review. Taking Tesla's rebuttal at face value: purposely embarking on journeys over twice the indicated available range, driving around in circles in an empty parking lot to kill batteries, turning up the heat and claiming to have turned it down ("shaking, shivering, and with white knuckles" no less).

They post images, graphs, logs, maps, and more. I'm incredibly surprised at how well they're defending themselves against dishonest reviews - for example, I'd never have thought to log the changes to the cabin temperature, but apparently they've done so and more!

This post makes me want to reconsider a Model S as my next car. As far as I'm concerned, this is exactly the kind of attention to detail I want going into the engineering, design, and manufacture of my vehicle.

I'd be interested in hearing NYT's response to this - they previously stated unconditionally that they stand by Broder's review and believe it to be honest, truthful, and factual.

If indeed at the end of the day this was Broder pushing his own agenda, not only ignoring but outright faking facts, then I think his journalistic career should be over.

Like the OP, I'm assuming many of us, have a great deal of respect for his intellect and integrity, but honestly, I can't help feeling a bit let down by the way Mr Musk has handled the situation.

Musk opens the rebuttal with: "We are upset by this article because it does not factually represent Tesla technology, which is designed and tested to operate well in both hot and cold climates."

It certainly feels somewhat disingenuous to mention nothing, of what arguably should be, the central discussion point: The Model S (more specifically the car's Li-Ion battery pack) performs unusually poorly in frigid conditions.

While as a nerdier group we tend to love data and generally have a higher faith in empirical methods, in this instance, it does appear more like a data deluge. As a result, this ends up detracting focus and deflecting any valid criticism of the car.

Although I've been following TM for years now, the battery pack temperature issue was still a surprise to me. More importantly, Tesla owners are finding this out the hard way too. [1][2]

Did the NYT reporter add a little journalistic embellish to the story? Probably. Is the review a complete work of fiction as Musk judged it? Unlikely, and what is more probable is that Musk has simply overreacted and has taken it personally. Indeed he is still human after all.

[1] http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/13633-NYT-arti...

[2] http://andwediditourway.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-not-so-ev...

(attr. iyulaev)

It certainly feels somewhat disingenuous to mention nothing, of what arguably should be, the central discussion point: The Model S (more specifically the car's Li-Ion battery pack) performs unusually poorly in frigid conditions.

When reading the article I found it interesting that for the data points relating to the NYT test drive he speaks in precise and specific numbers. When discussing the vehicles in cold climates (Norway and Sweden) he speaks in "per capita" and "half", but never mentions exact numbers.

The cold weather battery issue is certainly something not worth glassing over. It doesn't have to be a deal-killer for the car, but is probably something that they shouldn't try to politic around. It's not like a firmware upgrade is going to suddenly circumvent a chemical/physics issue with the battery, so just be up front about the current state of the battery technology.

> Did the NYT reporter add a little journalistic embellish to the story? Probably.

Agree that it's not a total work of fiction and there are clearly issues that EV shoppers should consider.

But how much embellishment should we expect and allow in future reviews from the NYT? Integrity in journalism is pretty much everything, and it looks like enough questions are being raised that some readers will wonder what the NYT is mischaracterizing.

> It certainly feels somewhat disingenuous to mention nothing, of what arguably should be, the central discussion point: The Model S (more specifically the car's Li-Ion battery pack) performs unusually poorly in frigid conditions.

If you listen to the interviews Musk gave with the likes of Bloomberg about this, he explains how they have taken care to make the car perform well in the cold. Things such as moving heat from the motor into the battery-pack and, when it detects cold temperatures, closing shutters at the front of the car to insulate it.

No, no, no. There is no such thing as journalistic embellishment. That's not okay, and certainly not for a journalist at The New York Times of all places.

I'm a journalist, and I expected what was written by Broder to be accurate, not embellished. This isn't Top Gear. There is no story to tell, just the truth.

I think that Tesla have been expecting this kind of shenanigans after the Top Gear pulava. It's clear that they have made sure that they have all the key data capture points switched on for a journalistic test drive.

It doesn't surprise me that a big media columnist on a topic is so in-bed with the industry he covers that he goes out of his way to defend incumbents from newcomers. I'm just glad that this nonsense has been exposed for what it is.

I'll be interested to see how the NYT handles it - though I suspect it'll be with denials and obfuscation as is par for the course for them in what has been a shameful decade or more of bogus stories, fabrications and toeing the establishment line on everything even in the face of countervailing evidence (that's as long as I've been in the US and paying attention).

> It doesn't surprise me that a big media columnist on a topic is so in-bed with the industry he covers that he goes out of his way to defend incumbents from newcomers.

More likely his thinking has been formed by years of contact with the industry he covers; his bias is more likely to implicit and unconscious than explicit and willful.

I don't know that this is quite the refutation that everyone is saying it is. I'm not sure what a reviewer driving in circles at a charging station proves? I imagine he wanted to find out what would happen - after all he was at the station anyway. Also he clearly does start to turn down the climate change about 20 miles or so after he claims - not sure why Tesla is really fighting on that one.

There is no denial of the Tesla losing 60 miles range overnight. There isn't a denial of Tesla telling him that the battery would regain its charge and range when it warmed up in the final leg. *Edit: Although it does certainly say they told him not to stop charging on that final charge.

Broder actually had an ok story to begin with, with a number of facts that are review-worthy. The cold weather energy loss is certainly one of them. Also, the Supercharger stations are not close enough together, admitted by Musk. Their customer support gave them incorrect instructions to use cruise control to preserve energy, which raises questions about how knowledgable their staff really is if it could leave you stranded. And electric cars use electric heaters, and you might be forced to pick some combo of heat and miles on freezing days. Most importantly, you still need to constantly be thinking about range.

But Broder pushed it. Trying to get the battery to die in his first Milford stop is an obvious one. But when he failed to do that, he got a second chance by leaving Norwich without possibly being able to make it back to Milford. Both Broder and Musk agree that the car showed 32 miles of range, and that the car had made it 51 miles. But he would have known, before he left Norwich, that the distance to Milford was 61 miles. How Broder reasonably expect he would get there?

As a result, he gets his dramatic photo of the Motor Trend Car of the Year, helpless on a flatbed truck.

So there's one damning thing in Broder's review: the confirmation of his range anxiety as the Model S sits on a flatbed.

Tesla explicitly refutes that point by saying Broder ignored warnings against leaving Norwich. Also, I mean, come on: range says 30 and you have to go 60 miles so...you...disconnect the power? Interesting, especially since it's not the first time he tried to kill the car (see "driving around parking lot for 5 minutes with zero range").

But then again...look at the battery chart just before the Norwich charge. You see zero increase in distance, and a large (=60-70 miles) drop in range. That's the evening where he lost a bunch of power. That's a problem for Tesla.

Anyway, Broder has a rebuttal to Musk's initial claims here [0]. I'm curious to see how he responds to this blog post, especially what seems to be a deliberate attempt to kill the car's power before recharging at Milford the second time.

[0] http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

It's not JUST that he drove in circles near a charging station. It is that he had initially charged it for LESS than the recommended charge for the rest of his journey, then when he made the journey (even though the car was saying that he should recharge immediately), to get it to shutdown he drove in circles for a while to try and get it to shutdown.

It's not JUST that he drove in circles, that takes it out of context. It is within the broader narrative that you realize how sinister that action really was.

The reporter was blatantly trying to drain the battery to get a story. They were, in no way, behaving like any half-ways rational person would, and they were absolutely not behaving the way anybody driving a Tesla would

Zero doubt in my mind this was a pre-scripted hatchet job. The only question in my mind was whether the deception rises to the level of termination.

Scenario 1:

Article: "The Tesla's range indicator is accurate but to drivers used to having a lot of range when the tank reads 'E' the Tesla's small amount of reserve range may catch them by surprise."

Reality: Author drove until the Tesla read "0 miles remaining" then continued to drive until the battery ran out.

Scenario 2:

Article: "A range estimate misses the mark... the car fell short of its projected range and had to be taken back ... on a flatbed truck."

Reality: Author short-charged the car then pulled off the road when the range meter read 0 and drove around trying to drain the battery.

One is fine, the other is journalistic malpractice.

Driving in circles doesn't prove anything. But, he didn't mention it in his original article or the follow-up blog post. In fact, he took great pains to write about all the hardships he endured to maximize the car's range, and how he still ran out of battery. So, one wonders why he would do it. It seems like an awfully odd thing to do, unless you are deliberately trying to run out of charge.

Broder's defense to accusations that he should have charged overnight in Groton is that he was just acting like a regular driver. When you drive a conventional car from DC to Boston, do you pull up to the gas pumps and drive around in circles until you run out of gas? Do you add a few gallons and take off, or do you wait until the automatic shutoff on the pump trips? I think a "regular" driver would charge fully (at least a full "standard" charge) at each Super Charger and then drive directly to the next way-point, not unplug at 75% and pointlessly drive in circles.

> I'm not sure what a reviewer driving in circles at a charging station proves?

Perhaps that he couldn't find it, since it was his first visit?

Based on the rest of this thread, though, Occam is not going to be making an appearance and we're going to be questioning the journalistic integrity of someone who's worked at the New York Times since most commenters here were in diapers. It totally makes sense that he'd write a completely false story at the behest of big oil. That's the logical explanation.

A reviewer driving in circles at a charging station _without mentioning it in the article_ and all the other things mentioned here proves that the journalists left out facts in the article.

Why has this been downvoted? greendestiny raises some valid points.

While the New York Times is a fine source of information I've learned personally that it no longer deserves a special designation of credibility.

In August 2012 a ProPublica article [1] syndicated by the Times made, at the very least, a contentious point (Sarbanes-Oxley didn't reduce the attractiveness of being public), written off with a link to a paper. I was dismayed to find the working paper [2] not only argued a different point ("the advantages of selling out to a larger organization, which can speed a product to market and realize economies of scope, have increased relative to the benefits of remaining as an independent firm") but in concluding remarks contradicted the claim it was quoted to have asserted ("although the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the 2003 Global Settlement have reduced the attractiveness of being public for small companies...").

Figuring it to be an intern's oversight I emailed the author and got the following reply (in its entirety): "Thanks, [first name], for your thoughts". I forwarded this to the editor of the Times column I received the article through and received a similar brush-off. The article, to date, remains unchanged.

The oversight was, in all likelihood, an honest blunder. The reaction's implicit intolerance of criticism, however, was jarring.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/the-sox-win-how-fina...

[2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954788

If you really look at the two accounts, it's not necessarily clear that they're contradictory except in a couple of statements on speed: he said 55 when he was doing 60; then said 45 when he was doing 50. Even then, it's not clear whether this is human bias or something wrong with the car log, because this data <i>is</i> from the car log and it would be nice to correlate it against that Google Map they have. Does he set the climate control to low? Yes, but he says that he did this when he switched to cruise control -- when in fact he did this a little later, when he switched to city driving, as the logs show. That's not a smoking gun either.

Poke further at the story. Look at the battery charge graph, and more specifically look at its slope, which is the fuel efficiency. Shifting to cruise control did not affect the drainage curve at all, and when he called Tesla they suggested that cruise control was a Bad Idea, because the Tesla has regenerative braking, so you see that he turns it off at about 225 mi and starts stop-and-go driving in the city. This devastates the Tesla's fuel efficiency. It does this for a very simple reason which should be high-school physics: your brakes are energy dissipaters and are bound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Regenerative braking just lowers the loss -- it does not eliminate it.

Now, if that advice was given, then the journalist trusted Tesla when they said something which contradicted high school physics. That is a dark smear on Broder -- at least if Broder was planning to be a scientific journalist -- but also a dark smear on Tesla's customer support. What were they thinking? But the two accounts are immediately reconcilable now.

Broder now is thinking, "okay, stop-and-go city traffic will use the brakes and recharge the car, this city driving will have a less negative slope." From this impression he probably expected he was at 20% charge when he stopped; he was actually at around 8 or 9% and it immediately drops 1% overnight. That should chop 1/10th off of his remaining miles, but he claims it went from 90 miles to 45.

So, here's the story: He is expecting a number at around 100 miles because he thinks he's being more efficient now. He sees 50 miles. On a digital display at a hotel at night, he misreads the 5 as a 9, and this fits with his expectation, so he goes to bed thinking he has 90 miles of range. He wakes up and the Tesla has lost 5 miles of range inexplicably -- but it therefore has become 45 miles, which looks totally different. He calls them up complaining that the Tesla lost half of its charge overnight and some sympathetic tech support describes it as a "software glitch."

That's a perfect storm scenario right there, because now he thinks that he does have the extra range and that braking is good for the car and that the car is simply misreporting what it can do. Confirming this, he makes it to the Milford supercharge with less than 0 miles of range, and charges it back up again to 185 miles. He is confident now, and you see him averaging 65. There are a bunch of full stops near 400 miles, but remember, he thinks that full stops are good. With a bunch of this, he stops and calls up Tesla. "What the hell, I can't get back to Milford on this expected range, can you find me a nearby charger?" He goes 11 miles in the opposite direction, plugs into a station in Norwich for an hour, and he visits a diner. He confirms that he only got to 28% and really should have let the car charge here because the display never got as high as it should be, but he says that Tesla had cleared him to go to Milford and that he trusted the humans at this point over the sensors in the car.

He gets back on the highway at 45/50 to try to conserve power (which does not affect the slope of the curve all that much) and that is the subject of this second-to-last Google Map. The sensors are right, the tech support was misguided, the car stops and needs to be towed. Both stories fit pretty well with each other.

If this were the olympics of mental gymnastics, you would take the gold medal in every category.

> So, here's the story: He is expecting a number at around 100 miles because he thinks he's being more efficient now. He sees 50 miles. On a digital display at a hotel at night, he misreads the 5 as a 9, and this fits with his expectation, so he goes to bed thinking he has 90 miles of range. He wakes up and the Tesla has lost 5 miles of range inexplicably -- but it therefore has become 45 miles, which looks totally different. He calls them up complaining that the Tesla lost half of its charge overnight and some sympathetic tech support describes it as a "software glitch."

Pure gold. Thanks for the laugh.

> . He sees 50 miles. On a digital display at a hotel at night, he misreads the 5 as a 9, and this fits with his expectation

Actually, I don't think he misread anything, I think it genuinely did read 90 miles exactly like he said it did. Look at the graph on the blog post: http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/r... At the 400 mile mark, right where he stopped for the night, there's an abrupt vertical drop from 90 miles remaining to 20 miles remaining, which exactly matches the journalist's claims.

Driving back and forth in front of the damn charger speaks for itself.

Straws. You maybe holding some.

EDIT: Two words. Occam's Razor. Your explanation is so tangled that an entire battalion of Viet Cong could hide in it.

Musk's own graphs show a precipitous drop in both battery charge and rated range at the mile 400 mark, correlating closely with the same 'overnight' range drop Broder reported. So there's something more happening there, as yet unexplained, than mistakenly misreading the range before going to bed.

Tesla should have records of all of the communications and should open them up. I suspect the calls themselves will confirm the driver's story and I suspect that tesla has these recordings, so the real question is why haven't they used those to defend themselves?

More generally this is a sad day for HN. Attack the argument, don't attack the actor. This isn't CNBC or Fox: attacking credibility doesn't constitute a logical refutation of the nYT piece.

Regenerative braking just lowers the loss -- it does not eliminate it.

It's not that simple. Regen does more than lower the loss; it also allows the energy captured during braking to be re-used on the next acceleration. Regen basically means your effective range is based on your average speed, even if you are doing stop and go driving instead of cruising; you can actually get better range in city driving with regen because your average speed is lower, and lower average speeds are more efficient (because there is less loss from drag and friction). This is why hybrids typically have a higher EPA rated mileage for city driving than for highway driving.

You are certainly cutting this guy a lot of slack.

This isn't Jim telling you about his crazy weekend while you stand around the watercooler, this is a professional journalist writing a story for one of the largest and most well respect news outlets in the world.

To me it looks like he doesn't manage to report the correct numbers even once, he said 55, actually going 60, he said 45, actually going 50.

Is it that hard to read a digital display?

Then you say he mistakes a 50 for a 90, if he has that much trouble with eyesight maybe he shouldn't be test driving cars.

Lets see now, which source seems more credible, the guy who doesn't manage to report a single accurate number, and makes mistakes when reading a digital display... or the company which had the foresight to monitor and log everything in their vehicles right down to the state of the temperature controls.

You make a good argument, but I think you are being far too charitable with someone who is a professional journalist and should have done a better job reporting facts if they want to be seen as credible.

> Shifting to cruise control did not affect the drainage curve at all, and when he called Tesla they suggested that cruise control was a Bad Idea, because the Tesla has regenerative braking, so you see that he turns it off at about 225 mi and starts stop-and-go driving in the city.

Braking and cruise control are mutually exclusive domains. You can't drive with cruise control in stop-and-go traffic even if you wanted to.

Turning off cruise control on the highway might have some small impact on efficiency, but the cause would not be braking.

Who in their right mind, specially someone who is reportedly a climate and energy expert, would think braking recharges the car?

edit: recharge as in having a net gain of energy. Even if you roll down a 3-mile mountain with the brakes pushed, you'd only be recovering energy spent on the way up, minus losses.

Sounds like a well elaborated excuse to me.

"If you really look at the two accounts, it's not necessarily clear that they're contradictory except in a couple of statements on speed ..."

So what does Broder have to say about that?

"It happened just the way I described it."

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

I can see how the 2 stories might square to some extent as you've described.

However I don't understand your part about regenerative braking. From everything I've read, regenerative braking very much is capable of adding charge to the batteries.

Thank you : cock-up beats conspiracy everytime

Nice try, Broder.

I find it interesting that they didn't actually show the car going in circles on a map. Either they have the GPS logged and they don't want to show it (customers could think "oh this car is going to record my location?!") or they just don't have it and are guessing?

The car park is described as a 100-lot area. Zooming in the map to show a tiny little circle wouldn't have conveyed the point - instead they showed the speed data logged instead.

As for data loggin: Elon states it's only for the media test drives unless written permission is given [1]

1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301053361157988352

The GPS logs probably don't update fast enough and aren't accurate enough to make for an interesting display. It'd probably look like a confused scribble, the speed data is more accurate.

If you look at the google map link above the supercharger is at a rest stop. If you don't pull in to the rest stop your only option is to continue down the highway. The start-and-stop pattern in the logs is not possible on a highway.

There are only two questions to answer here:

1. Did the reviewer take off on the final leg with insufficient charge at the advice of Tesla, or against the advice of Tesla? This caused the towing incident that created a sensational news story. Both sides disagree. There is probably no audio recording (which is illegal in many Northeast states without two party consent) so this is an area where one side can lie with reasonable impunity. One side is clearly lying, so it's a shameful situation. But that's not really as important as #2:

2. Does the car lose miles overnight in cold weather, or driving in cold weather? The answer here is unequivocally yes, and this is the story that Tesla doesn't want told, and hopes to distract from. It means you can't take it on a long ski trip deep into the mountains, or leave it in the airport an extra day without an annoying long recharge cycle. This can't be solved by charging overnight in some cases, as on long trips you still need to drive through the cold, so the range can decrease as one drives. The people who buy Teslas like to ski, like to fly, and don't want to wait two to six hours hours for a full recharge when a supercharger is not around.

The blog post doesn't really rebut #2, though it does try to distract and smear credibility with various nits which technically may be correct but are irrelevant to the basic questions. Classic courtroom defense strategy.

I read it as Tesla picking nits and ignoring the big picture issues. E.g.

* It's clearly quite hard to find the supercharger at night.

* Tesla should do a better job of indicating non supercharger charging options. This would almost have solved all the problems on its own (I got short of power owing to lousy weather and had to make a side trip to a nearby charging station.)

* Tesla's tech support people are giving out unclear (perhaps not incorrect so much as ambiguous or easily misunderstood) advice. Tesla does not dispute the advice the reporter claims to have received... Training problems?

* The car's software provides insufficient information w.r.t. charging (or buries the lead).

* The car's software doesn't account for temperature well, including not warning about overnight charge/range loss due to either heating or a cold start. I assume it has thermal sensors.

Either the reporter consistently misreports his speed or the Tesla is simply logging the wrong speed, which is entirely possible based on the variance in wheel size from spec. (I don't know the distances involved, but it should be easy for folks to verify either way.)

The 80mph (or 65-70mph if miscalibrated) speed spikes aren't worth mentioning. If you drive in traffic, rapidly overtaking someone to avoid a problem is commonplace and does not bear on the discussion. Making points like that actually undercuts Tesla's case.

Those who are rebutting this and Telsa and defending the NY Times need to read Manufacturing Consent.

OK, even if didn't run out off power and got back OK the review clearly demonstrates (as does Elon's rebuttal) that "Range Anxiety" is a real issue with the Model S (as do all EVs)... who want's to be thinking about optimal cabin temp, average speed, cruise control or not, regenerative braking, where's the next charger, calling up tech support, just to be sure they'll get home? Who?

Wouldn't a review that didn't highlight these very real issues be misleading the public?

Surely Tesla knew who was going to write the article, so presumably they were happy with his "agenda". If not they should have been more careful and had their best people on it.

Tesla has a public education mountain to climb.

> They post images, graphs, logs, maps, and more. I'm incredibly surprised at how well they're defending themselves against dishonest reviews - for example, I'd never have thought to log the changes to the cabin temperature, but apparently they've done so and more!

> After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives.

Off-topic, but I'm curious whether they log this data for all cars, and whether this data is available to the driver (even if they need to work a bit to get it or ask for it)

My understanding is that for private cars, they've said they don't log this data without consent (and a signature). I don't know whether it's available to the user - that'd be neat for sure.

If indeed at the end of the day this was Broder pushing his own agenda

If that is indeed what is happening, I doubt it is actually his agenda. Rather, whomever is paying him under the table's agenda.

>This post makes me want to reconsider a Model S as my next car."

Really? I had the opposite reaction.

Let's assume the the Times lied about everything, and we only consider Tesla's words. Look at the instructions he was to follow, "Drive like this, turn off this, don't do this, charge here for an HOUR".

That seems like a lot of consideration, and the thing costs $100k? No thanks. It's cool, and it may be the future, but the technology seems over-hyped for daily use.

Within months the supercharger network on the East Coast will have more stations that will make these precautions unecessary. This was just a snapshot in time, with the minimum number of stations possible with the car's range.

I'm also curious whether something like raw charge percentage is shown to the user directly, or whether it is made more familiar like a bar graph or something.

This would probably be less useful than the range, because it follows an exponential function correlated to temperature and battery condition. You could take the log of it, and add a factor for the temperature, and then... you'd have the range indicator they have now.

This is really damning.

I became way more suspicious when Mr. Broder started trying to weasel in lots of C.Y.A. wiggle room once Elon called his bluff: "Mr. Musk’s logs may show I hit 75 m.p.h. for a mile or two during my trip, although it was likely before, rather than after, the Newark stop..." [1] Suddenly he needed three conditionals in just one sentence: "may", "a mile or two" (now he's not so sure), and "likely".

Given all the hard data here that contradict the original story and show intentional shenanigans like laps around a parking lot, plus the evidence of Mr. Broder's stated a priori irrational bias against electric cars, it's hard to see how this might end up without a retraction from the Times.

And once again I think all the Times's griping about industry disruption is a secondary matter and a distraction from the fact that it's consistently not actually a very good news source.

1. http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

Here's what I posted after the NYTimes review: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204109

Our culture is badly broken. When "the social contract" for broad swathes of society is so little regarded that lying is a matter of course, then we have already reached worrying levels of dysfunction, of the sort that historians point out when they discuss the fall of the Roman Empire, Czarist Russia, or the USSR. A point all of those have in common: The denizens came to assume public information was false as a matter of course, as a time and sanity saving measure. Large swathes of our society think of lying, even when deceiving large swathes of the public, as a kind of sport, and profiting from such lying as a kind of serendipitous fortune to be exploited without conscience, like finding cash on the sidewalk.

Such attitudes are shoved in my face when I see exclamations like, "Pictures or it didn't happen!" It's the same when big media corporations trade in innuendo and conspiracy theories and deliberately sabotage the dissemination of knowledge for their own ends. Such attitudes are so pervasive, that large swathes of the population actually disbelieve in any kind of objective truth, and accept mere social proof as its substitute and superior.

It's entirely possible that the journalist in question is innocent of deception and only guilty of poor journalism and/or poor trip planning and/or insufficient UI design. However, the issue with the review and that of the social contract are entirely related. In a world where reality itself is relative and subject to social proof, there is no need to double check your facts or to prove the null hypothesis. In a world where science is just another fabricated self-serving belief system, there's no need to apply one's scientific literacy or application of physics learned in school when doing things like taking a car trip in winter. One only need know enough to read the dials and gauges to be a good consumer, then complain loudly if things do not go one's way.

True competence, be it in programming or journalism or any significant endeavor, requires diligence with and prostration to the truth. Our society as a whole has forgotten this and our society as a whole is oblivious to the price it is paying as a consequence.

Another way to think of it: Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has.

EDIT: Some of my fellow HN-ers seem to suggest they hold such relativism as a world view. This warrants much reflection.

Depressingly, HN, or large chunks thereof, seem to lack that foundation.

Here we have an institution, the NY Times, cherished by progressive as authoritative, in conflict with a technology, cherished by progressives as environmentally crucial. The ensuing debate looks like something out of Orwell. Over an analysis of logs!

The problem isn't technological knowledge. It is "liberal" knowledge, knowledge of how we and others form opinions and deal with argument. People underestimate the impact of their political convictions on others' opinions, and their own. That impact goes really, really deep, it actually takes a lot of thought and reading and observation to see how this works.

And yet we're routinely treated to debates where people simply state whatever seems obvious to them as "fact" and then respond incoherently to any contradiction. It's truly depressing.

"Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has."

Thank you sir for reminding me why I am quitting my job to begin a Master's degree in Technology and Public Policy. Those in the know with regards to technology and its impact will forever be limited by those not in the know. Maybe we will never agree on the means used to determine Truth, but we should coalesce around empiricism. Not because we need all be scientists, but because empiricism and its methods provide the best means by which the powerless may confront the deceptive and calcified agents of power.

I sympathize strongly with your comment. But, following your own standards, there should be a little voice of doubt in your mind about this narrative as well. Perhaps it seems that civilizations grow more corrupt over time merely because their ability to detect and disseminate knowledge of such corruption improves.

> But, following your own standards, there should be a little voice of doubt in your mind about this narrative as well.

That was written before Tesla's response. You're saying, that for the interest on impartiality, I should have doubted Tesla's side before I even read it? Huh?!? Does that make sense?

As I stated elsewhere, someone can replicate both Tesla's side and Broder's side by redoing the trip both ways.

That, in itself, highlights the crucial difference between an anecdote and data. Journalists as a general rule over-emphasize an anecdotal view of the world at the expense of an evidence-based view.

Realistically, that’s not possible.

The disputes are much more subtle here.

THIS: "Another way to think of it: Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has."

Perfect.

"Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has."

I think a better description of the problem is that our cognitive infrastructure isn't robust enough to handle the interconnectedness and complexity of modern society. Epistemology and technical sophistication are both just subsets of two larger problems.

Extremely insightful comment, thank you sir.

...there is no need to double check your facts or to prove the null hypothesis.

Don't we typically attempt to disprove the null hypothesis?

No, we attempt to prove it and sometimes fail to do so, at which point we are justified in rejecting the null.

Thank you for this. Please publish this insightful and sobering post as a web page somewhere so it can be submitted to HN.

http://blog.stcredzero.com/post/43108099779/tesla-ny-times-w...

Submitted with thanks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5225899

Musk didn't disprove a thing. He's trying to manipulate the facts.

The estimated range that Broder is referring to is the 90 mile estimate that the car displayed at the end of the first day, not the 32 miles it displayed the next morning. That is what he means when he says the car fell short of its range estimate by 2/3rds.

He also states that the reason he proceeded in the morning with just a 32 mile range is that "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." In other words, Tesla TOLD HIM TO. Musk does not refute this.

Tesla flunked the test due to cold weather energy loss. It's that simple. Superchargers alone cannot compensate for that. You still have to plug in overnight and take conservation measures on the road, or you may end up stranded. Musk can't change that no matter how hard he tries to distract you from the facts with "facts".

(BTW, has anyone realized that Musk's "driving around in circles in front of the charging station" conspiracy theory doesn't even make any kind of sense? If the writer wanted to intentionally strand the car he'd do it on the road.)

> He also states that the reason he proceeded in the morning with just a 32 mile range is that "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." In other words, Tesla TOLD HIM TO. Musk does not refute this.

To quote from Musk:

"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."

I'd say that is a refutation.

Yeah. We're now in a sad he-said-she-said situation, unless someone was recording phone calls.

. . . hey, most customer services lines tell you that the call may be recorded? So maybe we do have that call.

The estimated range assumes that the driver follows the car manual which says it should be plugged into a 120v outlet over night, which he neglected to do.

So you're saying he's driving it wrong.

Still a valid thing to criticize. Musk calls the Tesla "an electric car without compromises." Finding plugs and stringing extension cords at some random hotel in the woods so as not to get stranded is maybe a little bit of a compromise.

That's exactly what I'd suspect a clueless person would do if he were trying to intentionally damage the li-ion battery. (You should drain the cells directly, circumventing the charge controller, if you want to be sure.)

> Tesla flunked the test due to cold weather energy loss.

This might sound pedantic, but the logs don't actually show any overnight cold-weather energy loss. What they do show is that it costs more energy per mile until the battery heats back up.

This makes a big difference when looking at the expected performance, because it means that it doesn't much matter how long you park it in the cold, only how cold it is when you start driving again.

It looks like energy loss, because the system apparently knows that a low battery temp will cause the batteries to drain faster and compensates in the range estimate.

> This makes a big difference when looking at the expected performance, because it means that it doesn't much matter how long you park it in the cold, only how cold it is when you start driving again.

Yes, unless you try to charge the battery while it's cold -- batteries aren't very efficient at absorbing a charge when they're cold. I'm speaking here about the basic physics, not the metering and software.

This NYTimes article has been used as evidence against Tesla's claim that you can leave the car at an airport for a week and come back without having lost (much) charge, regardless of weather conditions. I merely intend to point out that due to an inaccuracy in interpreting the drop in range, this is not evidence against that claim.

This is awesome. I've been waiting for them to show this and get it out there for peer review so no-one can say it's just he-said he-said.

It's yet another example of how the New York Times which complains so much about the hardships it is suffering in the new media economy has brought most of the problem on itself by no longer being worthy of its once-exalted status.

The problems that the New York Times complains about are not at all incompatible with the self-inflicted wounds.

When your budget is being decimated, it is hard to attract and support the quality employees who can deliver the product that you want. It gets worse with the way that new media is turning into a more virulent rehash of the old "yellow press", thereby lowering journalistic standards among the companies that the New York Times has to compete with. This means that people you try to hire are unlikely to come from a culture that cares about facts - which accelerates the downward spiral.

I do not personally believe that it will get better until it has gotten so clearly bad that the public hungers for high quality news enough to pay a premium to subscribe to it. (Which is how institutions like The New York Times got started in the first place.)

I don't think it's a problem retaining great journalists. The job market for journalists is outrageously tight, and working for the New York Times is still considered prestigious and just about the top of the profession, and they have some really fantastic reporters and columnists, but they have a lot of bad ones too, and bad editors, who consistently produce stuff like this that occasionally dips down to the Jayson Blair level.

On the other hand, the Financial Times for example manages to be consistently reliable and intelligent, and from what I gather it's not due to any spectacular remuneration for their reporters, but seems to spring from a leadership and culture of high standards of accuracy and rational thought. And not coincidentally, they are hailed as a great success story in succeeding financially in the age of digital news. But that doesn't come down to any special alchemy of their porous pay wall formula, it comes down to being really excellent at what they do.

There's no reason the New York Times couldn't become just as excellent and just as financially successful if it had a brain transplant, i.e. a replacement of its leadership with much more intelligent and rational top executives, like, say, Elon Musk.

I assume people are willing to pay for actionable intelligence on things that matter to them. Or to be entertained. But you pay an entirely different amount of money to find out an answer to "should I build a factory using natural gas in the midwest, or will prices rise, or will a pipeline be constructed in time that we can keep using our factory in Texas" vs. "what is latest on Tom Cruise and his wife?".

Unfortunately, since voting is relatively ineffective, information on political/social/etc. issues, even if it fully determines how you vote, is closer in value to entertainment than intelligence.

This guy has been writing for the Times for 14 years; recent budget decimation didn't cause them to stoop to hiring him.

How hard is it to find someone who won't lie in a story? What's the yearly compensating differential on that? $20,000 a year? Hell, I'll not-lie for only, like, $50 extra a year.

Maybe I'm being too nice, but I'm willing to give the NYT a little benefit of the doubt that this might just have been a single journalist embellishing a story for publicity, as has been known to happen both there and at so many other publications many times over.

I came to the US in 1999, and understood the NYT to be the "newspaper of record". Then witnessed their atrocious coverage of WMDs and the drumbeat to the Iraq invasion. There was Jayson Blair. There was Rick Bragg. Just off the top of my head. They're always "isolated incidents" ...until it becomes a pattern of behavior. Just my 2c YMMV

Americans can see the same effect just from being out of the country for a while. A few years, months, or weeks of not being subjected to the psychological burden of following 'the news' and its gradual narrative, whether that's NYT or otherwise, can have quite effective results on how ably you judge things in the future.

If I didn't live next to a journalist, I'd say it was a single journalist. But job of journalist is not to discuss the truth, inform the public, but to garner eyeballs.

"Enhanching" the truth is their standard MO.

This wasn't "embellishment" - no reasonable person can look at those charging logs and not believe that this "reporter" deliberately set out to discharge a battery and then write a story about it.

I do blame Tesla, somewhat, for not having the good sense to realize that this guy was going to do a hatchet job. Perhaps they'll learn from this and deal with actual journalists in the future.

You do understand that NYT made previously a statement for unconditionally supporting their journalist, although Tesla promised contradicting evidences?

Most media outlets are thick with this kind of skewed reporting. The only difference in this case is they did it in such a way that catching them at it was straightforward.

Meanwhile, the political stories in the NYT are just as bad; but not so easily refuted.

> When Tesla first approached The New York Times about doing this story, it was supposed to be focused on future advancements in our Supercharger technology. There was no need to write a story about existing Superchargers on the East Coast, as that had already been done by Consumer Reports with no problems!

As compelling as this blog post is, this statement really stuck in my craw. NYT, nor any other news group, is beholden to your ideal article. To make matters worse, it was Tesla approaching NYT, not the other way around. So no Elon. Just because the article didnt cover what you wanted it to cover, doesn't mean you can get your panties in a bunch about it. The truthfulness of the article is a whole other matter entirely, but as someone who studied journalism, I have to give him a big "fuck you" for this imperialistic notion.

But that's how PR works. A company or their PR agency pitches a story to the journalist, who is constantly in search of good content in exchange for publicity. While the journalist and the publication get the final say, there's an agreement of what's going to be covered, and what's out of bounds. What Musk and Tesla are doing here is sinking PR agencies' willingness to work with the Broder and NYT on a future story and reducing the chances they will get media test drives of cars in the future.

The NYT is huge and important, so they'll never be completely shut out. But I'm guessing they'll be pretty far down the waiting list for the Tesla Model X media car.

  While the journalist and the publication get the final say,
  there's an agreement of what's going to be covered, and what's out of bounds.

No. There is not. There is the notion of "off the record" when talking to sources. However NYT never agrees to whats being covered in a PR sense.

Editorial policy is pretty clear on most things like that.

Whenever we visited Google's office and such we were forbidden to sign the standard NDA's at check-in. It was fun to watch the people at the front desk get flustered ("No one ever declines the NDA!")

The NY Times is not a PR outlet. It is a newspaper first, and moreover, is an investigative newspaper. If Tesla wanted a puff piece they should have gone with a blog.

Exactly! It's a very cynical view of the media and unfortunately one I encounter too often among tech vendors. This statement makes everything else seem like sour grapes, regardless of the facts of the matter.

In my opinion, a damning comment in the journalists rebuttal causes him to lose all credibility on it's own. "Mr. Musk has referred to a “long detour” on my trip. He is apparently referring to a brief stop in Manhattan on my way to Connecticut that, according to Google Maps, added precisely two miles to the overall distance traveled from the Delaware Supercharger to Milford (202 miles with the stop versus 200 miles had I taken the George Washington Bridge instead of the Lincoln Tunnel)."

Anyone who has driven this trip knows that a "2 mile detour" into Manhattan will cost them an hour+ of their lives, and a quarter of their soul, much less a stop and go hell ride. A true testament to his disinginuity is his pretending to think that stop and go is more efficient than highway mileage. He has no place as an energy reporter unless acting as a shill.

> A true testament to his disinginuity is his pretending to think that stop and go is more efficient than highway mileage. He has no place as an energy reporter unless acting as a shill.

Why is everyone here conflating gas-powered machines with EVs? There's a reason Tesla recommended he slow down and go through a city. There's a reason the Prius has a higher mileage rating for city driving than highway driving.

The reason is that driving faster requires proportionally more energy. It's always been that simple. The reason cities have historical given poor mileage is because of energy wastage from idling and from braking, both of which many EVs (incl. Tesla's) can minimize the energy loss from.

The data doesn't show a significant loss of charge when he was in NYC, though(which, I believe, is around the 250 mile mark). His speed is all over the place, which would be consistent with stop and go city driving, but there isn't any significant drop in range or battery charge.

So the 2 mile detour didn't appear to do anything except add 2 miles to the total distance. As far as the data shows, highway driving is actually not more efficient than stop and go traffic.

Stop and go may be inefficient since it takes a lot of energy to get a still car moving. Regenerative braking can't capture all of the energy lost when decelerating. That said, city driving may still be more efficient than highway in an electric vehicle. Note that the speed which maximizes fuel efficiency for most vehicles is around 30mph. So driving 60 on the highway isn't as good as driving consistently 30mph. Depending on how much speed deviates from 30mph and how good the regenerative braking is, fuel efficiency could plausibly be higher at 30mph with some stop and go than a consistent 60mph.

Of course, I imagine Manhattan is not the place to test this hypothesis...

That's bullshit. Traffic isn't that bad in manhattan. I've driven there for 10+ years now. Two miles is going crosstown. At worst it might take you half an hour. Typically, it's more like 15 minutes.

Not really. After his stop he went up the FDR or West Side Highway to head to Conn. The highway traffic usually moves just fine.

I found that interesting in the other direction. Elon Musk originally claimed it was a "long detour." When Broder pushed back, the "long detour" claim went away; now it's just a "unplanned detour" through Manhattan.

Musk doesn't address the big drop in estimated range overnight, which actually seems confirmed (at mile 400) in his charge/range graphs. I'm curious if temperature alone can explain this, or some other bug or drain-left-on overnight must be at play.

It does appear the reviewer wanted to trigger a car-stop scenario. Curiosity about what happens when a driver messes up, or perhaps range estimates fail because of unpredictable terrain/traffic is legitimate. So, I don't blame the reviewer for the circles near the charging station. But ignoring the range estimate and recharge opportunities, in order to require a tow and then report it as if it were a car failure, seems indefensible.

That is why when conducting a review and not just a blog post , you should have a protocol - what were you testing, how, why.

After all - see how detailed the testing methodology for some hardware sites is. For a world class media like the times it is inexcusable. So it is very sloppy to have times making reviews of expensive products that are worse than these of 300$ video card.

I pushed the car to the limits is a viable test, just notice it.

An excellent point. It's also probably worth mentioning that for this kind of review, a single data point/drive is more of an anecdote than a test. At the very least they should do a "round trip" there and back test.

>Musk doesn't address the big drop in estimated range overnight, which actually seems confirmed (at mile 400) in his charge/range graphs.

That's true. It looks like the car lost about 5% of capacity overnight, and that could have been a problem if he had stayed two nights. It looks like he used about 40% of capacity to get to Groton from the Supercharger. If he had let the car finish a standard (not even max range) charge at Milford, he would have had 90%-40%-5%-40% = 5% of battery remaining when he returned to the Supercharger at Milford the next day. That's an uncomfortably thin margin, but quite different from needing a flatbed.

My understanding is that the battery mustn't get too cold so a heating element is automatically turned on during cold nights (you can't leave your iPhone or laptop in your car during freezing weather either). This explains part of the loss in range. The second part is that the charge level is less accurate when the battery is cold, so only after driving for a bit you see your "real" range. Either way Tesla recommends you always plug in your car at night.

Or the driver left the lights on overnight.

People hear "NY Times" and think it means something. It doesn't. There's simply no way (usually) for anyone to factcheck what happened on a reporter's solo trip. The editor is completely reliant on the author's word.

In this case the writer is busted, but you can be sure that plenty of NY Times articles are equally biased without anyone able to prove otherwise. I was fortunate to personally witness absolute yellow journalism out of the NY Times, so I know just low their reporting can go.

Trust individuals, ignore brands.

From the data, all of the claims made are correct - except for the one about the air temperature.

http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/c...

They put the arrow where it was increased for a short duration, but then immediately after this the temperature is lowered considerably. A short delay like that could be just timing differences on his watch or similar. Does not seem like a valid complaint here, as the temperature was definitely decreased substantially after that time.

Rest of it is, obviously, completely incriminating though. Tesla should have just left this at the 'driving in circles in the parking lot'. That speaks for itself more than anything.

Look at the x-axis, he doesn't lower the temperature immediately after. At 182 miles, he states he lowered temperature. Instead he increases it in small increments up to a bit more than 74 at around the 200 miles mark (18 miles after he says he lowered it). Then he decreases it in two increments, down to a little less than 70, around the 220 miles mark. He doesn't reduce it to 64/65 until around 250 miles.

That could be a genuine mistake. If that was the only mistake - misreporting 80 miles when he lowered the temperature - then this would be no proof at all. He did still lower the temperate, after all, just gave the incorrect distance at which it was done. It doesn't actually affect the review.

As I said before though, this is hardly the only part of the puzzle that doesn't add up.

I don't get it. How cold was outside? Lowering the temp in a cold weather means less drain on the battery. It seems he increased the temp from 72 to 74 for a short time before lowering it below 66.

"Putting the temp on low" means different things depending on where you look from. The blog may be articulate on some issues but it's not very clear at least on this one.

From what I've read, the temperature controls on the centre console are a touchscreen with none of the tactile feedback that physical controls have, so it's probably really easy to press the wrong button without ever realising it...

> They put the arrow where it was increased for a short duration, but then immediately after this the temperature is lowered considerably.

I don't think ~80 miles could be considered a "short duration".

elon musk accused the author of a significant detour in manhattan and not charging to max in his tweets. he provides zero proof the first thing happened and the article is very clear that the test driver/reviewer did not, in fact, charge to max when elon musk claims he didn't.

i'm also appalled elon musk would use charge remaining charts that show the battery dropping into the low single digits to prove the car never ran out of battery when the tesla runs on lithium ion battery technology. lithium ion batteries are ruined by complete discharges. if the tesla doesn't shut down above some safe threshold it's a poor piece of engineering. elon musk is definitely aware of this fact and is cherry picking facts and misleading his audience to gain sympathy for his argument.

elon musk also cherry picks a quote from a response to his tweets and attributes it to the original piece to further his argument

regardless of the new york time's behavior, elon musk is not acting in any more honest a manner and is harming his companies reputation

> if the tesla doesn't shut down above some safe threshold it's a poor piece of engineering.

Such batteries have their charge scale as displayed to the user deliberately shifted, so that even a small negative capacity actually indicates that safety threshold. Do you actually know anything about making charge controllers? Your statements seem to be of the type crafted to deceive uninformed readers.

> elon musk also cherry picks a quote from a response to his tweets and attributes it to the original piece to further his argument

[Citation Needed]

> regardless of the new york time's behavior, elon musk is not acting in any more honest a manner and is harming his companies reputation

There's no concrete proof you've offered in this comment at all, only a willful misreading of Tesla's response.

> elon musk accused the author of a significant detour in manhattan ... he provides zero proof the first thing happened

The journalist acknowledges that detour, but claims it wasn't significant.

He said the detour shouldn't have mattered because he only added two miles by going into Manhattan "stop and go traffic" via Lincoln tunnel instead of using the George Washington Bridge to follow I-95 bypassing Manhattan.

Assuming this journalist is familiar with NYC, that's the most damning comment he's made. His claim might play for anyone not familiar with the area, but if you're from around here, his claim that it only added two miles is hysterical.

As a local, I can tell you that's a difference of typically an hour and a couple gallons of gas, being generous. I've had that detour to drop a friend off in Chelsea add two hours before.

Only two miles may be true, but baldly mischaracterizes the energy cost.

Uhm.. I'm pretty sure the Teslas don't actually let you completely deplete the packs, but rather take you to the safest discharge they can handle before shutting down. Of course they aren't going to let a stubborn driver destroy $10,000 of batteries.

An issue here which fascinates me is -- how closely do we expect any subjective narrative to match the facts?

I'd love to see an experiment where you ask ten people to drive a car for 300 miles and write a story about how their trip went; then compare what they wrote against actual instrumentation data. I would be fascinated to know what parts of their narrative are most likely to be incorrect / misreported.

This isn't just one of "ten people"; it's a nytimes columnist whose very profession is to report facts, accurately. He got caught embellishing facts for a pre-determined narrative, simple as that. I can't believe people are actually trying to defend this sloppy journalism.

Hmm, I may be a little more cynical than you here.

To my eye practically all journalists are sloppy: when I read a newspaper article about a topic I know well, it no longer comes as any kind of surprise to read something inaccurate or incomplete.

I can maybe trust the facts in a New Yorker piece (their editors' attention to detail is legendary) or in a WSJ feature article, where someone has had a lot of time to put things together and probably knows 10 times more than they bothered to write down … but that's not how most news works. Most newspaper stories are a "first draft of history" and I'm pretty much prepared to accept that when I read a story, it is one person's interpretation of what happened that is likely to deviate from reality in some hopefully minor way.

I'd like to understand whether I'm being unduly cynical or whether this is really a common quirk in how people tell stories -- hence my suggestion that I'd love to see an experiment where we measure empirically how good people are at aligning their story with easily measured facts.

> He got caught embellishing facts for a pre-determined narrative

Pre-determined narrative? Huh? Now you're embellishing the facts.

I don't think that matters. It is well established that just asking people to recount an event is extremely unreliable. However, the difference between "ask ten people" and "have a journalist write an article for a major newspaper" makes this question a lot less fascinating.

Things maybe relative or fuzzy, but journalism is supposed to be one of these areas where the two are explicitly ruled out.

This quote from Broder is telling:

This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. [1]

The problem is "normal use" for gasoline engines doesn't map to "normal use" for electrics. For instance, Broder left his Tesla parked overnight in the cold and lost ~60 miles of range. For a gas car that doesn't happen - you can park it in the cold for a week without losing any mileage.

An unbiased review would have pointed out the differences between gas ("old normal") and electric ("new normal"). Yes, with an electric you will need to charge more frequently (and possibly overnight) when operating in colder environments. Yes, filling up a gas tank takes a few minutes - and fully charging an electric can take 30 minutes to an hour. Yes, these are the tradeoffs involved, etc., etc.

Instead (as the Musk rebuttal shows) Broder mis-used the Tesla, didn't charge correctly, ignored advice and ended up blaming the technology. Broder's review is a PEBKAC error written in the first-person.

[1] http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

See also his snarky reference to "electric-car acolytes" in the same paragraph. He seems to be a bit too careless in revealing his biases.

> For a gas car that doesn't happen

correct, for a gas car, at least in the old days, the battery would die and you couldn't get anywhere...or if it was a diesel you'd have to go plug in the engine warmer or you wouldn't get anywhere

I'm surprised people are so surprised a NYT journalist might write pieces to suit his own agenda. This is the paper who employed and defended Judith Miller, the paper who didn't know Jayson Blair was plagiarizing and fabricating stories. The entire old-media setup is suspect at the best of times, these days, but the NYT is certainly one source you always have to take with a grain of salt.

I don't get it. I'm reading all the comments and most seems to be defending what are clearly some blatant lies. Of course there are things in there where we can argue if it is overly nitty that Elon says the guy is driving 61 when the guy says he was driving 55, but maybe we should focus on the stuff that was clearly a lie?

The reviewer was instructed to fully charge the car at a station, he did not, and was then surprised how low his range got. If I stopped at a gas station and put 5 gallons in, when I knew I needed 6 and faulted the manufacturer in a NYT review I shouldn't be allowed to be a journalist anymore.

The reviewer goes on to write about how cold it was after turning the heat down at 182 miles, when he actually turned the heat up, I mean, how does one even begin to explain? Oops, I thought to turn the heat down you turn the dial clockwise?

He then goes on to talk about how he set the cruise control to 55, when he went under 60 for about 15 total seconds in the first half of the trip. It looks like the cruise control MAY have been set to like 60-62mph, but why not use those numbers? Oh hey, because the ones he made up made tesla look worse, see the theme here? He later goes on to say he drove 45 while the graph clearly shows he never went below ~52.

How do you guys defend something like this? Are we just that okay with lying as a society now? I can pick out 5-6 blatant lies in this story, but apparently the fact that some of these are debatable makes it okay to lie in a bunch of other situations? How does that work?

The reviewer already said exactly how much he charged it up at each charging stop and why, so it's hard to really accuse him of lying about that. (Also, there's apparently no temperature control dial to turn at all, just software buttons on a huge center-console touchscreen with no tactile feedback.)

There's already too much pedantry on HN; please don't contribute to it. Broder clearly was able to control the temperature, whether it was via a rheostat dial or a touchscreen controller.

Unfortunately, I suspect Musk gave Broder and the NYT a little too much ammunition with some of his weaker claims. That's certainly what their response will be, proudly refuting one or two things while dancing around the blatant lies.

Did anyone else try to find the citations made in the blog post back in the original NYT article? I did and couldn't trace some of them down.

The third bullet point in the blog says "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,'"

When I do a Command-F on the article, I can't find "32", "51", "final leg", or "fell short". Where is Tesla getting these quotes from?

When Broder stopped at Norwich for the low-power charge, in the article he says "after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford". The figure that the NYT released:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/02/10/automobiles/10t...

is where it says that the car showed an estimated range of 32 miles when he left Norwich.

Elon's blog post contradicts Broder's "they cleared me to resume the trip" comment, saying "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."

So the car logs are hard to argue with; the contradictory claim here is about what Tesla said to Broder when he was at Norwich, which presumably wasn't recorded.

It would be interesting to see the NYT double down on this... only to have Tesla reveal that they did in fact record this conversation and it matches their version of the story.

They're in the graphic linked to from the article: "GRAPHIC: A Range Estimate That Misses The Mark": http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/02/10/automobiles/10t...

It's in the graphic attached to the NYT article. It's also near the bottom of the Tesla post.

Ah thanks, whoops. Should have finished the whole thing. :)

There was an inset graphic in the original story, which lists miles driven and estimated range remaining at various way-points. I believe this is the url: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/02/10/automobiles/10t...

Check the 3rd image from the bottom. It shows the route, a timeline and both estimated and actual distances.

Jalopnik points out that the alleged driving "around in circles" at Milford isn't automatically nefarious, given the supercharger's geographic location:

> * Note that the Milford station is on an off-ramp and it isn't at all small. A single loop around the station is nearly a 1/3rd of a mile, and if you make a wrong turn (or even hunt for the charger) and make one turn around you're at 1/2 mile.*

http://jalopnik.com/tesla-claims-model-s-driving-logs-show-n...

Notice there is a left turn right after the first row of parking spaces, which takes your directly to the charging station. You can also apparently take the 3rd entrance from the ramp and get there directly.

The red path depicts exactly what Musk claims: driving around in circles. Look at the final leg, going around the chargers. Even with that ridiculous path it's only 0.5 miles. That is disingenuous.

Not sure I understand you...for reference's sake, here's the location:

https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.24586,-73.009073&z=17

How direct of a path you take from the offramp depends on the signage, it's not unreasonable to think that the writer missed it.

And when you say: "Even with that ridiculous path it's only 0.5 miles."...you did read the OP right?

Musk uses this chart in which he says the reporter "circled" around for 0.6 miles:

http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/s...

0.6 is very close to 0.5. This doesn't prove the reporter didn't do something nefarious...but the line between accidentally and purposefully taking a circuitous route here is not a wide margin.

I mean, if the reporter wanted to screw with Tesla -- and while ostensibly being unaware that he was tracked -- why wouldn't he just miss his exit a couple of times and get stranded on the side of the freeway? If you wanted maximum damning effect, that's what I would go for...driving around a McDonalds seems less efficient.

If Tesla needs someone to do a fair review of the Tesla, particularly in urban environments, or for SF-Reno, I'd be happy to make the extreme sacrifice and take them up on it.

(what I'd really like to do is test a Model S in police/security duty cycle. Lots of idling, powering accessory equipment, high speed short pursuit, long highway cruise. Or test the vehicle through something like the Blackwater driving/carbine course, where the low center of gravity would make it pretty awesome I think (especially vs. a Crown Vic or an armored GMC).)

I think I could do the sacrifice as well ;)

The article is direct, factual and Brother should undoubtedly be fired.

Just why did Elon Musk not link to the article, for everyone to easily see Broder's embarrassment beats me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the...

He has a new article from February 12

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

More strange things are claimed

At that point, I was already experiencing anxiety about range and had called a Tesla employee from the New Jersey Turnpike to ask how to stretch the battery. She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

What?

> Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

If I were hiring John Broder to be a journalist covering electric cars, that right there would be enough to reveal him as disqualified: Doesn't know even the basics of thermodynamics or can't apply it to his subject.

Broder seems stunned to learn that he is not, in fact, driving a perpetual motion machine.

Oh, and BTW, it's not mentioned, but it would be quite interesting, and much more of a burn, if Elon is actually making some of the charges, like driving in loops, with a proof via GPS logs of the test drive.

Yes, and after a little research, I find that the Tesla log contains GPS positions, so this could be done in principle. But for a short distance like within a small parking lot (as in the account of driving in circles), the positions might not produce a useful graph (typical GPS accuracies are +- 10 meters or 32.8 feet).

I don't think GPS would show anything substantial if his claim of a "100-space parking lot" where Broder drove in circles is true. I'd be impressed if the GPS was that accurate.

Regardless, I don't think that's a huge sticking point to this story. Broder was at the charging station - it's possible he wanted to see just how long it would take until the battery shut down.

It makes me wonder why Musk didn't provide that proof then.

Well, lets see if this goes to court.

Tesla were as robust in their attack on Top Gear, and a court threw them out. They still, regardless of the court decision, openly complain about Top Gear trying to drown out the court loss. So, to be honest, Tesla have form. They get criticised, loudly defend them selves, lose, but refuse to accept the loss. This could possible turn out the same.

I think people getting all excited about this evidence should wait and see it a) it goes to court and b) the out come of such a case.

I fully accept that their produce is likely under severe attack from their petrol (gas) competitors and frankly in their position I would be a bit foil hat about it, but equally they do seem hyper sensitive to criticism. There is a lot of instant Tesla supports here, but I would exercise caution and wait for both sides to be tested.

It is also interesting to me to see how opinion is divided. Here its all very pro-Tesla, but in motoring circles, opinion is far more sceptical. I suspect somewhere in the middle is where the truth lives.

> Tesla were as robust in their attack on Top Gear, and a court threw them out.

That's because the psychology of human beings allows for media folks like Top Gear to score their points and (incidentally) severely damage Tesla through the effect of a lie, without actually stating the lie.

> equally they do seem hyper sensitive to criticism.

As for that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204152

Stephen Colbert has a word for this. "Truthiness."

They can't go to court in the US, because America protects this type of speech as free speech - whereas in Britain and in commonwealth countries, libel laws are far-reaching and pervasive.

Actually...he doesn't need to go to court...something as fact-filled as this, that will get a lot of attention, almost is better than a court-case. Because it plays out in the public, and Tesla will likely come out much better for it - because they are proving, with facts (not legal arguments), that this journalist was trying to perform a hack-job...but it backfired.

I guarantee you, he is panicking right now - and the NYT editorial team (and perhaps board) is in panic mode right now.

This cuts to the heart of journalistic integrity. As far as I can see...this is easily checkmate.

Let's see how they respond.

They can't go to court in the US, because America protects this type of speech as free speech

Citation needed.

http://journalism.about.com/od/ethicsprofessionalism/a/libel... (and many, many other references) disagree with you.

Top Gear wasn't dismissed because Tesla was wrong, it was dismissed as Top Gear presented their case that they were demonstrating the cars for entertainment and not as a factual review. The judge felt the distinction had merit and dismissed the case, Tesla felt differently of course.

This just isn't true. The entertainment angle was not at all why the judge threw out the case. It was because they felt Telsa's claims were vague and that people understand that cars perform differently under different circumstances:

http://transmission.blogs.topgear.com/2012/02/23/tesla-libel...

Nope. They lost because, even if some viewers did interpret it as a serious factual review with no dramatized elements, Tesla Motors still couldn't come up with any plausible justification for why those viewers would be mislead in a way that would actually harm Tesla even slightly.

(English libel law doesn't work the same way as US libel law; IIRC, if you can show that a reasonable viewer could have interpreted the broadcast in a way that's both defamatory and false, then that's libel even if the broadcaster never intended it to be understood that way and even if all or nearly all viewers interpreted it correctly.)

exactly. Top Gear isn't a news program, it's an entertainment program.

People don't watch Top Gear to get actual car reviews, they watch to drool over the car porn and laugh at Jezza in a Robin Reliant.

I will say I don't agree with what they did with the Tesla, but it's a separate issue from the NYTimes article.

Top Gear didn't lose because they're entertainment and "obviously" not truthful.

Are you suggesting the NYT is not truthy?

The competition isn't petrol. You'll still need lots of petrol for plastic (for example). The competition is more traditional car companies that don't have an electric car yet.

The kicker is the "detour". Not a detour as the journalist claimed but rather that he drove the Tesla in circles in a parking lot to ensure the battery was flat when returned.

I think this article has woken some people up to what a lot of us have known since 2003 (or earlier), namely: Don't believe everything you read in the NYT.

In case anyone is unaware, it was recently revealed that when the government announces that "X militants were killed", that the word militant actually refers to any military age male that is killed, and does not imply there is any evidence to suggest the person was anything other than completely innocent.

Furthermore, the NYT continues to parrot the government claims, and to use the word militant in it's reporting, despite this revelation, without mentioning that in most cases there is literally no evidence at all.

In fact, the NYT public editor recently wrote an article complaining about this fact.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/public-editor/questions-on...;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/drones-b...

I have a problem with log data being released with analysis being imposed over it. I understand there need to show that they are in the right and NYTimes is in the wrong but as it stands now this is just pure marketing. If they had released the data plain and unadulterated i might feel differently, but at least as of the link provided i saw no link to the raw log material. So as it stands this is marketing, and that is really sad. If this data were indeed true(and i am not saying it isnt) it should be able to stand on its own up to 3rd party analysis. One can always make data look the way they want for there cause, and this goes for the NYTimes review as well.

This is a hollow complaint because releasing the data with analysis and releasing the data without analysis have one thing in common: the data.

Did they actually release the data? I just see charts, and boy can I manipulate charts to say what I want!

Does anyone see any discrepancy in third graph, "Rated Range remaining vs. Distance" ? The graph shows the distance from Delaware Supercharge to Milford Supercharge is approx. 200 miles. The car arrived at Milford with almost zero charge left even though projected range was 242 miles after charge at Delaware! Which means battery lasted nearly 42 miles less than the projected distance. Am I missing something?

The detour taken in NY.

Detour would show up as part of the distance calculation (x-axis in the graph).

Mass media is show business.

Whenever I have known the facts in a story that happened to become a media story, the facts differed from how the story was presented in media. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. But always some. You can't trust mass media, not even NY Times.

Theory: Broder didn't realize the logging capabilities of the car, and when the Model S' software ui initially supported his internal baises he took liberties with the truth. By "documenting" his experience through Tesla support he attempted to falsely add credence to what would be a traffic generating, "anti-electric" review masked in the journalistic repute of the NYT.

Firstly, all of Broder's excessive winging about the cold weather (I think) was designed to subtly imply that the Model S doesn't work in the cold. You future buyer, will be cold and your car will break. This is why Musk had to address the cold weather link directly in the evidence blog posting.

Secondly. Broder likely couldn't have fathomed that every parameter in the car was being logged. Very specific details add credibility and character to a story. They make the author appear diligent, and one who gives great attention to detail. In the past such details were a "literary tool used to bend the story. Now thanks to data driven engineering words and truth in such matters should align more closely in cases such as this.

Lastly. For a man who may or may not have a bias against electric vehicles (cars at least), the observation that "the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating" at the outset of the author's journey might have set the tone of the coming review. With all the incessant calls to Tesla support to document all the "trouble", Broder had plenty of documentation to support his (what was IMHO a) journalistic malignment. This angle also had the added benefit of generating views for NYT - plus through the courtesy of Tesla arranging a tow - the money shot.

I hope NYT has the ethical chops to do what they must.

This is great for Tesla, but it's depressing to wonder how many other people/companies have been screwed over by dishonest journalists, but did not have the luxury of a GPS-based, by-the-minute log to call bullshit with.

I don't understand how so.

Sure, they shredded the Times article. But this looks to me like an extremely finicky car. I mean, you have to drive it slow, possibly turn off the heat in the winter and charge it for an hour at a time? That's craziness.

Edit: Whoever is just combing through the comments, down-voting anything that doesn't praise Saint Elon, how about you step up and point out what I've said that's wrong. Or do we just downvote differing opinions now?

> I mean, you have to drive it slow

Are you trolling? No, you don't have to drive it 'slow'. Citation needed, and one that isn't this NYTimes piece that's currently being called in to question.

> possibly turn off the heat in the winte

No, you don't. You're just making things up.

> charge it for an hour at a time?

Yeah. Problem?

> That's craziness.

No, it's not. You know what's craziness? Humanity driving cars that burn things and pollute our atmosphere to the point of causing and accelerating global climate change, driving species to extinction and gunning towards global upheaval. That's craziness.

Story 1: Tesla shows NYT review does not reflect what actually happened with the car.

Story 2: Tesla, your mechanic, your insurance company, your spouse, the government, and anybody else with access to the box can tell exactly how you've been driving.

I'm a big Tesla and Musk fan. I have nothing but hope that Tesla rocks on. But #2 is the way larger story here.

I continue to be amazed at how in 20 years or so suddenly the world is full of people who don't mind detailed logs of their every movement and action being kept.

Musk said previously in a tweet that logging is always on for media but only on for customers with their written permission.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301053361157988352

This is a good point. Thanks for bringing it up.

But I think you miss the gist of my statement. My apologies. I should have been clearer. I said "...anybody else with access to the box can tell exactly how you've been driving..."

The issue here is that the car is automatically equipped to provide such tracking. Whether the tracking is turned on by default, by court order, by the police hacking your system, by the company in order to verify test drives, by your insurance company convincing you to give them the data -- all good and interesting situations for discussion, but not germane to what I was saying.

In fact, it's not the company I worry about. It's consumers who will easily be lured into turning on tracking by their insurance companies -- and then this data will be available to anybody who has system access. We are our own worst enemies.

Your car -- a large, heavy, physical piece of reality which you trust to get you from point A to point B -- is now only so much software. That's a big deal.

Logging is off by default except when the car is being driven by a member of the media. The reason they have it turned on under these circumstances is mentioned in the article: they were treated unfairly by the car show Top Gun.

That's how things are for now. His point is that all the cards are in place. Switching to default logging won't happen with fanfare.

Don't all new cars have black boxes now? I seem to recall reading something about it and how cops are using the information.

Musk: "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."

NYTimes article: "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,"

So what Musk is correcting isn't actually in dispute.

Musk: "Cruise control was never set to 54 mph as claimed in the article, nor did he limp along at 45 mph. Broder in fact drove at speeds from 65 mph to 81 mph for a majority of the trip and at an average cabin temperature setting of 72 F."

This seems disingenuous since there is clearly a good chunk on on the graph where the reporter was driving below 55 mph on 95 in CT, which I would not recommend. Musk is comparing the "majority of the trip" before the range troubles with the parts about cruise control from the parts with range troubles.

Musk: "For his first recharge, he charged the car to 90%. During the second Supercharge, despite almost running out of energy on the prior leg, he deliberately stopped charging at 72%."

NYTimes: "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."

Reporter never said he fully charged it, and didn't have any reason to if the range gauge was accurate. Musk is basically saying the reporter should have been worried about the range and overcompensated.

Musk: "When Tesla first approached The New York Times about doing this story, it was supposed to be focused on future advancements in our Supercharger technology. "

Seems odd they lent him a car for a test drive then.

Musk: "In his own words in an article published last year, this is how Broder felt about electric cars before even seeing the Model S"

Musk should have stuck to the logs. Here is more of that paragraph:

"Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate. General Motors has temporarily suspended production of the plug-in electric Chevy Volt because of low sales. Nissan’s all-electric Leaf is struggling in the market. And the federal government has slowed its multibillion-dollar program of support for advanced technology vehicles in the face of market setbacks and heavy political criticism. "

Are those facts untrue?

> Reporter never said he fully charged it, and didn't have any reason to if the range gauge was accurate. Musk is basically saying the reporter should have been worried about the range and overcompensated.

My car doesn't have 'range'. That said when the fuel light is on I go to the petrol station. Similarly I know a drive to my parents is about half a tank. If I have less than that I put in the required amount of fuel to make it. If fuel looks like it getting low I get off the main road and look for a service station. Common sense.

If I was driving a car for the first time, was unfamiliar with my route or the presence of charging stations I wouldn't trust the range. Range is always an estimate. What if I hit traffic? I don't want the exact range because if I get stuck in an hour of slow moving traffic I am buggered. Its the same with petrol cars. Its the same with guestimating how far you can go on your fuel tank. You cannot defend idiocy.

> Seems odd they lent him a car for a test drive then.

What better way to demonstrate Supercharger tech than in a real world scenario. Drive the car, get it low, look how well it recharges to get you going again. (I assume Supercharger relates to the speed of charging) My impression of Electric cars is that take overnight to charge. Giving a car which charges in an hour would be a good way to demonstrate both the technology and the improvements in the practicalities of electric cars.

>What better way to demonstrate Supercharger tech than in a real world scenario.

My point is that Musk is saying that like he didn't write the story he was supposed to, which was about 'future advancements in our Supercharger technology'. But clearly they knew what the eventual point of the story was, since they lent a car and provided support. So why bring up the original intent of the story?

Your bias is showing.

You know what would be a killer feature? If the Model-S had an up-to-date map of the locations of all of the chargers in the network, and it monitored how close you were to the closest one and compared it to the remaining range you had. It would be able to warn you if your range started getting dangerously far from a charger "lifeline" and even give you emergency GPS directions to the nearest charger as soon as the range got within say...5% of that minimum.

See, here's the thing: this kind of stuff happens in journalism all the time. The journalist decides on what to write before they even begin their investigation (i.e. test drive), and their decision affects the way they conduct said investigation. They become majorly affected by confirmation bias and leave out or distort important details (i.e. driving around in circles in the parking lot).

The only reason Broder got called out in this specific case is because he made the mistake of going against one of the most intelligent, ambitious and accomplished figures in the tech industry - who expected the kind of shenanigans Broder would try to pull and therefore logged the test-drive data. He poked the wrong bee hive.

Now that's how you respond to media - with the truth.

I think this is an important lesson to all startups who are disrupting an industry with powerful incumbents - particularly those whose advertising spend pays the salaries of the journalists who create the narrative in their marketplace. We can all learn from Elon Musk. Yet again his startup-fu is masterful.

With confusing half-truths that are highly misleading and confusing? I guess you are right …

To play devil's advocate, I wonder if it's possible that there is no foul play on either side - if the car had issues displaying accurate data to the driver but logged properly to Tesla, he might have thought he was discontinuing the charge with a fuller battery then he had. Same for the speedometer (a chilling thought) and temperature.

As for the circles in the parking lot - I'd probably do donuts too if I was given free reign over a slick sports car.

Obviously it's far fetched to think that display inaccuracies were really the case, but food for thought.

> As for the circles in the parking lot - I'd probably do donuts too if I was given free reign over a slick sports car.

Yeah, but the middle of a range test without mentioning it in the article is a bit suspicious. Also, thanks for implicitly revealing your standards for an acceptable white lie and acceptable journalism. ;) (Okay, devil's advocate, so it only reveals about your devil's advocate persona.)

to a reporter given the chance, donuts might be considered "normal use patterns" :-)

I would expect the car to show a higher speed to the driver (by 5%) not lower

Agreed if things are going right - but again, for the sake of discussion, one could fathom there being some sort of bug. I don't believe that this could realistically be the case, but I'm just trying to mention all possibilities...

While I agree that the charging logs are completely damning, I think it's worth pointing out that Broder probably wasn't taking minute-to-minute notes as he drove (which, as a fellow driver I appreciate). More likely, he simply wrote the relevant portions of the article from what he remembered the night after he drove. Which, in my mind, isn't unreasonable - Elon calling him out to say "Broder never drove 45 mph" when he was driving 52 would seem somewhat nitpicky were it not for the article's inflammatory language.

He's a journalist. Taking notes is his trade.

Journalists are well-accustomed to using voice recorders by now. Heck, most car reviewers videotape everything they do now.

I think Elon makes a pretty convincing case that this guy was going out of his way to write a hit piece against the car. No sensible person would drive any car in the manner this reporter did.

I absolutely agree with you; there was definitely a contrived scenario going on.

However, I also think that Elon's taking a bit of an overzealous approach, especially given his Tweets. I can see where he's coming from - the company's stock did dip after all - but his rebuttal is somewhat inflammatory in my mind as well. Any person able to read a basic graph can see the untruth in Broder's article by looking at the charge graph, and I think that a more cool, professional approach could have given Tesla a very big PR boost as the more mature company in the situation.

> Elon calling him out to say "Broder never drove 45 mph" when he was driving 52 would seem somewhat nitpicky

The performance of a battery in a piece of equipment is a matter of engineering and empirical fact. Calling a 7 mph difference (over 15%) "nitpicky" indicates a lack of understanding of what it takes to deal with matters of engineering and empirical fact. This is even more true in this particular context, as drag tends to increase with the square of the velocity, which in layman's terms means you get a lot more drag than your increase in speed.

A journalist who doesn't understand the above isn't qualified to write an automotive article with any kind of empirical basis. (He can go be like Jeremy Clarkson and emote lots instead.)

This is a public education issue for Tesla, instead they left to a journalist to educate the public instead: EV's work differently. Job done. Frankly I think Tesla slipped up. BTW. Plenty of ICE cars run more efficiently at higher speeds due to long gearing/overdrive, increased drag or not.

> I think it's worth pointing out that Broder probably wasn't taking minute-to-minute notes as he drove (which, as a fellow driver I appreciate).

If Broder now said, "I must have forgotten a few things", it would instantly end his credibility as a journalist.

Actually... I don't get why he was doing circles on the parking lot...

I mean, think about it. Why he was doing it? I guess to check if the car will get discharged in next few minutes to write in the review that car got totally discharged after just few more minutes. Well, it didn't happen. Why then he didn't write that the car actually still held some charge? I mean, he was trying to show something negative about the car, but when he found something positive, he was no longer interested in showing it?

Regardless of who you think is right the data is kind of indisputable.

Unless Tesla is faking the data (which may happen but I really doubt it) it is up to us to determine the veracity of the NYT's article. Is it within journalistic means or did Broder straight out lie?

Maybe it should become standard Telsa practice to provide all of this information to the journalists within 24hrs of the end of their test drive.

That way there will be no confusion, and the facts are plain for the journalist to see, and use in their article.

blasting somebody in this way generates more publicity, i'd wager.

Two issues: One, in a matter of dispute, he is claiming his own logs as proof -- which is nonsense. Two, even if the logs are legitimate, the error could have been somewhere between the computer and the user (e.g., the user might have been getting wrong information).

In either case, Tesla is being very unprofessional. Very petty, too. Think about Musk: he created PayPal, where he was a total scumbag. Why would it be different here?

I have only one word for this: pwnage

Assuming this data is not fabricated (always a possibility!) - then the news reporter did some seriously shady reporting and should be fired immediately (this is THE New York Times).

The only questions I have about the hit piece are the following.

Is he getting paid by anyone to be against electric cars?

What is his past history with electric cars?

Where has he previously been employed?

And what ties does he have to the ICE industry?

Absolutely brutal way for Broder's career to end.

I'm skeptical that it will. Broder pretty much is their go-to guy for coverage of energy/big oil. His articles fit their editorial vision.

If the NYT cares about their credibility, they'll get rid of him, but this isn't an isolated incident for them. I stopped reading them a decade ago for that reason.

No, this is a Jayson Blair-level screwup. All opportunities the NYT might have had to spin the logs in their favor ended when Broder deliberately drove around a parking lot trying to exhaust the battery.

He's done. As in, "Yes, Mr. Broder, I would like fries with that."

Is Tesla's data independently verifiable?

How is the reader to know the logs haven't been tampered with, if only Tesla has them?

Interesting data.

And of course there is another course of action that can settle this once and for all. Repeat the journey with an unimpeachable witness along for the ride.

If indeed this is true, it is incredibly despicable behavior to try to bury with lies a technology that could bring so much good to the world.

Trying to 'kill the electric car' is pure evil and sociopathic to my mind (if true).

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.

But the graph showing the visible miles was well below zero.

Did the car really force itself to stop like Broder claims, or could Broder have driven it farther?

Even if the battery had charge, if it forcefully stopped, then Broder is right in essence. The fact that there is a reserve in the battery that Broder cannot use for driving is, for all intents and purposes, the battery being out.

On the other hand, if the car didn't forcefully stop, then Broder is lying.

For his first recharge, he charged the car to 90%. During the second Supercharge, despite almost running out of energy on the prior leg, he deliberately stopped charging at 72%. On the third leg, where he claimed the car ran out of energy, he stopped charging at 28%. Despite narrowly making each leg, he charged less and less each time. Why would anyone do that?

Time constraints? Maybe he had a meeting to get to (simulated)? Arguably, people who can afford to drive around in a $100K electric car probably set the meeting starts by their arrival.

+1 for log files.

I bet that Tesla gives automotive insurance underwriters massive hard-ons.

I want one of these cars so badly. I had plans to buy the new 2017 Mazda RX-7 and keep my '88 10AE RX-7, but I might just sell the old one and figure out how to make the Model S purchase happen.

I just bought a new 981S, but would have preferred to buy a car from Tesla, for what it's worth. I just can't get past my belief that EVs make no sense without a standardized battery-exchange infrastructure.

I tend to keep cars for a long time, so hopefully the situation will be different next time around, and I can spend the money with Tesla. I'm very glad they were vindicated in this case. That said, I still agree with the discredited report in a qualitative sense: EVs that have to be charged in real time at arbitrary leaf nodes on the power grid are a really, really stupid idea.

> gives automotive insurance underwriters massive hard-ons.

They already have them. State Farm keeps badgering me to turn on the OnStar in my car so that they can charge me insurance based on how far I actually drive, rather than the upper bound on mileage that I tell them.

I've superimposed the 'charge' and 'range' graphs. The gap indicates the reserve.

http://i.imgur.com/mfB1IJ6.png

I guess Tesla needs to figure out how to prevent wonky gaps like the one at 400 miles. Seems the algorithm jumped too quickly to the conclusion that range was going to be severely impacted.

Thanks for posting this graph. My speculation just from looking at it is that just before that recharge the car traveled in a more efficient way (i.e. relatively constant 35-50MPH rather than 80MPH or stop-n-go 5MPH), so the rates of decrease in both charge and range with respect to miles traveled were less.

A journalist conducting a review on a consumer product is a scientist. And a scientist is supposed to set out to test theories, not prove them.

Any journalist that falls short of this standard, even if it's because of honest mistakes, should not be allowed to conduct reviews.

> A journalist conducting a review on a consumer product is a scientist.

I think what you're trying to say is that a journalist is supposed to be objective.

> And a scientist is supposed to set out to test theories, not prove them.

A scientist cannot prove a theory true, but he might prove one false. Remember philosopher David Hume's famous remark about this: "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

So even a completely objective journalist, with no axe to grind, might discover that a claim is false.

> Any journalist that falls short of this standard, even if it's because of honest mistakes, should not be allowed to conduct reviews.

Perhaps in an ideal world. It turns out that Broder has a long history of bias in his reporting, and a rather favorable view of the oil industry and of conventional vehicles over electric ones. Notwithstanding those facts and this episode, I doubt his career is over.

We broadly agree.

Science is more than "being objective". My "test" vs "prove" business was about devising tests that you expect would be most informative, not just accepting the results.

For instance, I could test if an apple really falls when I drop it. But I'm know it will, and I'm quite certain I will learn nothing from such a test. Therefore, I won't perform it in the first place.

I reckon objectivity is a good start, though.

Also, I did say that a biased journalist should not be allowed to conduct reviews. That indeed prove we don't live in an ideal world. Unless you made a deeper point, and asserted that such journalists actually should be able to operate precisely because of non-ideal aspects of our world?

The New York Times public editor now has an initial response to the Tesla Motors blog post, "Conflicting Assertions Over an Electric Car Test Drive," just submitted to HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221679

and that post promises more follow-up to come and links out to some other commentary on the story from other sources.

A Washington Post blog also comments about the dispute as a matter of journalistic practice.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/02/1...

I find it amusing that people will leap to defend the new shiny geek toy -- even if practically no one here can afford it. IMO, Telsa is sinking under it's own PR weight, and Elon knows it. The logs don't contradict the reporting in any significant way. The gist is that, even for a non-"sports" car, the Tesla is... lackluster compared to the non-electric alternatives.

Now, whether the reporter is too dumb to own a non-hybrid electric car may be an issue, but most drivers don't know how a transmission works, or even how to change the oil -- so I don't think a failure to understand charge cycles & regenerative braking is all that damning.

Is it possible that the sensors were broken or buggy ? A long time back, I had poured all of my money into buying a second hand Porsche .One day I was cruising merrily on I-90 when my car caught fire, even though all the indicators were normal. Turns out the indicator were not functioning -- the last mechanic (not a Porsche dealer )to tune the car had effed up the indicators. ( I have stuck to Hondas and only authorized dealerships for repairs since then).

I may be doing wishful thinking here but Car Journalist are could be biased , snarky , they might embellish a bit but they are rarely outright liars.

I think this is fantastic, especially given that I had recently purchased some Tesla stock. However, I wonder, is anyone perturbed that Tesla has the ability to monitor all of this? I know that other car manufacturers are getting closer and closer to this kind of thing. But is anyone else perturbed? I know there must be precedents set already because of technologies like OnStar. What is needed for the police or a court of law to be able to demand this type of data from Tesla or the vehicle owner (not sure where the logs are kept, in the car or in the cloud).

> However, I wonder, is anyone perturbed that Tesla has the ability to monitor all of this?

Tesla has made a public policy statement that they will turn on logging and monitor media test drives -- but they won't be automatically monitoring the private uses of their car. That would be a public relations disaster.

Also, to get to the log, they have to get to the car. It's not as though the log is automatically transmitted to Tesla by wireless.

EDIT: Apparently, with the user's permission, Tesla can log car data remotely. How they go about this isn't clear, but it's apparently an option.

Actually, assuming they had your permission, they could record all of this data remotely, just as you can: http://docs.timdorr.apiary.io/

They actually turn it off by default except for the press.

I think when insurance companies, technology and public opinion catch up, it will be an always-on thing. I want that kind of logging if my car gets stolen. I want that kind of logging if I get hit by a cop and he calls his buddies to alter the evidence to make me at fault (this has happened to people).

This kind of log data will only result in lower insurance premiums for everyone and evidence useful in court. The potential savings to society are tremendous.

This kind of log data will only result in lower insurance premiums for everyone and evidence useful in court.

As long as everyone needs coverage, and accidents remain the same, the insurance company will need to pay out about the same and therefore collect something similar. That means that average premiums will not change across the population.

However you can move costs from lower risk drivers to higher risk drivers. Which may help YOUR premiums.

Discovery Insurance in South Africa has a car insurance policy that lowers your premiums based on the data from a logger they install in your car. Drive below the speed limit, avoid hard acceleration from traffic lights and avoid cornering at high speeds and they lower your premiums by something like 50%.

Of course it's still an optional policy for now and easy to implement because most insurance companies insist that new vehicles in SA are fitted with a GPS car tracking system anyway, but it's an indication as to where things are heading.

This would be great and I'm sure it will come to fruition sooner or later. I wonder what will happen to the auto insurance industry when self driving cars are prolific. Undoubtedly they'll be logging this kind of data constantly.

The logging capability can be turned on at the owner's request, and only at the owner's request.

Unfortunately for the NYT, Tesla Motors was the owner of this particular car.

All car manufacturers have this sort of logging enabled. It's used especially for testing and on-board equipment.

This isn't what I had in mind, but serves to demonstrate the capabilities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics#Data_logge...

if you buy a Tesla you get to decide whether this is enabled or not (at least as of today). It's on by default only for journalists after the Top Gear "experience".

While we now get accusations and nice graphs, as long as we don't get provably unaltered source log files, we'll never know who is right.

Even if Tesla were to release the log files used to create the graphs, it would still be impossible for them to prove that the logs weren't being altered prior to release.

It seems to me that either the reviewer or Tesla (or both) is playing unfairly here, but it's impossible to say who.

Instead of coming to articles linked here and commenting how clearly the party not currently defending themselves must have been wrong, lets just just ignore this mud flinging contest and move on.

> While we now get accusations and nice graphs, as long as we don't get provably unaltered source log files, we'll never know who is right.

What!? Piffle! There's this powerful tool scientists use called replicability. Just have some other journalists make the same trip as stated by John Broder in the article and compare. 3rd parties can also try to replicate the same result achieved by Broder, using the log information as published by Tesla.

> Instead of coming to articles linked here and commenting how clearly the party not currently defending themselves must have been wrong, lets just just ignore this mud flinging contest and move on.

My money's on Elon Musk. I'm pretty sure his world view is compatible with mine. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204109 "Move along" would only be an effective damage control strategy for John Broder.

> Even if Tesla were to release the log files used to create the graphs, it would still be impossible for them to prove that the logs weren't being altered prior to release.

Think about what you're saying. If the logs were reported dishonestly, someone in Tesla could (and would) make a million dollars by being a "public-spirited" whistleblower.

A secret plan to twist the truth about an automatically-generated computer log would eventually unravel. In modern times, there are few truly secret secrets. I can think of just one exception -- where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. But that example only proves that someone was paid more to keep quiet than he would be paid to speak up.

> It seems to me that either the reviewer or Tesla (or both) is playing unfairly here, but it's impossible to say who.

On the contrary, I think this release shows who was telling the truth. Especially because Broder now has the option to sue Tesla and Musk for defamation of character -- if he dares.

Even if you ignore Tesla's side of the story, the NYTimes infographic that was supplied with the article contradicts the contents of the article itself.

The article explicitly states that the car fell short of range estimates on the final day, but the infographic clearly shows that the car was driven 51 miles on 32 miles of charge.

That detail alone might be excusable as an error, except when you account for all the other variations between the story and the infographic. For example, why did the journalist decide to drive out of Manhattan to a destination that was 73 miles away when the car reported only 79 miles of range left? Why would he claim that Tesla gave him the go-ahead to drive from Norwich to Milford with half the required range remaining. It just doesn't add up.

"lets just just ignore this mud flinging contest and move on."

Let's not. Let's re-run the trip with an actual impartial (neither booster, nor someone out to perform a hatchet job) driver in similar conditions and see how it works out.

That there are two sides of a story doesn't mean that they're equally likely to be true.

I'd wager my house for a donut that Tesla's data is closer to the truth than the vitriol spewed by a guy who's had nothing but bad things to say about electric cars in the past.

Who do you trust more - an engineering company with runs on the board, with multiple good reviews of their product, and a CEO known for attention to detail, or a journalist with a known previous bias against electrical cars?

Whilst we will never be 100% sure, I think that Tesla have proven their point beyond reasonable doubt.

I dont think anyone can deny that the battery depletion could have been easily prevented. Now whether it was an act of malice is a little harder to determine. But then why did he really turn the heat up?

Trust issues abound in published reviews (with the possible exception of Consumer Reports), whether by respected journalists, real buyers on Amazon, or anonymous online posts. What I find of most interest about this story are the possibilities it suggests:

Logging data published right along with reviews would be a terrific way to add credibility.

Of course, then you need to set up a system to ensure logging data can't be faked, and that the logging data is for the review in question. Something along the lines of the black box in airplanes seems like a possibility.

What can be done to encourage NYT take appropriate action here? An apology is the very least they could do, and firing John Broder for a complete lack of journalistic integrity wouldn't hurt either. Would writing to them help? Spreading the news to other media outlets? What's the best course of action? Inaction is just what they want so the whole thing blows over, I think in this case (when there's overwhelming evidence of foul play) we have a golden opportunity to get NYT to start straightening out their act.

Elon Musk PR extraordinaire! I thought offering to help Boeing with their battery fiasco was an amazing PR coup! He's showing to be a true PR Master with this move. Check mate NYTimes?

I'm surprised Tesla is already popular in Norway. Do they offer any service outside of US? And do they sell cars in Europe or are these imported by customers on their own?

Tesla has a showroom and service center in Norway, and I believe there are 2 importers. Official Tesla and an independent importer.

Part of the popularity is price. Cars in Norway are heavily and progressively taxed on CO2 emission, horse powers and weight. This makes big strong cars extremely expensive, but normal cars are also relatively high taxed. EV's are exempted all those taxes, not just the one on CO2 emission.

Some base prices: Tesla model S 85kWH: 106 250,- USD

Mercedes Benz E 300 4MATIC (252 horsepower): 138 178,- USD

If you want something with similar horsepower:

Mercedes Benz E 500 4M (408 hp) 225 339,- USD

Audi S6 (414 hp): 236 910,- USD

(1USD to 5.6NOK conversion)

I think outfitting an Audi S6 or MB E class from base to acceptable level of accessories would be much more expensive than with the Tesla Model S

Also, electric cars can use the bus line and skip traffic where available

Broder didn't charge long enough, but there are compensating factors:

1. the car showed enough range on the previous night 2. he didn't have any convenient place to hang out while the car was charging 3. there was possibly some misunderstanding between Broder and Tesla support

In the end the obvious happened. He started on the journey with too little battery and it died.

What I don't understand, if he had just a few miles left, why not stop again at some convenient place before running out of energy...

Too bad his message was lost by writing a 1,211 word article, explaining 2 different suspicious reviews, with multiple graphics, each with way too many words to read.

Would have been the perfect time to sit on his hands and hire a PR firm to tell the story. The details may be important in a courtroom, but potential customers just want to feel safe.

Now the story is two guys who don't like each other, screaming at each other.

Great lessons here for office politics. Or the playground.

Liar! You are! No, you are!

I haven't followed this thing very closely but has anyone suggested testing this again and trying to reproduce the problem? If someone said my code was faulty, the first thing I do is repro.

Why doesn't another newspaper just try the same experiment?

Maybe the journalist was bias, maybe he got a lemon, maybe he hit on some weird bug, maybe it's true and the car doesn't work well in cold weather.

Arguing over who said what is crap. Just test it and get more data.

I really want to buy an electric car, but range anxiety keeps me from doing so. Unfortunately, this article doesn't help.

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.

I think it's worth noting that seemingly all of Broder's past NYT articles are about the oil and gas industry - http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/peopl....

I think this might go a fair way in explaining why he wrote a fraudulent review of an electric vehicle.

You might want to touch up your blog format so that Facebook finds a more useful title and topic summary to suck in when the URL is posted.

(Yes, I still use Facebook. Keeps me in touch with many "normal" friends... for certain definitions of "normal". ;-)

Since this is a blog and public communication platform, I assume that issues such as the one I point out may be legitimate concerns, in that context.)

I am a big fan of Tesla Motors. However, it should be noted in the graphs that the car's "Rated Range" and "Distance" do not decrease 1:1 as they should if the "Rated Range" was accurate. My solution would change the car's "Rated Range" actively with data on recent power levels and actual distance traveled. This would take in effect heating and other accessory's usage.

With that much log data, simply perform the same trip again at the same time.

Temperature wouldn't be the same but I bet you could get close.

Can NY Times have an agenda to support traditional car business? Not possible, this might have only been an incompetence of a reporter that NY Times can not effectively prevent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AnB8MuQ6DU

Thought this should be posted ... in case nobody else has. NY Times replies to Elon Musk: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-w...

I am not sure I would be smacking the reporter around as they are. What stands out to me is, here we have a 100k car that we cannot run the heat and get good range out of. Here we have a 100k car that if don't drive at some contrived speeds while keeping the climate control down low we cannot get good range out of.

Frankly, if I cannot drive a car at a comfortable temperature the car or the technology behind it is not ready for prime time.

I am still curious what the user is displayed versus what is in all these logs. We also have other stories linked in the original thread of other Tesla S drivers who had range issues as well.

Musk is not doing his brand any service especially when he highlights the user only operating the interior climate control in the low seventies, really you mean we cannot do that with a 100k car and have good range? Really?

Its a matter of expectations. With a 30 to 40k car similar to the Focus EV or Leaf people will expect limitations of this sort, for a 100k car people expect it to just work.

Broder (the NYT reporter) cites a $101,000 car, but the Model S pricing doesn't come close:

http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options

It could be an honest mistake, but it seems more likely the inflated price is meant to solicit comments like yours.

But he did run the heat, the car never dropped below 60F and averaged 72F.

Interesting marketing decision. I don't particularly care if a journalist lied about the cars, and I did not read the Times article, or even know it existed. But by blowing this up, Musk has made me painfully aware of the limitations of electric cars.

Broder's reply (posted just now): http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-f...

Crying about Top Gear again.. if they'd left that out, I'd probably have enjoyed the article more! Top Gear is an entertainment show, not a documentary!

That doesn't stop people from taking it as gospel, which could be very bad PR. Unjustified bad PR.

this is fantastic. to me this isn't so much about tesla, or hack shop journalism. it's about sensors and big data. which is really the future we are looking at more than anything. if you publish the data logs publicly as open information for every car they test, you wouldn't even need journalists.

Can someone tell me why this got all these comments and points in a couple of lines? Thanks

There should be security footage from the parking lot where the car was running in circles.

This guy needs to be fired.

Next article: Tesla tracks and publishes consumer's driving data!

Gots to love the companion image of the S in the snow. Subtle.

John Broder must change from journalist to QA.

Can't stop grinning while reading this

oh, logs, we all love you :) I only hope owner can control retention and delete these logs if desired.

Desire to purchase BlueStar++;

DATA FTW!

Check.

NYT - your move.

All my support to Tesla people.

Brilliant

I was the first one, when the NYT article was linked to here, to say:

"Be careful, journalists love to fake car reviews to display cars they don't like in a bad light"

Car journalism 101. Even journalism 101.

I consider CNN and Fox to be propaganda. Now I'm badly losing faith in the NYT too... Unless they react swiftly and promptly: public apologize to Tesla and firing of that journalist.

I used to work for a big bus company here in mexico ( A.D.O )and they implemented a system for recording everything that happened on the bus' trip. The buses had a computer that recorded the ranges, the speeds, the times, and the fuel the bus used during the trip and believe me, these sensors never ever failed.

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