7 Tesla Owners Are About To Pwn The New York Times

The Tesla versus New York Times saga has entered round 3: it's road-trip time!

18 May 2015

Tesla Model S. It's all-electric, has seats seven, costs £50-80k and will out-drag a BMW M5. It nearly won CT's Car of the Year 2012, and did take Motor Trend's COTY crown. It's a pretty special piece of kit. And that means one thing: haterz gonna hate.

As you're reading this, seven Tesla Model S owners are undertaking an epic USA drive marathon. Why? Saucer of milk please, it's about to get catty.

This story exploded last week, when the New York times ran a review of the Model S, with writer John Broder slamming the Tesla for underperforming on a Washington - Boston road trip, finishing up dead at roadside and needing a breakdown truck.

Tesla, as you'd expect, hit back. Its CEO is South African billionaire Elon Musk, who founded PayPal and was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jnr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man, I kid you not. Okay, the guy's not an actual armour-plated flying superhero, but he's super-rich, super-motivated, and super-pissed when people cry fail over his multi-million-dollar endeavours.

After Top Gear slated the Tesla Roadster (and showed a dead car being pushed despite the fact it wasn't actually out of juice at all), Tesla now log driving data for every press car they loan out. Our man Elon provided graphs and maths to show Broder drove faster than he claimed, didn't fully utilise charging stations, and even drove around a car park several times to seemingly wear the battery down (Broder says he was looking for a poorly-lit Supercharger station in the dark). The NY Times duly responded saying they'd been fed faulty advice on how to run the Model S by Tesla themselves, and the whole bitchy saga rumbles on.

How does that bring us to seven Model S owners? Well, they're sticking up for their pride and joy by recreating the road trip themselves, using the 'Supercharger' plug-in stations and matching usual speeds and driving habits, to prove that the Model S can do the numbers its claimed. And also to expose the NYT's John Broder as a fraud.

Whether you're an electric car sceptic or not, you've got to love the Hollywood-ness of this entire episode. It's car culture meets war via salacious journalism.