Thread: Reporters who want to bag electric cars .... need to be better than this.

Everyone interested in electric cars knows about the infamous Top Gear episode - where the script for the "failure" of the car had been written before the car was taken out.

So a reporter, so-called, who shares Top Gear's disdain for electric cars should have been a bit more careful about saying that he'd driven at a particular speed when he was, in fact, driving faster than that, sometimes much faster. Perhaps he should also have omitted "reporting" that he'd turned the AC temperature down when he had, in reality, turned it up.

A Most Peculiar Test Drive | Blog | Tesla Motors

Tesla don't just build electric cars, they also build electronic recording devices to monitor the performance of their cars. Check out the recordings versus the 'reporting'.

Electric cars have long since been associated with four major problems, for this reason it is no real suprise that many reporters and motoring journalists can have preformed opinions before evening testing some of the cars, I can certainly see how this may seem unfair and quite biased but possibly also a little understandable given some of the wildly exaggerated claims that have turned out to be false in the past.

This been said the link you have provided is quite interesting in pointing out manipulation in the testing procedure. It seems to me that such manipulation serves no real purpose and can only be damaging to the people involved, credibility wise.

This particular company Tesla is quite an interesting one, with many respect journalists actually having rather high hopes for their future. This beening said they still need to demonstrate a reliable product and really start to rack up some good reviews before everyone begins to take them really seriously.

Also just with regard to Top Gear, I do think they are willing to give most cars a fair crack of the whip, but what you have to remember is that they will and do have prior knowledge about cars before actually testing them. It would be rather naive to just assume they get straight into the cars knowing nothing at all about them and make up a script from there. They plan things out based on some actual knowledge of the cars they will be using, no matter how much larking around and joking may appear on the actual shows.

When it comes to cars Top Gear give honest assessments based on their opinions, and as you've probarbly already figured out electric cars in general don't rate to highly in their's, but when you consider that it seems no manufacturer as yet has been able to build a car that is 1.) affordable, 2.) has a recharge time anything like comparable to refilling a petrol or diesel car, 3.) is easy to find some where to recharge it and 4.) has a range that means you can actually go somewhere in it, then it really isn't all that hard to begin to understand why electric cars arn't exactly everyone's favourites.

When it comes to cars Top Gear give honest assessments based on their opinions, and as you've probarbly already figured out electric cars in general don't rate to highly in their's, but when you consider that it seems no manufacturer as yet has been able to build a car that is 1.) affordable, 2.) has a recharge time anything like comparable to refilling a petrol or diesel car, 3.) is easy to find some where to recharge it and 4.) has a range that means you can actually go somewhere in it, then it really isn't all that hard to begin to understand why electric cars arn't exactly everyone's favourites.

So it's OK for them to have a script pre-written saying that certain specific things were wrong with it - in particular that it ran out of power when it didn't?

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I'd quite understand them being tougher on cars they suspect aren't up to the mark for whatever reason. But if the cars exceed their expectations they should acknowledge that. Shouldn't they?

Transmission – BBC Top Gear Tesla vs Top Gear: Andy Wilman on our current legal action «

[QUOTE=adelady;394980]

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I'd quite understand them being tougher on cars they suspect aren't up to the mark for whatever reason. But if the cars exceed their expectations they should acknowledge that. Shouldn't they?

Yes I 100% agree that if a car exceeds expectations they should acknowledge the fact, the problem is this though if they still don't like the cars involved then they are not going to be that complementary, even if they exceeded expectations, when there might be hundreds of other cars they think are far better.

Top Gears version of events seems more believable than Tesla's for the simple fact it's actually been recorded and broadcast, the truth is there for everyone to see. Top Gears side of things:

"1. We never said that the Tesla’s true range is only 55 miles, as opposed to their own claim of 211, or that it had actually ran out of charge. In the film our actual words were: “We calculated that on our track it would run out after 55 miles”. The first point here is that the track is where we do our tests of sports cars and supercars, as has happened ever since Top Gear existed. This is where cars are driven fast and hard, and since Tesla calls its roadster “The Supercar. Redefined.” it seemed pretty logical to us that the right test was a track test. The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our heads, but from Tesla’s boffins in California. They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles.


2. We never said that the Tesla was completely immobilized as a result of the motor overheating. We said the car had “reduced power”. This was true.

3. Tesla claims we were lying when we said the brakes were “broken”. They now say that all that had happened was that the fuse to the vacuum pump had failed, which meant that the brake just had to be pushed down much harder than usual. Well – to my mind, if the brakes are broken, then they’re broken, and if this happened to your car, you’d take it to the garage to get it fixed. Odd it seems so trivial to Tesla now, because on the day of filming they insisted on repairing the fuse before we could carry on driving the car."