Clarkson Pisses All Over the Tesla Roadster, Again
Top Gear presenter and Times carmudgeon Jeremy Clarkson is not one to walk away form a fight. In fact, you could say he never met a fist he didn’t lunge his towards. After Tesla and the MSM knocked Clarkson for pretending that a Roadster ran out of juice in an episode of the shark jumping car show, Clarkson mounted Ye Olde “Valid Yet Undeclared Fictional Recreation of Theoretical Facts” defense. And that, one presumed, was that. Only, of course, it wasn’t. In Clarkson’s Times column, the world’s most famous pistonhead attempts to disprove the English maxim “the first thing you do when you’re in a hole is stop digging.” “Tesla, when contacted by reporters, gave its account of what happened and it was exactly the same as ours. It explained that the brakes had stopped working because of a blown fuse and didn’t question at all our claim that the car would have run out of electricity after 55 miles.” Uh, yes it did. Anyway… “The problem is, though, that really and honestly, the US-made Tesla works only at dinner parties. Tell someone you have one and in minutes you will be having sex. But as a device for moving you and your things around, it is about as much use as a bag of muddy spinach.” Dodgy handling, high price, yada, yada, yada. And the Roadster’s greatest sin?
“In the fullness of time, I have no doubt that the Tesla can be honed and chiselled and developed to a point where the problems are gone. But time is one thing a car such as this does not have.
“Because while Tesla fiddles about with batteries, Honda and Ford are surging onwards with hydrogen cars, which don’t need charging, can be fuelled normally and are completely green. The biggest problem, then, with the Tesla is not that it doesn’t work. It’s that even if it did, it would be driving down the wrong road.”
More by Robert Farago
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Clarkston, as the old line goes, is too clever by half. He's be called out on a misleading story, so he's playing defense and trying to change the subject. If I lived in Silicon Valley, an electric car for errands / weekend runs / fun, etc. would be neat. For many of us, the constraints posed by heavy heating and A/C loads, plus a large commute render a vehicle like this useless. Given the proper infrastructure (which Europe is capable of doing, the USA less so), hydrogen CAN be a player
If clarkson had praised the Tesla I would never had respected him again. Everybody who is not a stupid treehuger with no knowledge of engineering knows the Tesla is a gimmick with as much substance as penis enlargement pills.