Oh, the Tesla has a nicer interior than the stripped Subaru racing shell? Count me impressed! (said no one)
The Rapide is no slouch, to be sure, but acceleration falls somewhere in the middle of a larger spectrum of goals for that car.
Unfortunately I would be very surprised if Top Gear touches a Tesla car again with a 10-foot pole (and I can't say I blame them).
I think they both had wildly different expectations of what was appropriate in that situation. Neither came out looking very good, IMHO.
But engaging the press in a press release war creates the wrong image for the company. Who will hear about it? Viewers of Top Gear and the NY Times. And they won't be likely to guess their beloved news source is in the wrong. You can't win that kind of fight and he should have known better than to try. I can't believe it has been good for Tesla on balance.
Top Gear is the Daily Show of automobile journalism. Although it's entertainment, a surprising number of its viewers would cite it as their primary source of auto news.
Just as with the Daily Show audience, the Top Gear audience isn't thinking very critically about every subject presented. With that kind of audience, it's all about appearances. Merely having heard that there has been a kerfuffle over their prior coverage of Tesla is sufficient for viewers to think, "well, perhaps what I saw about Tesla on Top Gear wasn't quite accurate." In other words, since loud and silly is all that this audience can perceive, I think Musk did the right thing.
I was skeptical of Musk's reaction to the Times, but in net, I think Tesla came out of that looking seriously intolerant of journalistic hijinks. And many people respect that.
I was also on the side of it being a slight misstep for Tesla to make as much of an issue of the NYT and Top Gear problems, but in hindsight I think it's paid off for them. There's been so much good press now that people thinking back on the events may have a different opinion than when they first heard about it, and Tesla was less well known.
Jesus, is there some bad blood between HN and Top Gear? Or is this the bad blood, the Tesla thing?
On second thought, I could see that being it. HN pretty much idolizes Musk after all.
But, whether you and I see it as entertainment is somewhat moot when, like the Daily Show, much of its audience actually gleans the totality of their auto news intake from this entertainment show. Because, frankly, many are not interested in watching the serious news shows, automotive or otherwise.
I think a suitable segment to parody would be the (rocket assisted) Mini Cooper Ski-Jump[1] from the Top Gear Winter Olympics Special[2].
For the low low price of a single Model S, a Merlin engine, and some quality time bodging one onto the other[3], he'd have a guaranteed viral hit in which to make his appeal to the public, as well as, almost certainly, the credibility of producing either a much better jump, or a much larger fireball.
As the saying (sorta) goes: "Never get into a rocket fight with a rocket scientist who owns his own rocket making company."
[1] http://www.bbcamerica.com/top-gear/videos/mini-ski-jump/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear_Winter_Olympics
[3] plus somewhere with a ski-jump they don't really like that much, and whose authorities don't have a problem with a mostly-horizontal rocket flight-plan, which might be tricky.
It doesn't really matter if their beloved news source is right or wrong, it still paints Tesla as litigious. The only time such suits over reviews expressly supported by the manufacturer go over well is when the reviewer committed gross fabrications or other inaccuracies.
The omissions in their suit speak quite loudly to me. For example, I just went back and rewatched the Top Gear review. They mention the engine overheated in one Tesla, and in the other the brakes failed while it was charging. I notice Tesla only made a big deal about the race track range estimate, which if I recall they didn't even claim was wrong- just misleading. That leaves an especially bad taste in my mouth- it's almost like Tesla is trying to discredit the apparently real failures by nitpicking unrelated minor details.
It all looks even more shady when you consider how few of these sorts of scuffles come up with Top Gear & other car companies.
(This is part of why Top Gear America is but a shadow of Top Gear UK)
Top Gear lied. Tesla wasn't expecting special treatment for sponsorship, they were expecting a modicum of honesty. You don't get to put this down to "culture clash" unless you're defining "ethical" and "unethical" as cultures.
Sometimes they fabricate things to make an awesome car look awful, sometimes they fabricate to make a mediocre car look awesome.
The common denominator is that they fabricate for the sake of entertainment. Anybody who actually watches the show would know and embrace that.
Judges aren't arbiters of truth, they're arbiters of law. If your standard for truth is "a judge didn't say it was legally defamatory", I hope nobody ever trusts anything you say.
Oh no! They showed a dramatization of running out of power while driving it on their track! How dare they!
(while driving around the track, cornering) "This car then really was shaping up to something wonderful. But then..."
(cut to Jeremy in the Roadster, a musical cue cutting off the soundtrack, signalling a problem. Jeremy pumps his foot, looks down at his foot and back up with a perplexed look on his face, and says "Oh", with backround noise of the Tesla decelerating.
Jump to outside view of the Roadster rolling to a stop in the middle of the track, with Jeremy narrating "Although Tesla say it will do two hundred miles, we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles." During this the scene changes to men pushing the Roadster in a hanger.
More narration from Jeremy, "And if it does run out, it's not a quick job to charge it up again."
Make of that what you will, I don't think words do it justice, which is why I included the video[0]. The narration is accurate, but the portrayal clearly implies something more than the narration, making it very to misconstrue what the facts are. The facts are, by the way, that the Roadster never ran out of power, they ran it for a few hours, decided they didn't want to wait for it to run out, and staged that portion.
Now, Top Gear is clearly an entertainment and comedy program, but to act like that's the end of it is also clearly ignoring the reality of the situation. Top Gear is less like SNL than The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Viewers expect it to not be too serious, but right or wrong, they also expect to be able to get some information from the show, knowing that they'll need to sort through the context to determine whether it was a joke or not.
Keeping all that in mind, to me Top Gear seems to have overstepped slightly here. Then Tesla overreacted with a lawsuit. That's why I said neither seems to have come off well.
[1]: http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/electric-shocker, start at 4:17 for the relevant scene.
Sure, I'd read that article. Throw the Tesla onto a dirt track too, I'd read that as well. Hell, I want to know if it can go upside-down in a sewer tunnel. I don't see the problem here.