Tesla Vs. Top Gear: The War Of The Blogs

by Bertel Schmitt

Published: April 3rd, 2011

Compared to smothering hugs, ample booze and possibly a little deniable blackmail, suing a media outlet rarely is the best way to perform the skillful art of public relations. This is what Tesla is finding out right now.

Most likely after throwing words of caution by its own PR folk to the wind, Tesla decided to bring a defamation suit against the BBC’s Top Gear. According to Tesla’s own blog, Top Gear perpetrated “serious and damaging lies,” such as claiming that “the Roadster’s true range is only 55 miles per charge. “ Of course, writes Tesla’s Communication VP Ricardo Reyes in the blog, Tesla is “not doing this for money. As the world leader in EV technology, Tesla owes it to the public to stop Top Gear’s disinformation campaign and provide the truth. “

Top Gear has its own blog. In it, Top Gear’s Executive Producer Andy Wilman answers with some counter battery fire. Normally, says Wilman, when a suit is brought, both sides keep their respective mouths and blogs shut while “brainy people wearing wigs” (lawyers wear wigs in the UK, at least in court, sometimes … never mind) argue over the matter. “Tesla, however, doesn’t seem content to wait for the legal eagles to settle matters,” says Wilman. “On the contrary, it’s been very busy promoting its side of the argument through the media.”

Tesla’s PR agency PHA Media even contacted the British TV program “The One Show” and invited them to “have some fun with this.” Too bad The One Show is a show of BBC One (hence the name), and it just so happened that Top Gear “accidentally received” the email. Which allowed Top Gear to have some fun with it.

No longer bound to the “pre-legal etiquette of keeping schtum until we get our day in court,” Wilman then provides a point for point rebuttal. The core is that Top Gear “never said that the Tesla’s true range is only 55 miles, as opposed to their own claim of 211, or that it had actually ran out of charge. In the film our actual words were: ‘We calculated that on our track it would run out after 55 miles’.”

That 55 miles number did not come from Top Gear’s “heads, but from Tesla’s boffins in California. They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles.” (Before lawyers prepare another defamation suit: “Boffins” is nothing bad. In British English, it stands for people engaged in technical or scientific research. At worst, “boffin” could be understood as “geek.”)

Tesla concedes that Clarkson said: “Although Tesla say it will do 200 miles we worked out that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles.”

I guess even a wig-wearing judge will give this one to Top Gear. (Note to Tesla: When quoting from videos, QUOTE VERBATIM.)

As for the rest, if you are interested in a lot of he said, she said, here is Tesla’s blog, and here is Top Gear’s rebuttal.

Again, if Tesla would ask me for advice (I’m sure they won’t) I’d tell them to quietly settle. Each blog on the planet that writes about that stuff will do what we do, and link to Youtube. There, at the times of this typing, the Tesla segment already had racked up 336,139 views. (Not counting other clips of the same segment floating around in various digital formats.) If what is said there indeed is lies, then this is how lies multiply.

Should Tesla win, and the segment is blocked from retransmission, that Youtube flick will become a collector’s item. And what will people remember? That the Tesla is running out of battery mighty fast. Which Tesla most likely does not want them to remember.

#BertelSchmitt #ElectricVehicle #Lawsuit #Tesla #TopGear

Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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3 of 31 comments

Dutchchris on Apr 04, 2011

I don't know about stupid but fact is that people tend to take things serious if they are on TV. A lawsuit like this could be an eye opener for some people not to let the idiot box do their thinking for them.

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Zackman on Apr 04, 2011

Speaking of blogs, I'm curious - how does TTAC compare to other auto sites as far as numbers of comments average per topic? In my very limited research, the comments on TTAC appear to be generally more than a single sentence and more intelligent than most other sites. The Russian slapping contest a couple of weeks ago that went on between TTAC and an "unmentioned" site, someone related that their traffic was still higher. Why? TTAC, in my opinion, is the best out there. I go over to Autoblog and their responses often go over 100. Why? That site seems to me to be a cheering section for anything on 4 wheels. Or is it me?

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- Ronnie Schreiber on Apr 04, 2011
  
  Autoblog is part of AOL, which drives traffic to their site. Jalopnik is part of the Gawker family of sites, which does the same. While TTAC is part of a corporate family of sites, some of which you'll see linked to at the top of the home page, our corporate overlords don't really do much to promote the site. That's a two-edged sword. Gawker promotes Jalopnik, but then Jalopnik has to run articles crossposted from Jezebel and other Gawker sites (and Ray recently complained that when he's pitched Gawker on syndicating Jalop's content to other Gawker sites he's been turned down). We may not get promoted by VS as much as we'd like, but they leave us alone and let us say what we want to say.
  
  Still, Jalopnik gets enough traffic that their editors get flown to Vegas to test drive Aston Martins.
  
  It's hard to grow traffic to the point where you can monetize a site from advertising. I respect the success that Autoblog, Jalopnik and TTAC have. Considering that he didn't have something like AOL or Gawker backing him, Farago did a remarkable job turning TTAC into a viable operation.
  
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