"When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range"
"I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy."
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
But the Model S had other ideas. “Car is shutting down,”"
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Sounds like he was in constant contact with Tesla and they incorrectly stated that the ~65 miles lost overnight would magically return, and Mr. Broder, unfortunately, took them for their word and left the charging station with the dash showing less than the amount needed to make the trip.
Who is the real "liar" here?
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Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
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He clearly states that the displayed range never reached the distance to Milford, and that he (essentially) ignored warnings to recharge. Nevertheless, the Tesla employee he spoke to cleared him to resume the journey.
There's a lot of nonsense being thrown around here, but THIS is where the stall occurred. It would be great to see a call log, if one was available - did Mr. Broder clearly state when he was cleared that the displayed range was not sufficient to meet Milford and did the Tesla employee clear him to go despite this? Was he cleared, with the Tesla employee assuming mileage was sufficient, and Mr. Broder chose not to correct this assumption?
I've seen a lot of people drive around with their 'check engine' light permanently lit up. This is because somebody told them it's ok, that it means their fuel cap is a little loose but it's not a problem, or whatever other reason that isn't serious. If the Tesla employee was aware of the displayed range and still cleared Mr. Broder's departure, then the 'correct' party in this case seems obvious, and his behavior is not in any way unusual.
I dont know how it measures speed whether GPS or wheel rotation or both and if that would make a difference. Anyone care to fact check?
Also, there is a disturbing amount of herd mentality in these comments; people are instinctively shielding/supporting Elon Musk, a fellow techie, rather than the "interloping" journalist, even though even a cursory Google search of other reviews of the Model S, the Roadster, and other manufacturers' EVs will show that they all suffer from the same battery charging/status problems.
It should also be noted that Elon Musk has made public misrepresentations in the recent past about competitors to SpaceX, in particular, about the cause of Boeing's battery problems, and he had a history of making similar remarks about credit card companies while he worked at Paypal.
Really? As I recall, he speculated that improper isolation between cells allowed for failures to cascade to adjacent ones. Turns out, that's what it was.
== yikes
However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy.
Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refute. This might seem unfair but I don't think it is because the New York Time reader isn't going say "well, either the driver, the Tesla employee or the car made some mistakes or just couldn't understand each other, what does this prove?", a reader in these days of simplification will just get "Tesla doesn't work in the cold" and so Musk is correct to refute this arguably false claim.
I will never forget when my friend and I released an iPhone app, and two years later Apple comes out with a product of the same name. My friend got contacted by a reporter asking these innocuous questions, for instance "do you expect Apple to remove your app from the App Store?". He said he doesn't expect any problems, but that we're willing to talk about it with Apple.
The headline? "Indie developer braces for legal battle over app named ###"
Looking back on it, the questions the reporter asked were absolutely leading questions to suit his own (anti-Apple) agenda. This is why anyone talking to the press needs to be very careful what they say.
EDIT: it may be different on blogs
"When I parked the car for the night at a hotel, the range meter showed 90 miles remaining, and I was about 45 miles from the Milford Supercharger. As I recounted in the article, when I awoke the next morning the indicated range was 25 miles. The rest of that story is told in the article, including a Tesla official’s counsel, which I followed, that an hour of charging at the Norwich, Conn., utility would restore much of the range lost overnight, which had disappeared because of what he called a “software glitch.”"
"Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford."
The "conditioning" sounds like a explanatory shortcut to explaining that ambient temperature affects measurements, and therefore also estimated range.
Without really understanding the details, I think two things: The NYT should have more sophisticated reviews, Tesla should have better QA over its support services to make sure fewer people are given unreasonably optimistic assessments about their range.
It's also pretty clear from the data that he lied about the speed he was driving at.
