The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our prior post took things through a promise by the Times's public editor, or ombudsman internal-critic, Margaret Sullivan to look into vehement charges from Tesla and its chairman Elon Musk that Broder did not drive the way that he said he did in his review, and that his sloppy and perhaps malicious treatment of the car is why it wound up with a flat battery and a trip on a flattbad tow vehicle to rescue at a charging station. The review, along with a report of slightly higher losses in the fourth quarter of 2012, contributed to a dip in the company's stock this week.
In her piece, filed Monday, Sullivan wrote that there is no clear evidence that Broder deliberately set the car up to fail. But she hardly had his back. While his reporting was apparently done in good faith, she added "Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially." She faults his sketchy log on a small red notepad on the seat next to him, and for undisciplined use of the opportunities present him to top up the big battery under the car's flat floor.
Four days later, the issue is fading but one thing is certain. Teslas can perform in winter weather, as other testers have shown, but it takes more careful driving to keep them healthy than conventional cars demand. It seems ok in the end that Broder gets a pass from Sullivan, as he probably performed a public service by driving as attentively as most Americans do when tooling down the highway, which is to say, not very attentively at all. Tesla may have gotten a needed jolt here amid its mostly unrelenting string of boffo reviews. Broder's a good and experienced reporter who went out to test one thing, the supercharger stations Tesla has set up to keep its customers moving down the road for hundreds of miles. He ran into unexpected trouble. And that's what he wrote about.
Sullivan should have come down a lot heavier. Instead, she seems to throw up her hands at the chore of relaying detail on the core issues that Broder raised, and that Tesla has sought to refute:
"I could recite chapter and verse of the test drive, the decisions made along the way, the cabin temperature of the car, the cruise control setting and so on. I don't think that's useful here."
She wouldn't have had to question the reporter's character or intentions. And may not need to have recited every verse. But a few more chapter themes would have been helpful. There were plan factual errors, as documented by the data Tesla received from the car's computerized log (some of it, one gathers, received in real time). The Times has a sterling record for punctiliously running corrections on the second page of the paper and amending online versions of stories. The original Broder review has not changed a whit that I can see. If Broder asserts he set the cruise control at 54 mph, and for quite awhile limped along at 45, but the data logs show no such thing, should there not be a correction?
Disclosure: We drive a Tesla, with more than 3,000 miles on it in two months. I do try not to be a fan boy for this car, not explicitly while blogging on it but it is a struggle. The car is not flawless. Some things need work as the model evolves. But on the whole it is, already, ummm…. wow's the word.
Other stories on the Times vs. Tesla saga:
- PC Magazine (Feb 19) Damon Poeter: Farewell Tesla Test Drive Tussle, We Hardly Knew Ye ; Also from Poeter the same day, NYT Public Editor Dings Both Sides in Tesla Test Drive Dispute; Both are long and fair-minded summaries of what just happened.
- Silicon Beat – John Boudreau: After War Of Words Over Citical Model S Review, Tesla CEO Elong Musk Asks For Peace With New York Times ;
- LA Times – Ronald D. White: NYT's public editor finds flaws in Tesla article ;
- Vancouver Sun – Andrew McCredie: Auto journalists need to unplug their biases / Fair coverage of electric vehicles may be suffering at the hands of sentimental baby boomers clinging to their internal combustion past ; Hmmm. There are some auto magazine writers of the sort McCredie sees as quite common. But all those prizes the automotive press bestowed on Tesla suggest the anti-electric faction is not dominant. McCredie does warn himself in his piece, "not to generalize." His story comes close to doing it anyway.
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