Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

> Musk accuses Broder of thinking "the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story" (which is an odd choice of adjective for a car review)

The story was "Electric cars suck". Broder is well known for having anti-electric car opinions, so it's not surprising that he would want to write a negative review.

Argument 1: The length of the detour is not as important as the type of driving during that detour.

Argument 2: "But Broder never claims he turned down his heat at the 182 mile mark." - well, he does claim he turned it down and doesn't mention he had turned it up. People can lie by omission.

Argument 3: "But the section before he broke down it does look like he chugged along at a pretty low speed.", perhaps. But not at the 45 mph claimed in the article.

Argument 5: "No. His other chart shows the mile range dipped below zero, which would indicate the car could not move." The car has a small reserve. 0 charge would mean "charge the car right now".

Argument 5: "Broder also explains that he did not charge fully because of the time it took to charge. He wanted to show the real world experience of a real driver, who might not want to endure the hour and a half it takes to charge up, when only needing a certain amount of energy to get to point B." I hope any real driver would know that a distance of 60 miles would need enough charge for a 60 mile journey, and that giving 30 miles of charge would be a stupid thing to do. Just as if you needed to drive a distance needing 20 gallons you'd be stupid if you only filled with 10 gallons.

This article is, frankly, idiotic.

All it takes is one person to drive the same journey, but with proper charging, and to release the logs to disprove Broder's points.

The "Norwich Charge" data point is all you need to understand what happened here. Notice how vague Broder is in his original account:

"After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford."

At every previous charge, he noted the exact mileage remaining when he headed out. Why not this time? Because the estimated range when he left that charging station was less than he needed to reach his destination and he knew damn well that that was the case.

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

(How he convinced the Tesla people to "clear" him at that point is a mystery that hasn't been followed up on by either party.)

Later he hand-waves past this by saying he was testing the superchargers, not normal chargers. But the fact is he knew he would run out of charge midway to his destination if he didn't charge the car longer. Instead, he decided to intentionally set up a situation where the car would be stranded.

Elon might have been better off concentrating on this point more, rather than some of the smaller inaccuracies. But the data is clear: the reporter was in full control of the situation and manufactured the failure himself.

There is nothing wrong with replication, it’s just that it’s wholly unable to clear anything up in this case.

The main important points of contention aren’t even disagreed over here. Those you could figure out by replication.

It’s the interpretation of those results that’s the sticking point here.

Some details that cannot be replicated are also disagreed on (heat, circling in parking lot, …), but replication won’t help you find out which is the correct interpretation.

Earlier in the article, Broder claims that Tesla blamed the mileage inaccuracies on a computer glitch, and that some battery reconditioning would restore the range lost overnight. So it's not impossible that either he, or Tesla, (or both) believed the mileage readout to be inaccurately low, caused by a bug triggered by low temperature readings. I think the author implies that this was the situation, but it is indeed vague. Unless a transcript of the phone calls is released, this will probably remain a contentious point forever.

This is a huge PR win for Tesla, what started out as one NYT review has blossomed into 4 or 5 articles and a he said she said drama.