Will Tesla Lose Its Top Gear Lawsuit?
Tesla has sued Top Gear for depicting its Roadster running out of electricity in the 2008 segment shown above. According to the San Jose Mercury News, Tesla is suing because
Top Gear’s allegation that the car’s range is 55 miles is defamatory because it suggests Tesla “grossly misled potential purchasers of the Roadster,”
But Top Gear spokesfolks tell the BBC
We can confirm that we have received notification that Tesla have issued proceedings against the BBC. The BBC stands by the programme and will be vigorously defending this claim.
And, as long as the Tesla Roadster that Top Gear tested was a first-generation machine (and we think it is), Tesla’s going to have a little problem making the case that the BBC defamed their car…
Way back in 2007, before the Top Gear segment ever aired, then-Tesla PR boss Darryl Siry basically disclosed the weakness that Top Gear highlights in their segment to Autoblog Green‘s Sam Abuelsamid, who reported:
When I went for a ride with Darryl Siry in the Tesla Roadster following the Los Angeles Auto Show, we discussed a wide array of topics relating to the car. One of those areas was the use of the Roadster as track car. Given the heritage of the chassis being derived from the Lotus Elise and the frequent use of the that car on the track, it would seem to be an obvious application. Unfortunately for buyers of the Roadster, that won’t be a viable option. The power electronics module (PEM) monitors a variety of the sensors in and around the battery pack and the air-cooled AC motor. If anything starts to get too hot, the PEM will automatically start limiting the power flow from the battery until things cool down. The result is that after a only a couple of laps of all-out track running, the motor will start to heat up and performance will be limited. On the road in real world conditions this won’t be a problem, because conditions generally won’t allow that sort of sustained extreme driving.
Is this not exactly what Top Gear is pointing out in their segment? Since even Tesla has admitted that the first-gen Roadster wasn’t a track car, wouldn’t it have been even more misleading for Top Gear to depict it as a car that is capable of driving its entire claimed range in hot-lap driving? And even if the Top Gear tester were an early “Roadster 1.5,” it might not matter, as in 2009 Abuelsamid couldn’t get Tesla’s PR flacks to contradict his conclusion that
The upgraded 1.5 version of the powertrain certainly improved the cooling of the motor but it’s still unclear how well it could manage under sustained hard running.
And a Tesla engineer recently told me on background that the Model S’s fully-cooled drivetrain and powerpack would actually make it a far better candidate for racing than even the latest Roadster’s powertrain… which seems like proof that Tesla has adapted to fix the weakness that Top Gear points out. Isn’t truth a defense against defamation? And given that the Roadster is going out of production within a year or so anyway, it’s hard to see how Tesla will show any damages either. If anything, the most pointless bad PR an automaker could incur is when they sue entertainers and reviewers in hopes of chilling their ability to point out a product’s weaknesses.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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I still don't get what the big deal is. According to other Top Gear testing, even a Ferrari 599 will suck its entire 27.7 gallon petrol tank dry in under 50 miles, if driven under full track conditions. (1.8 mpg reported on Top Gear, tank capacity from the web.)
Falsehoods are embedded in the language people are using here and they don’t realize it. If people accept that the show is scripted and staged then it must necessarily be the case that any references to information presented on the show are meaningless and have no real world content. So statements like “the show depicted this”, “the results were this” or “according to”-- these statements actually mean nothing in a discussion about the real world. And yet these statements are being used by those that support the show and those that decry it in reference to Tesla vs. Top-gear. If we all accept that the show is entirely a fiction, as everyone on here seems to be doing, then the only thing relevant to Tesla’s case is that this FICTIONAL show told a FICTION about Tesla’s product that misleads people in an unfavorable way for Tesla. Any discussion of how the show presented it or what Exactly the show said, is irrelevant because whatever it said it has already been accepted by us as a baseless fiction. All that matters to the Tesla case is whether the information top gear presented, conflicts with real world facts. And if it does, Tesla wins its case. It’s that simple. YET, people seem to be arguing for and against the matter in a way that suggests Top-Gear can be a fiction one moment, then have truth content the next. It doesn’t work that way folks. A liar that only lies sometimes cannot be trusted to tell the truth ANYTIME, if we have no way of establishing, based on what they say, that they are lying. This is the central dilemma of Top-Gear and why it’s not well liked by those who value true-beliefs about the world. But what’s more than the Tesla case, Top-Gear viewers should be weary that, even though they may not be dummies, a Trojan-horse of false belief may be changing the way they think about the world. Remember, if you accept Top-Gear is a baseless fiction, whose content cannot be trusted as EVER TRUE, then ANY references to the show as HAVING truth-content are also baseless, and are just as much a fiction. You may find yourself talking truth one moment and fiction the next without realizing it.