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Sunday, February 10, 2013

EVs only work in California?

After being given a Tesla Model S to test drive, John M Broder drove it until it was empty and then proclaims that EVs must just be a California thing.

Here is the valuable lesson he learned: (News Flash) If you ignore the fuel gauge and all the warnings, and just keep driving, you will eventually hit empty. Wow, this same thing applies to any vehicle with any fuel type! I guess John thought that Tesla had invented a perpetual motion machine.

From the article: “It takes more planning than a typical gasoline car, no way around it."

Au contraire, you plug EVs in at your house, let it charge while you sleep, and for a typical day's drive, you never have to stop anywhere. Would you find it "convenient" to take your cell phone to a filling station periodically? No, of course not. Plugging in at your house and charging overnight is for more convenient and it does not require much planning.

Stalled on the E.V. Highway - NYTimes.com:


  1. funny, after nearly 25 months and more than 27, 000 miles, my all electric LEAF seems to work pretty well for me and I live in WA??

    should I be confused or continue to protect the best kept secret in the automotive world that EVs are FUN to drive!

  2. Can't wait to see the data logs from the car. Past articles written by this clown (er I mean "journalist") indicate that he was already biased against the base technology of the Tesla so it's no surprise that he couldn't make this car work. For me the most telling part of this article came when he said he parked the car for the night in freezing conditions with just enough charge for the next leg of his trip without plugging it in! Surprise surprise the car consumed power to prevent damage to the rather expensive battery pack. If the car hadn't done this act of self preservation he would have written an article about how the battery pack failed due to low temp rather than suffering a loss of range.


  3. Gregory, you are correct. Elon Musk fired back on twitter today and says that the car's logs tell the real story. Broder did not fill the car up and he made detours (that he forgot to mention). Elon promised a post on the Tesla Motors blog soon with details.

    Broder has also written articles about the death of EVs and how fuel cells will be the solution of the future. Tesla's media relations folks needs to look into the people they give demo cars to a little better. I think they just assumed someone from the New York times would be an impartial journalist. Oops.