Whipped Cream Difficulties

Could be worse. Could be “all poop cruise”.

Anyway, the NYT public editor has weighed in on the Tesla story.

In my opinion, she’s done so in a rather half-assed fashion. Much of her blog entry is actually a quote from one reader’s letter, making the standard arguments:

• the writer should have used the “Max Range” setting
• the writer should have used the “Range Mode” setting
• the writer should have read the section of the owner’s manual, “Driving Tips for Maximum Range”
• and he should have left it plugged in overnight

Quoth the public editor:

My own findings are not dissimilar to the reader I quote above, although I do not believe Mr. Broder hoped the drive would end badly. I am convinced that he took on the test drive in good faith, and told the story as he experienced it.
Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially. In particular, decisions he made at a crucial juncture – when he recharged the Model S in Norwich, Conn., a stop forced by the unexpected loss of charge overnight – were certainly instrumental in this saga’s high-drama ending.

But she fails to give any examples of what she (as opposed to the letter writer) considers to be his alleged “not good” judgment.

If the public editor wishes to take the items above as examples, there are some questions worth asking:

• Doesn’t using the “Max Range” setting shorten the lifetime of the Tesla batteries? Isn’t it a legitimate decision to trade longer battery life for an additional “20-30 miles” of range?
• The writer was on the phone with Tesla throughout the entire drive, and followed the advice they gave him to maximize range. Wouldn’t they have given him the same advice as far as the “Range Mode” settings and what’s in the owner’s manual?
• Are there many hotels that have outside power outlets, in their parking areas, accessible to the public? That’s a serious question: I stay in maybe two hotels a year, if I’m lucky, and I don’t recall seeing power outlets at the ones I’ve stayed at in Vegas.

In addition, Mr. Broder left himself open to valid criticism by taking what seem to be casual and imprecise notes along the journey, unaware that his every move was being monitored. A little red notebook in the front seat is no match for digitally recorded driving logs, which Mr. Musk has used, in the most damaging (and sometimes quite misleading) ways possible, as he defended his vehicle’s reputation.

I agree somewhat with the public editor here. But, as she notes, the writer was “unaware that his every move was being monitored”. Elsewhere, I have seen Musk state that the Tesla has the capacity to do these kind of detailed logs, that it does not do them by default on consumer vehicles, but that Tesla automatically turns on the detailed logging for any vehicle they send out for review. Question: isn’t this just a little bit creepy and disturbing? I wouldn’t have a problem if Tesla had told the NYT and their writer in advance that they were going to have the car maintain a detailed trip log, especially if they shared that data with the NYT. But Musk kept this a secret from the paper, and from the reviewer, until he disputed the review. Yes, he has a right to do that, and yes, I can understand why you’d want your own logs to compare with the paper’s reporting. If Musk can do that to the NYT, though, he can do that to you, Joe Tesla Driver, too.

(So how does this differ from the “black box” in newer cars? Not sure. Need to think about that. My understanding is that the “black box” only collects the last few minutes of data from the car, as opposed to the detailed multi-day logs from the Tesla. But I’m not an auto mechanic, and I have no “black box” in my car.)

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary on a pogo stick, if I had known the Tesla story was going to cause this much trouble, I wouldn’t have linked to it.

Since I did, though, I feel obligated to link to updates. In what I think is chronological order:

“A Most Peculiar Test Drive”, Tesla’s blog post giving their view of what the data shows.

Hacker News discussion of “A Most Peculiar Test Drive”, which has some good points in it. (It also has a lot of “The New York Times is a shill for Big Oil!” (Oh, wait. You’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.)  and “Any publication that gives the Tesla a good review is going to get driven out of business by the car companies!” (This, of course, explains why Motor Trend is no longer publishing. Oh, wait…))

“Elon Musk’s Data Doesn’t Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery” from The Atlantic Wire.

“That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t”, the NYT response to the Tesla blog post.