It's one thing to present data that contradicts the article. But to suggest possible dishonest motivations was a step too far.

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 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?

Take everything you read in the press with a huge grain of salt.

This is quite a general statement, which in itself cannot be defended. Furthermore, I think that NYT's standards are higher than the average journalist taken "as a group". Their fact checking is rigorous (although, of course, is not infallible, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair)

It's still broadly true. Regardless of the dwindling influence of newspapers, arguing with the NYT doesn't sell cars but it does generate clicks for the paper.

Tesla can best refute the claims in the article by building great cars. A car review is not a story with legs, a fight between a genius billionaire and the worlds most respected newspaper has juice, and only compounds interest in a highly negative article for Tesla.

It's just a dumb choice and if you make such a mistake, I am of the opinion that it disqualifies from saying anything about said car. Especially if you usually specialize in mostly hagiographic articles about oil companies in the NYT.

I find the notion that people like standing around looking at charging stations for hours on end extremely odd. The test was supposed to simulate a normal driver, and a normal driver will absolutely do the minimum necessary. With gasoline -- a ridiculous energy rich substance that we can fill in just a few short minutes -- most of us still find the five minute fill up once a week or less a nuisance.

Tesla is actually contradicting themselves a bit: They berate him for not heeding the in-car predicted range, and then pat themselves on the back that it actually went 51 miles, and supposedly still had juice (apparently an accessory battery was dead). In other words, that what their engineers supposedly told him (that it would recover the incredible loss of power overnight, from 90 miles left to 20 miles left, once the batteries warmed up) was actually largely right.

Musk also makes a big show about him not turning down the temperature, when his own graph shows that not much further in the journey he turned it to the minimum for an extended period of time.

Reading both sides, I find Musk's heavy handed attack response incredibly unpalatable. He was so hasty in attacking, he ignored that his own data and his own claims in many ways supported the reporter.