The real lessons of Tesla’s PR disaster

Last week the New York Times’ John Broder published a harrowing account of his attempt to drive an all-electric Tesla Model S from Washington, D.C., to Boston. The drive did not go as planned.

The Model S did not get anywhere near the 265 miles between charges estimated by the EPA, let alone the 300 miles claimed by Tesla. At one point, Broder had to wait by the side of the freeway for a tow truck in 10-degree weather. The driver had to charge the car for 25 minutes, just so it would have enough juice to release the emergency brake and allow him to get it on the truck.

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Broder never made it past Milford, Conn. Along the way, he introduced the term “range anxiety” to a broader public and stepped into a media maelstrom.

If you’re the CEO of a cutting-edge tech company in the bright white spotlight of Wall Street, this is exactly the kind of review you never want to see. But however damaging the story was, Tesla’s response was worse. Via his Twitter account, CEO Elon Musk claimed the Times story was “fake,” Broder was lying, and he has the driving logs to prove it. (As I write this, Musk had yet to make those logs public.)

[Update: Musk has now published the logs on the Tesla blog. See the comments section for more discussion on that.]

On CNBC, Musk got more specific about what he thought was wrong with Broder’s account. He claimed Broder a) didn’t start out with the car fully charged, b) drove faster than the speed limit, and c) took an “extended detour” through Manhattan, further draining the battery. From this, Musk declared the Times story was “something of a setup,” “misleading,” and possibly fabricated.

In other words, he’s accusing Broder of believing the car when it told him it was fully charged and driving like a normal human being. How dare he?

In Musk’s defense, other Tesla owners piped up and said their mileage varies. They’ve been able to drive further than Broder did — though not necessarily in the same conditions — so he must be wrong. The tinfoil helmet crowd has since conjured up the notion that this is a conspiracy by the Times to kill the Tesla and electric vehicles in general.

Here’s something most mere mortals don’t understand about the world of reviewing technology: Writing a negative review is harder than writing a positive one. It’s easy to hand out love notes to large companies with high-profile products. The vendor loves you, because a positive story in a big publication is worth more than millions of dollars in advertising. Your editors love you because positive stories tend to draw more readers and more Web traffic. Your publication’s advertising team loves you because it will make it far easier for them to sell ads to that vendor and its competitors.

Publish a negative review, though, and nobody’s happy. Readers tend to shy away; they’d rather learn about stuff that makes their lives better, not things that miss the mark. The editors scrutinize it much more closely because they know they’ll probably get an angry phone call from the publisher, the vendor, or both. You have to work twice as hard to make sure the flaws you identified really are flaws in the product and not something you did wrong. If something works right the first time, you tend to assume it will work right every time. If it doesn’t, you’re now in the hell of troubleshooting, which usually involves a lot of time on the phone with the vendor’s technicians and, often, their nervous media representatives.

It’s much easier to gloss over problems and give it the old thumbs-up. That’s one reason why so many tech reviews are positive. It’s not because Reviewer X is a tool of Microsoft who is biased against all things Apple, or Reviewer Y is an Apple fanboy who has hates everything with a Redmond return address. It’s because there’s very little upside to telling the whole story. It’s mostly a lot of grief — so kudos to Broder for having the guts to tell his story, warts and all, and for sticking to his guns afterward.

Wired’s Chelsea Sexton has the right take on this, I think. Electric vehicles are like mobile phones: not a one-to-one replacement for a landline, but mighty useful nonetheless. She writes:

Mobile phones were never premised on delivering the exact same experience as the land-line phones (“gas cars”) they replace. They don’t have the talk time (“driving range”) of hard-wired phones, and aren’t expected to. They must be “re-fueled” much more often than home phones — much like an EV, actually…. Despite these compromises, we’ve grown downright addicted to our mobile phones, finding a different solution for those marathon conference calls (the “road trip” use case) when we need to make them.

Anyone who’s ever used a device based on a lithium battery knows how inexact those power meters are and how wonky these devices can be in general. At the very least, Broder’s story does everyone a service by pointing out some basic limitations of the EV technology, especially for folks who live in the Northeast, where there are fewer charging stations, and for those who have to drive in cold weather.

Don’t get me wrong. I have tremendous respect for Musk, who is kind of the Henry Ford or the Thomas Edison of our era (and, like Ford and Edison, has his share of highly public personality flaws). I like that he’s going full steam ahead with private space exploration. I’ve been lusting for a Tesla vehicle since I saw a story about Musk in Wired two years ago. Like a lot of people, I’ve been frustrated by the stupid ideas coming out of Detroit over the past 30 years (gee, let’s build yet another SUV) and have been looking forward to the day Silicon Valley takes on the job of bringing cars into the 21st century.

I think we should have ditched the internal combustion engine 20 years ago. Imagine how much cleaner our skies would be and how much cooler the planet might be. Contemplate, for a moment, how losing our dependence on petroleum would change our nation’s approach to the rest of the world. Think about having the chance to telling all those oil-rich potentates to sod off.

I’m all in with electric and other non-fossil-fuel technologies. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore their flaws or attack those who point them out.

What this incident illustrates isn’t merely the immaturity of the technology, which is to be expected. It also points out the immaturity of the company. To me that’s far more troubling. Musk, et al. had to have known a negative story was coming, given the number of times Broder had to call the company for help as he was driving. You’d think they’d have a better response prepared than calling the story a fake and Broder a liar. That’s playground stuff.

What Musk should have done:

• Acknowledge the faults of the technology and point out how Broder could have maximized his mileage and improved his experience if he’d only done X, Y, and Z
• Bring in others who’ve had better experiences to show that Broder’s trip was an anomaly
• Offer a cash prize for some smart Tesla owner who can drive the furthest on a single charge and share his or her tricks
• Assure the world that your technology is still young but rapidly improving, and talk about the next cool thing it will do

This isn’t rocket science — it’s PR 101. If Tesla can’t handle that, how is it going to respond when it has a real crisis on its hands?

Would you buy a Tesla, if you could afford one, warts and all? Post your driving fantasies below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The real lessons of Tesla’s PR disaster,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry withRobert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.