Back long before I could drive, a guy by the name of Ralph Nader delivered a damning review on an innovative car from the most powerful car company in the world. The car was the Chevrolet Corvair, which was GM’s answer to sporty rear-engine cars from both Porsche and VW. The review, which took the form of a book titled “Unsafe at Any Speed,” was scientifically debunked in 1972, about three years after GM was forced to cancel production of the Corvair. Researchers concluded that while the Corvair had issues, it was no more or less safe than other vehicles of its time period. Most of the cars made in the 1960s weren’t exactly known for great handling.
Nader may have overblown the problem, but it was GM’s misguided response that killed the car. Rather than fixing the problems and giving Nader some credit, the corporate giant decided to go to war with him. The result was a dead car and the birth of one of the most powerful consumer advocates in history.
Tesla is experiencing what seems to be a similar problem. A New York Times reviewer named John Broder panned the car for running out of juice on a test drive, and Tesla attacked him personally. The attention is causing the review to circulate more widely, and may make the guy famous much like GM did for Nader. And it could kill Tesla.
The review heard ‘round the world
Unlike the Corvair, the Tesla S isn’t being presented as unsafe, but as using an unreliable technology (lithium-ion batteries) that could leave the driver stranded, much like what happened to the reviewer. In regular weather, this could be problematic, but in the kind of weather they’ve been having on the east coast lately, this could be life threatening and a serious problem.
To be fair, the author of the article isn’t a typical car reviewer. He appears to cover mostly the oil market. As such, he may well lack the expertise and experience to properly review an EV or compare it to comparable gas-powered cars.
In other words, Tesla should have either passed on giving him a review vehicle, or insisted that one of their folks ride along. After all, Apple doesn’t send review products to Microsoft fans, and Microsoft doesn’t send Windows 8 PCs to Apple sites (they did that during the Vista launch and it didn’t go well).
The problem with electrics
For a time, I was a battery analyst covering the US market. There was no one putting any real money into this market and, for some reason, after everyone else left, the job landed on my desk. My firm actually ran the largest battery show in the nation. There are a number of problems with battery technology that need to be overcome. They are created through a relatively toxic process, they don’t like extreme cold or high heat, they have a quarter the energy density of dynamite, quality control has had historic problems, and when they do fail, they burn really hot. I can speak to this last point because a failed lithium-ion battery pack almost burned my house down.
Electric vehicles are almost the polar opposite of gas vehicles. Gas cars are most efficient at moderate highway speeds over long distances, torque develops at speed, and they can operate over a wide temperature spectrum. Electric vehicles are most efficient in stop-and-go or slow speeds, they have most of their torque available at start (making them wicked fast off the line), and are best over a much narrower temperature range. If a gas car is as silent as an electric car, you are likely coasting; if an electric is as noisy as gas car, it is probably in the process of blowing up. Finally there are lots of gas stations and very few charging stations (and you’d better bring a novel to read while you fill up).
So a review scenario that would favor an electric car would have the driver hopping around the city and in traffic, with a total drive distance under 100 miles. One that would favor a gas car would be a long drive over a distance greater than 100 miles. For competition, an electric will typically win in the sprint to 30 mph, a gas car would be favored at top speed and above posted speed limits.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused the author of creating a test that made the Tesla S look bad. He’s right, in that New York Time’s Tesla test would favor a gas car over an electric and expose the range, charging station, and weather problems associated with an electric. But he didn’t do anything you or I might not do with our own cars, or hope to do with a new Tesla.
Tesla’s problem
Tesla’s mistake was giving the car unchaperoned to a reporter who is tied to the hip to gas. An EV would be a hard sell for a guy who makes his living in oil, even if it behaved more like a gas car than it does. Tesla is defending the car’s range by claiming the distance driven is inaccurate, he didn’t charge the car properly, and that he drove over the speed limit rather than under it, as he claimed. But by making these challenges, the company is just making the author of the review more visible. Ultimately, a $52,000 car shouldn’t need excuses, it should be able to compete head to head with a gas car in a test that favors gas cars. Just as GM validated Ralph Nader and eventually had to kill the Corvair, Tesla is unintentionally focusing everyone on the shortcomings of electrics and making it harder to see through them to the advantages. Put differently, a bad car review isn’t news, but a car company going after a reviewer in the media definitely is.
There is an old saying: You don’t go to war with people that buy ink by the barrel. Tesla should likely revisit that advice, or it may find itself as a footnote in history as a peer to the Corvair.
I’ve seen multiple write-ups of this event and I’m left with the feeling that the reviewer was aboveboard and Musk is trying character assassination to protect his baby.
I do like the idea of electric cars and now that I’ve moved I’d even consider one if they weren’t so expensive, but there’s no way to deny that they aren’t primetime material yet.
I hope Musk takes Broder’s rebuttal as an opportunity to end this gracefully.
None of the write-ups focus on the basic issue that Broder didn’t fully charge the vehicle. Ever.
Then he wrote a story about he kept running out of juice. Derp alert.
In the case of the main segment between SuperChargers (the operation of which he was reviewing) he didn’t fully charge the car, and then intentionally hid that fact from his viewers.
The only people who could possibly know that his legalistic descriptions of that first charge were not a full charge were actual owners of the car who are familiar with its operation. That’s why the owner community is so pissed at this review.
They’ve driven this route hundreds of times at regular speeds, in cold weather and with the climate control on and never had a problem.
Then someone chooses to write a fake story about range issues, complete with deception and rhetorical handwaving to conceal the fact that he consciously chose to NOT fully charge the car on three separate occasions.
All of the Hypermiling FUD and emergency calls to Tesla were purely the result of not charging the car.
The only “real” issue identified is the apparent range drop when the car was left out at night not plugged in. Again, owners are aware of this “issue”.
Most of the “lost” charge is still there and will be recovered if you just start driving (which warms the battery). It’s like parking a gas powered car on a hill.
You get up in the morning and the gauge shows “empty” but you know the gas is actually there, so you just start driving, and the “rated” range returns when the car levels out and the gas stops sloshing.
Broder didn’t know that, and when told he needed to heat up the battery, he sat in a parking lot with the heater running for an extended period of time.
It’s exactly like trying to “fix” your empty gas gauge problem by turning on the car and letting it run. You just end up with an empty tank. “Letting it run” is just a bad interpretation of what the actual fix is, which involves letting it run while the car is in gear, to get you off of the hill.
In the case of a Model S, the appropriate way to heat your battery and get your range back in the morning is to drive the flippin car.
It’s interesting that Broder brought it up, and it would be helpful for new owners to know this, but it wouldn’t have even been an issue if he had just charged the car to full in the first place.
One thing that has made me a little upset is that every publication that reviews the Tesla S, wants to take it on these cross-country road trips pushing the car to do what it isn’t ready for (at least not right now). Most people are not going to drive an EV cross-country, they just aren’t going to risk that. And most people I know that even buy a $90k+ car certainly are not likely to drive that across the U.S….they will fly because they can AFFORD to!
These reviews are all very misleading and in the process they are tarnishing the Tesla name which isn’t fair.
Agree, electrics are best on short hop until we either get the charging issues sorted or put inductive grids in freeways. With grids gas can’t compete. Early gas cars were the same way, no gas stations on interstate dirt roads designed for horses.
Exactly. And to be frank, I am not going to wait around for 3 hours in Timbuktu doing nothing while I wait for my car to charge on a cross-country road trip.
I love the Tesla S, but realistically its a car that won’t be leaving my state :)
Completely agree. I would buy one of these for city driving, but if it can’t handle that well in the scenarios that the reviewer did (granted, it’s not every day you have extreme cold), then I wouldn’t want to buy it.
The real question: is the Tesla Model S the only one with this issue, or do others like the Nissan Leaf have the same issue?
They’d be far worse, I don’t think there is a singe production electric that is in the Tesla’s class yet. Given what John did I’m kind of surprised the Tesla did as well as it did. I think it is a generation (at least) ahead of anything else which speaks to the cost.
I very strongly agree that road trips are a terrible way to review electric cars. But we’re forgetting here that the road trip being discussed was Elon Musk’s idea, not the reporter’s. Telsa called the NYT and proposed the idea as a way to show off their Supercharger infrastructure. The nature of the test can’t indicate bias if it wasn’t the idea of those doing the reporting.
Thanks for the update, I had not realized that.
So why did the journalist do circles in a parking lot like Elon Musk stated.
I couldn’t really say why, but Musk has said that the circling totaled about half a mile in distance, so it wouldn’t really have made any significant difference in the overall result.
The thing about this story for me is that I don’t care who’s right. Whether the guy went a few mph faster, charged a few minutes less or drove a half mile more in the parking lot than what he said, it still doesn’t change the fact that, as you said, taking a road trip in an electric car was a bad idea from the outset. Nitpicking a bad idea for mistakes isn’t really a great way to change anyone’s mind.
But I am still amazed by how badly Musk has handled this situation. Name calling on Twitter isn’t how adults solve their problems, and that more than any range discrepancies would be what was shaking my confidence in the company were I in the market for a Model S.
Agreed. He comes across as a spoiled brat complaining to his fans when he does that on Twitter. Maybe his publicist said to do that in order to get media attention.
In his last blog post, Broder said he couldn’t find the charge point because it was dark and there wasn’t sufficient signage. Either way, debating things like this or what speed Broder set the cruise control to isn’t making a strong case for this car; the margin of error seems too narrow.
I agree that Musk is handling this pretty badly, especially considering that his company proposed this drive to test one of its own claims.
It’s very short-sighted for Musk to ask a journalist to drive this car across country when he did. Sounds like he thought his super charger system was ready and apparently is isn’t.
Broder is an idiot though. There is no excuse for sensationalizing the piece just to get attention to it.
Fortunately for Tesla, Broder’s drive was completely logged, and the data Tesla claims to have proves that Broder lied. See the numbers at http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive.
Here is the breakdown the Atlantic did on the Tesla data. While the test was clearly designed to showcase the Tesla in a bad light they support Broder’s results.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/#.UR1EzExE-1M.twitter
The Atlantic doesn’t even address the main concern with Broder’s test. He didn’t fully charge the vehicle, and he hid that from his readers.
Telling folks that the car charged until it stopped, and you left with a reading of 242 rated miles is not the same as saying you left with just 90% of a full battery.
He strongly implied it was a full charge and then wrote a story about how he was having trouble making his destination.
At the second SuperCharger he wrote that he added ~180 rated miles, which is somewhat more acceptable since it’s actually possible for readers to conclude that the car is not fully charged.
But his continual focus on “Rated” miles instead of the much more accurate “Projected” miles leaves the impression that he had a 40 mile margin to make the 140 mile trip, when in fact he did not.
The entire meat of his article has to do with his (and Tesla’s) struggle in getting to his destination with very low states of charge that are a direct result of his choosing not to fully charge the car.
Beyond that, the Atlantic gets it completely wrong when it claims that there is evidence that Broder was reducing speed to limit power consumption.
The car does this automatically (along with limiting climate control BTW) when it reaches a low state of charge.
When you reach 20 miles of rated range, power output is reduced by 50% and then goes lower as the SoC goes down because the car is in an emergency mode to try and get you to a charger. When you are into reserve power (below 0) performance is reduced even more.
The lower speeds that The Atlantic is ascribing to Broder are pretty much all the car will allow you to do at those charge levels.
Thank you for posting this. I was wanting to write the exact same thing but simply didn’t have the energy for it.
I don’t trust Broder. In fact two CNN journalists specifically tested the Tesla S to see if Broder is right and they proved he was wrong too.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/15/autos/tesla-model-s/
I think you point to the core problem. In something like this their should have been more oversight on the review. John was new to electrics and they are a very different beast to own and drive. Tesla either should have given him a ride along, chase car, or remained in constant contact (and watched the diagnostics remotely real time).
Tesla really messed up here on that. Since they suggested the test, they totally should have had a ride along like you mentioned, or a chase vehicle.
agree, and with the bakkan oil boom, electrics is a no go until new battery tech that say charge in a couple minutes.
I disagree. I admire a guy standing up for his product.
Sorry folks, there is just not much of a market for a $90,000 car that is capable of only short distance driving. And don’t run the heater!
Which is probably why the Model S has been outselling the (less expensive) Corvette for the past three months. The only way that could possibly happen is there isn’t a market for it.
A very, very limited market. How many units are we talking about?
The current waitlist (not counting delivered cars) is almost 22,000. 5,000 have been delivered, so 17,000 waitlist customers right now. Their goal for 2013 is 20,000 cars, which is more than Jaguar sells in the U.S.
They seem likely to make their goal even if many of the 10,000 or so waitlist customers who have been on the list for several years end up cancelling. (For context you need to pay $5,000 to get on the waitlist, which is not a trivial commitment)
They’ve been averaging about 1,700 new reservations per month since October. Reservations from Europe are starting to spike now that the company is allowing a few press events over there. They haven’t started making an effort in Asia yet.
Anyways, demand has yet to be an issue. 20,000/year looks to be very, very doable for them, and that represents ~$1.6 billion in revenue.
Plus, the reservations for the Model X, which is due to come out in 2014, have really started to take off in the past few months and are outpacing the Model S at the same point in its life cycle, which is making their 30k unit production goal in 2014 very attainable.
Those are real numbers in the upper mid range luxury market that Model S competes in.
I’m actually looking at the X myself. It is sure tempting.
But if the doors open like wings, that’s incredibly stupid….
Maybe but it was sure cool to play with those doors. Rear doors are kind of a bitch to get out of in a 4 door anyway. Front doors work normally.
When I first saw the X, I thought it was a cool concept. Then I realized you could never park it in a parking garage with low ceilings, you would ding the doors! :)
I think the doors prohibit it from being parked in a garage.
For context, Land Rover sold ~32k cars in the U.S. in 2010, Jaguar sold ~13k, Porsche 25k.
The top luxury brand that year was Mercedes which sold 225k cars. But the vast majority of those are their mass market luxury cars that start in the $30k price range.
Tesla competes at around the $70-$100k range right now and is likely outselling many major luxury models with vehicles in that price range.
In fairness that’s because they have a big wait list and can sell as many cars as they can produce, but for much of the last 3 months the reservation rate has been enough to support their current production rate of ~450/week.
In global terms they are tiny. But they mostly play in the U.S. right now, and here they are pulling a decent market share in their segment.
I think that is because there was a lot of pent up demand for the S and GM just released (as expected) a new Corvette (and it is a looker) and folks have been waiting for it. Different class of buyer anyway.
But there is certainly a market for electrics. As prices drop and charging issues mitigate expect more folks will buy them. If Musk doesn’t Corvair the market.
i had a ’62 supercharged spyder corvair convertible. loved the dang thing. wish i’s kept it. probably worth a fortune. coconutz247
To be fair, the author of the article isn’t a typical car reviewer.
Isn’t that who you want reviewing your vehicle? If you are trying to sell it to the general public, the average driver must see it as useable. The car failed. That is all anyone needs to know.
I don’t know anyone who can afford a short-range city vehicle and a separate
car for the highway. Since the electric cannot do all I need one vehicle to do, it will never get consideration. Those of you with millions to spend on all the vehicles you want can buy one.