Tesla CEO Elon Musk found the perfect scapegoat for lost Tesla sales and a 13 percent drop of the company’s stock: John Broder of the New York Times. Musk told Reuters that “Tesla has lost about $100 million in sales and canceled orders due to the Times story, which said the sedan ran out of battery power sooner than promised during a chilly winter test drive from Washington D.C. to Boston.”  Musk should look in the mirror if he needs a scape goat. (Read More…)

As a retired operative of the auto propaganda community, I watched the schoolyard brawl between Tesla’s Elon Musk and the New York Time’s John Broder with detached interest. I won’t re-hash it again. Unless you live in a monastery in Tibet, and your Samsung Note 2 was impounded, because you were caught masturbating to Google image search, it was impossible to escape the fallout from the war of tweets, blogs, and counter-tweets. To this day, bullets and barbs still ricochet through the Internet. Only hours ago, Musk was still seen tweeting about an “impressively out of touch NYT auto editor,” while the world at large is utterly confused. And that is the true tragedy. This after-action report is dedicated to the victims.

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The New York Times had their public editor (think ombudsman) publish a response to the whole “Dead Tesla’ fiasco (summary by our own Dan Wallach here), and it is far from kind to reporter John Broder.

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Pull up a chair, get some popcorn. The fireworks have been flying fast and furious. New York Times reporter John Broder wrote a piece about his press loaner Tesla running out of juice. Tesla, already smarting from the perceived slight given them by BBC’s Top Gear, decided they needed an ace up their sleeve: data logging. Chairman Elon Musk penned a response that included detailed data logs from the press car. Broder responded in general terms and then with a point-by-point response to Musk’s charges. The NYT’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has also chimed in with the opening of her own investigation. Notably, Musk hasn’t returned her calls. Her tentative conclusion? “I reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or the electric-car industry.” She also called for Tesla to release all the data they’ve got in proper machine-readable form, not just their pretty annotated graphs with the circles and the arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one. (Read More…)

The GE Wattstation killed my Leaf! That’s the story being reported by the New York Times as well as PlugInCars.com. As the tale goes, 11 Leaf owners have had their chargers “damaged” while charging with GE’s Wattstation home charging station. The relative significance of only 11 failures aside, the Nissan Dealer in San Pablo, CA confirmed to PlugInCars.com that Nissan North America has notified dealers of a potential problem with the Leaf and the GE home charging station. TTAC contacted Hilltop Nissan and they have yet to return our calls. Rather than just parroting back the usual news reports we dug deep. We contacted GE and Nissan, consulted some professional electrical engineers and read though hundred of pages of boring SAE documents. Click past the jump to learn more about EV charging than you ever wanted to know. (Read More…)

The New York Times is outraged:

“Just as plug-in cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt enter the market, Costco is reversing course and pulling its chargers out of the ground, explaining that customers do not use them.”

Why in the world? (Read More…)

Ed Niedermeyer is too humble to say it, so it’s left to me: Ed just had his second third op-ed piece in the New York Times. Required reading.  Two core sentences: (Read More…)

No, General Motors is not paying back the taxpayers, nor will it ever fully… it’s more like a partial refund. That’s not exactly fresh news around here, but the Grey Lady called wanting the breakdown. So here it is. Just don’t ask how they misspelled the byline.