Tesla loses plot, sues Top Gear

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/30/tesla-sues-top-gear-for-libel-new-stig-unavailable-for-comment/

by dman • 15 years ago

56 80 15 years ago

rvkennedy• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Indeed, that Bentley they had in Albania completely put me off ever buying one!

ams61103• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

The fact they provided two cars says a lot about what they thought might happen to just one car.

pbhjpbhj7• 15 years ago

From what I recall of Top Gear this is pretty standard practice. It also presumably factors in filming issues.

vaksel5• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

gonehome• 15 years 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.

eftpotrm2• 15 years 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.

philjackson2• 15 years ago

"they should have the nerve to stand behind it"

So summarise, are you saying Jeremy Clarkson doesn't stand behind his political statements? That's simply not true, have you never seen his columns in the Times? Clarkson gets a terribly hard time for his views and he doesn't waver a bit, whether you agree with him or not, you have to give him some credit.

antihero• 15 years ago

People still use it as basis for forming their opinions. If they staged the Tesla going into the garage, then it undermines every bit of work engineers have done to make sure that would ever happen, and undermines the hard work engineers have done to get electric cars into the mainstream.

semanticist2• 15 years 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.

vaksel5• 15 years 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

geoffw82• 15 years ago

...or your work at Tesla!

Tyrannosaurs8• 15 years ago

They play conkers with caravans, do you think it really needs pointing out that this is an entertainment show?

pbhjpbhj7• 15 years 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.

semanticist2• 15 years ago

No, but it needs to be pointed out that it's fictional entertainment.

They have races and competitions between each other which are staged and adapted for dramatic results. The few car reviews they do are similarly dramatised. Does the viewer understand that the car didn't break down, that the person on the motorbike didn't coincidentally reach the same point as the person in the car, or whatever?

I suspect that most people don't realise that Top Gear is fictional entertainment instead of factual entertainment, because the extremely long-running brand of the show is rooted in factual entertainment.

Suing them over a fictional review is foolish, but if you were expecting an honest review of your product and got back a dramatised narrative you'd probably be pissed off too.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

and try to make a space shuttle out of a car....

frou_dh• 15 years ago

Personally I find the programme tiresome and don't watch it any more. So often they are pretending that events and quips are spontaneous when they are clearly heavily scripted. I'm British for what it's worth.

ams61103• 15 years ago

I have watched most of the series that are on Netflix, I think 2009 is the latest, and I thought it seemed to be on the decline in that series. They seem to be running out of new ideas, as happens with all long-running series.

dman2• 15 years 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.

vaksel5• 15 years 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.

Tyrannosaurs8• 15 years 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.

bigohms• 15 years ago

This suit has parallels to Dan Snyder (NFL team owner - Washngton Redskins) suing a local city paper for a rather humorous (and factual) A-Z account of his mismanagement. The original post: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40063/the-cranky...

The suit: http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/02/dan-snyder-lawsuit-a-com...

dhimes• 15 years ago

Hadn't seen this- and I am definitely a cranky fan.

eli2• 15 years ago

Except all the stuff about Dan Snyder was AFAIK true. While it's entirely possible that the Top Gear guys, ahem, exaggerated some of Tesla's failings.

Edit: Still, it seems rather boneheaded to try to solve a minor PR problem from two years ago with a lawsuit that is certain to be very public.

quicksilver03• 15 years ago

A better analogy would be a tech startup suing TechCrunch, except that Top Gear is infinitely better.

fleitz2• 15 years 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• 15 years 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?

fleitz2• 15 years 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.

JshWright• 15 years ago

I had a MacBook battery that dropped to 0% and wouldn't charge after that...

bradleyland3• 15 years ago

It's worth noting that the Ford GT actually ran out of gas on the Top Gear track while Clarkson was driving it, and they put it in the show. They got something ridiculous like 6 miles to the gallon and made a point of it.

Nelson69• 15 years ago

It seems reasonable to me.. I vaguely remember the car actually breaking in some way, maybe even a couple times.

I can't say I was in the market for a Tesla, but the range wasn't what sounded bad to me, I was left under the impression that it just didn't have the quality yet.

RiderOfGiraffes• 15 years 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>

vaksel5• 15 years ago

So does that mean you own a Morris Marina?

Tyrannosaurs8• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

watchandwait2• 15 years 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.

ams61103• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Have you seen www.betterplace.com

They have an answer for the range/recharge complaints (switching stations)

nickbp3• 15 years ago

(nitpick: Fremont)

raarky• 15 years ago

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

pbhjpbhj7• 15 years 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 ...

nickbp3• 15 years ago

More like "oh, you've got a Tesla? Isn't that the car company that sued Top Gear? Hahaha!"

watchandwait2• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

geoffw82• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

Tesla loses plot, sues Top Gear

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