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That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#71

Post by lawnchair_larry »

luigi wrote: post #7

Overall I think Broder acquits himself well, and his explanation about circling the Milford parking lot makes sense. Also, the Tesla engineer he was on the phone with at the time should have been able to tell Musk that happened (or Tesla should have just asked Broder to comment before posting the rebuttal). His action here is still hard to understand: > The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and…

That stuck out for me and I think he is being dishonest with his delicate wording. They didn't clear him to go, as he suggests. They told him that it would be ready in an hour.

He also explains that he drove past a station "because no one made him aware of it". That smells like wordplay too. He was probably aware of it, and any reasonable owner of the car would probably be aware of it, or be well equipped to look it up. The map of charging stations is quite easy to find. He surely had an internet capable phone for backup.

Instead, he made an extra support call, and when they gave him bad advice, he took the opportunity to maliciously comply. After 12 support calls, if you want to cherry pick bad advice that seems inconsistent with your expectations, you can probably find something.

I think Elon was wrong in some of his claims, but I think the review was still dishonest.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#73

Post by kdsudac »

jules wrote: post #5

> I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking ) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel. What the heck? Does this guy seriously think that braking and then speeding up will conserve battery? Maybe the adage "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" is true.

Curious.

Is this logical: cruise control ==> less (speed up / slow down) ?

So: no cruise control ==> more (speed up / slow down) ?

Do you believe the Tesla advice was to turn off cruise control to conserve battery? or do you think the times reporter is making that up?

Disclaimer: don't know much about Tesla implementation of cruise control.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#74

Post by TillE »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
HelloMcFly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing Musk is willing to "stand up to them" given that he's the truly unbiased one in this situation, right? He's playing an angle here too. And the other article ( http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks... ) casts some doubt on his loud protestations. And they've only released their summarized charts, not the raw log data, anyway. It's already a "he said / she said" situation, it's just th…

> it's just that much of the HN crowd is more apt to be on one side vs. the other. I don't think so, it's just that one part of the HN crowd likes data more than 'someone said'. So now it is up to Tesla to provide even more data, preferably with an exact re-run of the conditions in the presence of said journalist. That should clear up any kind of difference and would establish whether or not there is either a bug in…

The whole thing hinges on whether you're stupid enough to leave Norwich without sufficiently charging.

Do the same run a hundred more times, and nobody will fail as long as they exercise that basic amount of care. In that sense, reproduction is pointless. We already know the result, within a margin of error.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#75

Post by stcredzero »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #49
nikcub wrote: post #42

The biggest mistake Elon made in his response was to dump all that data and to attempt to tear apart each part of the review. This means that the rebuttals now involve taking pieces of that and disproving them in the aim of disproving Tesla's entire argument. Tesla should have posted nothing more than a single line statement saying that Broder left the last charging station for a 65 mile trip with 32 miles on his ran…

Agreed. They've allowed Broder to just ride this out by muddying the waters. He walks away from this only slightly tainted now. At the very least, his notes and the resulting article are not accurate. He confirms this himself. This isn't surprising, and not necessarily malicious. But it's extremely common, as anyone who has ever dealt with a journalist knows. As a group, journalists simply get a great number of thing…

> As a group, journalists simply get a great number of things wrong and cannot be relied on for detail oriented work.

Something is very wrong here. If the way you conduct business has nearly equal probability of pissing off innocent people unjustly as it has of making wrongdoers hot under the collar, isn't it time to revisit how you do things?

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#76

Post by smsm42 »

nbouscal wrote: post #48
luigi wrote: post #7

Overall I think Broder acquits himself well, and his explanation about circling the Milford parking lot makes sense. Also, the Tesla engineer he was on the phone with at the time should have been able to tell Musk that happened (or Tesla should have just asked Broder to comment before posting the rebuttal). His action here is still hard to understand: > The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and…

Yeah, there are really two major problems with the story. First, that he drove off with 32 miles left. Even if they did say it was okay, a rational consumer would be pretty skeptical. This also creates the problem that the story depends on what was said in a telephone conversation that we don't have access to, so there's really no way to know who is telling the truth. The other problem is this quote: "If there was a…

I know if I had my car say "32 miles" and I know I need to go 62 miles, I'd request explicit confirmation from the techs that it's OK. I've been with computers long enough to know supporting somebody remotely is very hard as the person on the other side assumes you can see what they see. Being on the user's side, then, requires you to explicitly state all relevant information, and ensure the supporter is aware of it, otherwise his mental picture of what's going on may be entirely wrong, and you may get very wrong advice.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#77

Post by DoubleCluster »

stcredzero wrote: post #47

> I do recall setting the cruise control to about 54 m.p.h., as I wrote. The log shows the car traveling about 60 m.p.h. for a nearly 100-mile stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike. I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch whee…

Maybe you aren't so hot either. Tell me, what do 19-inch and 21-inch specify? The outer diameter of the tire or the DIAMETER OF THE RIM?

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#78

Post by [deleted] »

stcredzero wrote: post #47

> I do recall setting the cruise control to about 54 m.p.h., as I wrote. The log shows the car traveling about 60 m.p.h. for a nearly 100-mile stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike. I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch whee…

[deleted]

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#79

Post by niggler »

kdsudac wrote: post #57

I get why Musk feels like he needs to defend his company but I think he may be doing more harm than good on the PR front. Do you think the average Tesla customer is going to want to wade through a bunch of plots of battery charge vs distance, etc? I think the takeaway for the average Tesla customer might be along the lines of "hmm, this seems really complicated.... am I going to have to keep the heat down while I dri…

"To me, Musk comes across as an out-of-touch engineer who keeps trying to argue the technical case and insists it's the customer's fault--it couldn't possibly be a faulty design, confusing U.I., or marketing not realizing a common (mis)use case. "

Fully agree. This is a great case study for other startups on what not to do.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#80

Post by lawnchair_larry »

majormajor wrote: post #26
tokenadult wrote: post #2

From the article, "Beginning early in the morning of my second day with the car, after the projected range had dropped precipitously while parked overnight, I spoke numerous times with Christina Ra, Tesla’s spokeswoman at the time, and Ted Merendino, a Tesla product planner at the company’s headquarters in California." That quoted sentence includes the interesting phrase "Tesla's spokeswoman at the time," seemingly i…

"Mr. Straubel said Tesla did not store data on exact locations where their cars were driven because of privacy concerns, although Tesla seemed to know that I had driven six-tenths of a mile “in a tiny 100-space parking lot.” While Mr. Musk has accused me of doing this to drain the battery, I was in fact driving around the Milford service plaza on Interstate 95, in the dark, trying to find the unlighted and poorly mar…

You could probably go either way on that strategy. If you had this capability, and you suspected your adversary may be malicious, it is probably better to keep quiet and then destroy their credibility afterwards. If they are malicious, and know that they are being monitored, they might be more inclined to keep you blind to them. If Tesla knows that the monitoring can be disabled (it obviously can - how easily is the question), or thinks a reporter might go so far as to switch cars, they probably would not want the monitoring known.

On the other hand, if I had very little monitoring ability, I would probably overstate these abilities so that the adversary doesn't test them.

Broder's implication that there is a privacy scandal there seems like a weak distraction. Elon said plainly that they do not monitor customers by default, but they turn this on for reviewers, citing the Top Gear review scandal. This is totally reasonable, and so is lying to a reviewer about whether or not it is enabled (even if they didn't lie). It's not comparable to lying to customers.

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