In my mind, the whole thing that turned this into a soap opera was Musk's knee jerk responses on Twitter.

Had he come back with a more measured response (like OXO did with Quirky) and just politely pointed out the inaccuracies of the article and made his same offer of "We'll provide a car to any journalist to do the same test and see what happens", I don't think we'd be discussing this right now.

I agree. If you subtract Musk's twitter posts and the few inflammatory sentences in his rebuttal to the review, I think he did a fine job of defending himself and pointing out that the reviewer was trying to push the limits of the battery (as the reviewer should). Musk should have simply made the point that no average person would have ended up towing their car.

It would be like if I complained about my new Android not making it past 3 hours of web browsing and then HTC slams me for running 15 background tasks and only charging the phone to 85% the night before. The point remains that these batteries are not the greatest.

Musk comes across as too defensive and a bit of a jerk. I understand he probably has PTSD after the other publication screwed him, but get over yourself. Most people just accept bad reviews and move on.

After reading the original article myself, I didn't think it was that bad. My main takeaway was "If you're a Tesla owner, make sure you charge your battery if you're driving a reasonably long distance on a really cold day".

I didn't think the article was that big a deal. Now we have what is essentially a "blogfight" with both sides parsing out every little word that the other published.