Another Iceberg, Right Ahead 228
year goes by, and still no car, I started to get a little antsy,
still excited, but wondering if Tesla might actually be the
name of some farmland I bought on an island of Nova
Scotia somewhere,” he said.^271
To make matters worse, the popular television show
Top Gearreviewed the Roadster. The review began with
a drag race competition between a Roadster and a Lotus
Elise. The Roadster won. “Not bad for a motor that has the
size of a water melon and only has one moving part,” the
reviewer, Jeremy Clarkson, said. He then went on arguing
how it’s cheaper to charge an electric car compared with
to fill up a gasoline car, and that the weight of the batteries
affected the steering.
After the promising start, the review went downhill.
“Although Tesla say that it will do 200 miles, we worked
out that on our track, it will run out after just 55 miles,”
Clarkson said. They also showed how the Roadster stopped
on the test track. Clarkson said it would take 25 days to
charge a Roadster with electricity from a small wind power
station, and you have to buy two Roadster – one should
remain in your garage where it can charge.^220
The interesting part of theTop Gearstory is that the
Tesla employee who delivered the cars happened to notice
a script fromTop Gearlaying around. Written before the
cars were tested, the script told Clarkson to say, “In the
real world, it doesn’t seem to work.”276,326So Tesla fought
back. “The breakdowns were staged and the statements are
untrue,” Tesla wrote in their blog before they suedTopGear.
The television show argued the 55 miles was correct