8 ms·

Tesla loses plot, sues Top Gear

56 points by dman 16y ago

rvkennedy 16y ago
Hmm. I don't recall what I'd call "lambasting" - most viewers came away with a very positive impression of the Tesla - especially as it outperformed the Lotus in some areas. The bit about pushing it into the garage was obviously staged, and for humorous effect. And to claim that providing two cars to the TV crew invalidates the point about range is a little bit outrageous. It's like saying "they cheated by not letting us cheat."
- robryan 16y ago
  Little weird they would be bothering, if Tesla won this case a large amount of the cars featured on the show could surely win similar cases. It's part of the show to pickup on cars flaws and over emphasise them.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Indeed, that Bentley they had in Albania completely put me off ever buying one!
- ams6110 16y ago
  Agreed, on balance the review was very complimentary, especially for Top Gear; they only pointed out the very real limited range that all fully electric cars have with today's battery technology. I don't see the lawsuit getting very far.
- Andys 16y ago
  The fact they provided two cars says a lot about what they thought might happen to just one car.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    From what I recall of Top Gear this is pretty standard practice. It also presumably factors in filming issues.
vaksel 16y ago
wow these guys are such whiners. Top Gear makes fun of everyone...and it's not like they hinted at something that would never happen Other manufacturers are mature enough to understand that TG is a comedy show about cars, and their stunts are covered by satire. And of course Top Gear will retaliate...they always do in cases like this.
- kristofferR 16y ago
  It's one thing to make fun of it in a humourous way, it's another thing to write a script (and follow through with it) claiming it broke down, overheated and ran out of gas before they had even driven the car. "But in the real world, it doesn't seem to work" was already decided before the cars were even delivered. It's cool to make fun of flaws, it's not cool for something percieved as a review show to decide something is flawed and write the script about how flawed it is before they have even tested it.
  - fossuser 16y ago
    Especially considering the amount of viewers and sway Top Gear has and how young Tesla was as a company at the time, that press could have destroyed them and there was no truth to it.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Yes, but.... The show's main presenter has been well known as having politically conservative views for many, many years. If you watch, the vast bulk of his output is joking in that general direction when it's joking. Frankly, if I were Tesla, I wouldn't have let my car appear; it smacked of a set-up against the green bogeyman who was trying to stop their fun. There seems to be a growing tendency at the moment in the UK at least for people with politically conservative views to express these loudly, prominently and repeatedly in a more forceful tone than they could otherwise use, with an I'm only having a bit of fun, it's just a joke, can't you just grow up and take it? tacked on to the end, trying to belittle those who might take offence at their assertions. If these people want to express their views from such a platform (by which I mean a prominent one, the fact of this being on the BBC isn't an issue for me), they should have the nerve to stand behind it.
semanticist 16y ago
It'd be good if Top Gear was more clearly 'labelled' as fictionalised entertainment. In the UK the brand/programme name still carries the associations of 'old' Top Gear, which was a factual motor review programme (which was cancelled, the format - but not name - sold to Channel 5, and then relaunched with the new format). Most of their challenges are staged, and I don't think they'd lose entertainment value by being clearer that it's fiction. It'd also be good if they stopped pandering to Daily-Mail-reading-racists. The Mexican stuff in the last series was horrific. I wish BBC America had had the balls to include it in their version, if only so they'd have to deal with the enraged viewers.
- vaksel 16y ago
  oh please...the new version of Top Gear has been out since 2002...if you haven't caught on that the new Top Gear is different from the "old Top Gear" after 9 years...then you haven't been watching
  - geoffw8 16y ago
    ...or your work at Tesla!
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  They play conkers with caravans, do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show?
  - protomyth 16y ago
    and try to make a space shuttle out of a car....
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show? I think the ancestor comment is simply saying that they need to say that they lie about the factual basis of the show. I don't think that playing conkers with caravans or driving cars of ski-jumps or whatever should allow them to make bare-faced lies about basic performance elements of cars that they review.
dman 16y ago
An auto company targeting auto enthusiasts suing Top Gear is like a tech startup suing YCombinator. In nine cases out of ten the loss of goodwill is going to make this a losing proposition.
- vaksel 16y ago
  agreed, Top Gear is pretty much THE car enthusiast show world wide...by suing them Tesla is pretty much attacking 80-90% of their potential customers. This will do nothing but hurt them...especially after Top Gear retaliates.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    It's an electric car, I think your average Top Gear viewer is as far from a potential customer as you can get given the general stance the show takes on such matters.
    - protomyth 16y ago
      I think the "average" viewer of any show is far from a potential customer. It is a $100K sports car with a range that limits it to commuting (not travel) distances.
      - _phred 16y ago
        I highly doubt that the "average" viewer of Top Gear could afford a $100k car of any make or model. Honestly, it's fun to watch the hosts blaze around the track in hideously expensive super cars, but the law of averages says that not more than a small proportion of the audience could actually afford those cars. So it's hard to quantify Tesla's claimed reputation damage as the people who buy Tesla cars likely don't care one whit what Top Gear has to say about the Tesla roadster, especially given the show's strong anti-environmental pro-speed hi-octane pro petroleum bent.
    - dman 16y ago
      Tesla isnt your typical cookie cutter electric car. Theres a reason the Top Gear folks compared it to the Lotus.
fleitz 16y ago
You can't drop lithium ion batteries much below 25% charge or they start to die. If you fully discharge a lithium ion battery it's dead forever. That's how the Tesla engineers knew it didn't drop below 25% charge because otherwise the car would be undrivable. Why is it unbelievable that a car with a normal range of 200 miles would only get 55 on a track? If your car normally gets 400 miles to a tank it would not be unreasonable to expect 100 miles during a track day.
- po 16y ago
  That's also why lithium batteries include circuitry to shut down when they get to x%. When they say they are at 25% then they are really at 25% of what is "safe" for the technology. It's not like if your laptop drops to 0% you can't boot it again. Don't you think that when they say it had 25% charge they are talking about what the battery was reporting?
  - fleitz 16y ago
    Knowing lawyers, probably not. Look at the crap SCEA is putting infront of the court against an 18 year old kid. Also, 25% is known as a quarter tank where people who don't like to run out of gas decide that it's time to fill up, since you can't 'fill up' a Tesla, that means you have to go home. It also means that if you drive your car 55 miles away from home in track like conditions you'll be pushing your car home.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >It also means that if you drive your car 55 miles away from home in track like conditions you'll be pushing your car home. In the UK you'd probably have been stopped by the police and have several speeding tickets if you were lucky enough to do the 55 miles on public roads at track speeds (0-60mph in 3.7s, limiter hits at 125mph) without killing anyone or wrecking the car.
  - JshWright 16y ago
    I had a MacBook battery that dropped to 0% and wouldn't charge after that...
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Surely they are deliberately going for the Streisand effect, to raise awareness of their existence by doing something the show's enthusiasts will always remember them for and getting wider publicity into the bargain. ADDED IN EDIT: Is someone going around downvoting all my comments? This is really strange. Please, if you downvoted this let me know why so I can adjust my actions accordingly. <FX: retreats, shaking head in confusion>
- vaksel 16y ago
  So does that mean you own a Morris Marina?
Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
As an aside under the proposed new English libel laws this case couldn't be bought as they've waited two years from first publication (the new laws place a limit of a year).
nhebb 16y ago
I don't want to dog pile on them because Tesla seems like such a promising company, and despite this PR disaster, I hope they pull through to profitability. They're trying to push the technology for electric vehicles forward, and they're going to use the vacated NUMMI plant in Freemont, which is commendable. So I'll cut them some slack. A lot of slack.
- watchandwait 16y ago
  The Freemont plant is part of the crony deal they struck with then Speaker-Pelosi and the unions in exchange for their massive government subsidy.
- ams6110 16y ago
  Sorry to rain on your parade but battery-only powered electric cars still have too limited a range and take too long to recharge to be practical for most people. They may find a niche with people who can afford to have a separate car for a modest daily commute, but most people don't have the cash to tie up in an extra car just to be "green" (which electric cars aren't, really).
  - whatusername 16y ago
    Have you seen www.betterplace.com They have an answer for the range/recharge complaints (switching stations)
- nickbp 16y ago
  (nitpick: Fremont)
raarky 16y ago
here's hoping they do nice segment tearing tesla apart in their usual witty style :)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  Yeah they can go all out on how it's got a far better range than Top Gear presented it having and how it can be charge under best conditions in 4 hours. Tesla will cry all the way to the bank ...
  - nickbp 16y ago
    More like "oh, you've got a Tesla? Isn't that the car company that sued Top Gear? Hahaha!"
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      [possible response] "Yeah, it's the one that whipped the Lotus' ass so bad that Jeremy got scared and had to lie to make it look crippled. Apparently the BBC still haven’t learnt about not lying on public funds ... Hey ho, wanna race?".
      - guscost 16y ago
        "Sure. My pit crew will use a gas pump, yours will use a charging station."
      - nickbp 16y ago
        "I would but you'd sue me if you lost."
watchandwait 16y ago
Normally Tesla's lawyers are busy in Washington, D.C., fleecing U.S. taxpayers for handouts. The company is one of the biggest welfare queens in America, they have almost no revenue and yet the government has given them hundreds of millions in unsecured loans.
- api 16y ago
  BP got far more in government handouts to pay for their Gulf oil rig blowout disaster. In a free market, BP would now be bankrupt as it would have had to pay for the cleanup of hundreds and hundreds of miles of damaged coastal property as well as compensating fishermen for millions (or billions?) in lost revenue. Just to give one example. Just saying. We live in a welfare state. Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Every major corporation has lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to get as much pork as they possibly can.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Actually, "everybody" doesn't do it. You can't subsidize everyone because you run out of money long before that. The vast majority of us don't get subsidies. Two wrongs don't make a right.
geoffw8 16y ago
Its such a PR flop. The thing I can't understand is why they'd want to draw attention to the fact a very well read/watched/trusted program wrote a very poor review of your product. Why on earth would you give it a second life?
dmazin 16y ago
I'm not sure what's wrong with this really. Top Gear (pretends to be) is a car reviewer, and they made false claims in a car review. They are surely a comedy show but that segment was just astonishing.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

56 points by dman 16y ago

Hmm. I don't recall what I'd call "lambasting" - most viewers came away with a very positive impression of the Tesla - especially as it outperformed the Lotus in some areas. The bit about pushing it into the garage was obviously staged, and for humorous effect. And to claim that providing two cars to the TV crew invalidates the point about range is a little bit outrageous. It's like saying "they cheated by not letting us cheat."

robryan 16y ago
Little weird they would be bothering, if Tesla won this case a large amount of the cars featured on the show could surely win similar cases. It's part of the show to pickup on cars flaws and over emphasise them.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Indeed, that Bentley they had in Albania completely put me off ever buying one!
ams6110 16y ago
Agreed, on balance the review was very complimentary, especially for Top Gear; they only pointed out the very real limited range that all fully electric cars have with today's battery technology. I don't see the lawsuit getting very far.
Andys 16y ago
The fact they provided two cars says a lot about what they thought might happen to just one car.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  From what I recall of Top Gear this is pretty standard practice. It also presumably factors in filming issues.

vaksel 16y ago

wow these guys are such whiners. Top Gear makes fun of everyone...and it's not like they hinted at something that would never happen Other manufacturers are mature enough to understand that TG is a comedy show about cars, and their stunts are covered by satire. And of course Top Gear will retaliate...they always do in cases like this.

kristofferR 16y ago
It's one thing to make fun of it in a humourous way, it's another thing to write a script (and follow through with it) claiming it broke down, overheated and ran out of gas before they had even driven the car. "But in the real world, it doesn't seem to work" was already decided before the cars were even delivered. It's cool to make fun of flaws, it's not cool for something percieved as a review show to decide something is flawed and write the script about how flawed it is before they have even tested it.
- fossuser 16y ago
  Especially considering the amount of viewers and sway Top Gear has and how young Tesla was as a company at the time, that press could have destroyed them and there was no truth to it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
eftpotrm 16y ago
Yes, but.... The show's main presenter has been well known as having politically conservative views for many, many years. If you watch, the vast bulk of his output is joking in that general direction when it's joking. Frankly, if I were Tesla, I wouldn't have let my car appear; it smacked of a set-up against the green bogeyman who was trying to stop their fun. There seems to be a growing tendency at the moment in the UK at least for people with politically conservative views to express these loudly, prominently and repeatedly in a more forceful tone than they could otherwise use, with an I'm only having a bit of fun, it's just a joke, can't you just grow up and take it? tacked on to the end, trying to belittle those who might take offence at their assertions. If these people want to express their views from such a platform (by which I mean a prominent one, the fact of this being on the BBC isn't an issue for me), they should have the nerve to stand behind it.

semanticist 16y ago

It'd be good if Top Gear was more clearly 'labelled' as fictionalised entertainment. In the UK the brand/programme name still carries the associations of 'old' Top Gear, which was a factual motor review programme (which was cancelled, the format - but not name - sold to Channel 5, and then relaunched with the new format). Most of their challenges are staged, and I don't think they'd lose entertainment value by being clearer that it's fiction. It'd also be good if they stopped pandering to Daily-Mail-reading-racists. The Mexican stuff in the last series was horrific. I wish BBC America had had the balls to include it in their version, if only so they'd have to deal with the enraged viewers.

vaksel 16y ago
oh please...the new version of Top Gear has been out since 2002...if you haven't caught on that the new Top Gear is different from the "old Top Gear" after 9 years...then you haven't been watching
- geoffw8 16y ago
  ...or your work at Tesla!
Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
They play conkers with caravans, do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show?
- protomyth 16y ago
  and try to make a space shuttle out of a car....
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show? I think the ancestor comment is simply saying that they need to say that they lie about the factual basis of the show. I don't think that playing conkers with caravans or driving cars of ski-jumps or whatever should allow them to make bare-faced lies about basic performance elements of cars that they review.

dman 16y ago

An auto company targeting auto enthusiasts suing Top Gear is like a tech startup suing YCombinator. In nine cases out of ten the loss of goodwill is going to make this a losing proposition.

vaksel 16y ago
agreed, Top Gear is pretty much THE car enthusiast show world wide...by suing them Tesla is pretty much attacking 80-90% of their potential customers. This will do nothing but hurt them...especially after Top Gear retaliates.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  It's an electric car, I think your average Top Gear viewer is as far from a potential customer as you can get given the general stance the show takes on such matters.
  - protomyth 16y ago
    I think the "average" viewer of any show is far from a potential customer. It is a $100K sports car with a range that limits it to commuting (not travel) distances.
    - _phred 16y ago
      I highly doubt that the "average" viewer of Top Gear could afford a $100k car of any make or model. Honestly, it's fun to watch the hosts blaze around the track in hideously expensive super cars, but the law of averages says that not more than a small proportion of the audience could actually afford those cars. So it's hard to quantify Tesla's claimed reputation damage as the people who buy Tesla cars likely don't care one whit what Top Gear has to say about the Tesla roadster, especially given the show's strong anti-environmental pro-speed hi-octane pro petroleum bent.
  - dman 16y ago
    Tesla isnt your typical cookie cutter electric car. Theres a reason the Top Gear folks compared it to the Lotus.

fleitz 16y ago

You can't drop lithium ion batteries much below 25% charge or they start to die. If you fully discharge a lithium ion battery it's dead forever. That's how the Tesla engineers knew it didn't drop below 25% charge because otherwise the car would be undrivable. Why is it unbelievable that a car with a normal range of 200 miles would only get 55 on a track? If your car normally gets 400 miles to a tank it would not be unreasonable to expect 100 miles during a track day.

po 16y ago
That's also why lithium batteries include circuitry to shut down when they get to x%. When they say they are at 25% then they are really at 25% of what is "safe" for the technology. It's not like if your laptop drops to 0% you can't boot it again. Don't you think that when they say it had 25% charge they are talking about what the battery was reporting?
- fleitz 16y ago
  Knowing lawyers, probably not. Look at the crap SCEA is putting infront of the court against an 18 year old kid. Also, 25% is known as a quarter tank where people who don't like to run out of gas decide that it's time to fill up, since you can't 'fill up' a Tesla, that means you have to go home. It also means that if you drive your car 55 miles away from home in track like conditions you'll be pushing your car home.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >It also means that if you drive your car 55 miles away from home in track like conditions you'll be pushing your car home. In the UK you'd probably have been stopped by the police and have several speeding tickets if you were lucky enough to do the 55 miles on public roads at track speeds (0-60mph in 3.7s, limiter hits at 125mph) without killing anyone or wrecking the car.
- JshWright 16y ago
  I had a MacBook battery that dropped to 0% and wouldn't charge after that...

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Surely they are deliberately going for the Streisand effect, to raise awareness of their existence by doing something the show's enthusiasts will always remember them for and getting wider publicity into the bargain. ADDED IN EDIT: Is someone going around downvoting all my comments? This is really strange. Please, if you downvoted this let me know why so I can adjust my actions accordingly. <FX: retreats, shaking head in confusion>

vaksel 16y ago
So does that mean you own a Morris Marina?

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago

As an aside under the proposed new English libel laws this case couldn't be bought as they've waited two years from first publication (the new laws place a limit of a year).

nhebb 16y ago

I don't want to dog pile on them because Tesla seems like such a promising company, and despite this PR disaster, I hope they pull through to profitability. They're trying to push the technology for electric vehicles forward, and they're going to use the vacated NUMMI plant in Freemont, which is commendable. So I'll cut them some slack. A lot of slack.

watchandwait 16y ago
The Freemont plant is part of the crony deal they struck with then Speaker-Pelosi and the unions in exchange for their massive government subsidy.
ams6110 16y ago
Sorry to rain on your parade but battery-only powered electric cars still have too limited a range and take too long to recharge to be practical for most people. They may find a niche with people who can afford to have a separate car for a modest daily commute, but most people don't have the cash to tie up in an extra car just to be "green" (which electric cars aren't, really).
- whatusername 16y ago
  Have you seen www.betterplace.com They have an answer for the range/recharge complaints (switching stations)
nickbp 16y ago
(nitpick: Fremont)

raarky 16y ago

here's hoping they do nice segment tearing tesla apart in their usual witty style :)

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
Yeah they can go all out on how it's got a far better range than Top Gear presented it having and how it can be charge under best conditions in 4 hours. Tesla will cry all the way to the bank ...
- nickbp 16y ago
  More like "oh, you've got a Tesla? Isn't that the car company that sued Top Gear? Hahaha!"
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    [possible response] "Yeah, it's the one that whipped the Lotus' ass so bad that Jeremy got scared and had to lie to make it look crippled. Apparently the BBC still haven’t learnt about not lying on public funds ... Hey ho, wanna race?".
    - guscost 16y ago
      "Sure. My pit crew will use a gas pump, yours will use a charging station."
    - nickbp 16y ago
      "I would but you'd sue me if you lost."

watchandwait 16y ago

Normally Tesla's lawyers are busy in Washington, D.C., fleecing U.S. taxpayers for handouts. The company is one of the biggest welfare queens in America, they have almost no revenue and yet the government has given them hundreds of millions in unsecured loans.

api 16y ago
BP got far more in government handouts to pay for their Gulf oil rig blowout disaster. In a free market, BP would now be bankrupt as it would have had to pay for the cleanup of hundreds and hundreds of miles of damaged coastal property as well as compensating fishermen for millions (or billions?) in lost revenue. Just to give one example. Just saying. We live in a welfare state. Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Every major corporation has lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to get as much pork as they possibly can.
- anamax 16y ago
  > Criticizing people for accepting welfare in a welfare state is like criticizing people for speeding at Nascar. Everybody does it. Actually, "everybody" doesn't do it. You can't subsidize everyone because you run out of money long before that. The vast majority of us don't get subsidies. Two wrongs don't make a right.

geoffw8 16y ago

Its such a PR flop. The thing I can't understand is why they'd want to draw attention to the fact a very well read/watched/trusted program wrote a very poor review of your product. Why on earth would you give it a second life?

dmazin 16y ago

I'm not sure what's wrong with this really. Top Gear (pretends to be) is a car reviewer, and they made false claims in a car review. They are surely a comedy show but that segment was just astonishing.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]