As for review cars being lent, but then never asked back? Yeah, Doesn’t happen, ever. I’m pretty sure it would be the stupidest possible way to bribe someone, because everybody would notice and start asking very serious questions, because as you might have noticed, when a journo has a credibility problem or a conflict of interest problem, it taints the whole publication.

Seriously, while I see where you’re going, this is is basically don’t take bribes 101 for journalists. Credibility and trust are more important than water or air for journalists(though do remember to poke holes in the box you keep them in, we appreciate it), and ethical violations of that nature are not only career-enders, they’re exactly the sort of thing that EVERYBODY in the food chain is looking out for. Even if you didn’t pick up on it, they also have to fool the editors(and cronies), legal(and cronies), the publisher, your fellow journos and columnists. 

Basically, by the time you start getting a realistic chance of success, you’d have to be paying off half the damned staff, which simply isn’t cost effective, and is STILL trivial to defeat.

Yep – It’s still trivial to defeat blackmail, because all you have to do is the exact same thing as bribery: You go to print. You shout it loud from the rooftops what they’re doing, and by extension, what they’re trying to hold over you, which both removes their ability to blackmail you, and their credibility for counter-allegations.

Blackmail and bribery rely on Cowardice, and the latter, cowardice and greed. It hurts you the worst only if you don’t have the spine to face it head-on.

You are presented with an opportunity to review an electric vehicle, even though you’re not an automotive journalist. It’s a good car, but you legitimately experience range anxiety, which causes your latent hostilities to flare up. “What a crock of shit!”, you exclaim to yourself. You zero in on every perceived shortcoming and adopt an aggrieved tone in your review…

Bribery isn’t necessary to occasion the sort of bias that the review reflected. I’m a huge automotive fan and believe electric vehicles are the future, but I don’t believe in *batteries*. Take away balance and perspective and you end up with a screed against a strong but compromised step toward a practical EV for the masses.

As records still have their fanatical devotees, so it is with ICEVs.  It’s just that EVs aren’t yet as far along as digital audio.

Now the reporter is saying the driving pattern in the data recorder is due to instructions he received from Tesla and him trying to find the charging station.

Surely we must all take ourselves and the goings on of arrogant businessmen and journalists as seriously as you. 

I think it’s perfectly possible that the Tesla employee, for example, knowing that the cold was causing the battery to incorrectly appear to not be as charged as it was, might have told him that an hour charging would be enough so long as he then drove slowly.

The logs do show that he spent most of the time driving 65, and a fair chunk of the trip at 55. This is not the behavior of someone who is intentionally trying to drive a car into the ground. And the explanation for why he drove around the lot (looking for the little charging station in the dark) is a lot more reasonable than the thought that he hoped a little driving in circles would “kill” the car, and then gave up after five minutes.

Honestly, I was all ready to pile on to the reporter (and did so above in the comments), but I think that most of the explanations he gave were perfectly likely, and no longer think that he was just out-and-out lying.

Absolute desperate bullshit unless he somehow swapped the tires they gave him and tinkered with their onboard GPS which would have corroborated the same speeds.

If they ever do something like the exchangeable battery pack station or roads that recharge, maybe. But not now.

Much of the die-hard (possibly most) clinging to fossil fuels by the average user is based on the fantasy of having some 700bhp crate motor powered Cobra taken from them by eco-hippies when the reality is they will probably never own anything more potent than a beige Camry and of those few who do own powerful vehicles an even smaller percent bothers to go to the track with it. Think of how few people who own 4×4 vehicles actually use them offroad.

I believe this is supported by talk of the sound that people love so much (me too, I had stainless Flowmasters on the Ford for just that purpose).

At the moment your options for a fully electric vehicle are pretty limited, but the potential for a fully electric off-road car or hyper car is not limited by the technology it’s being limited by pushing the argument into the socio-political rather than the technical. Those who benefit from the dominance of fossil fuels and internal combustion want this to be a culture war and want people to resent new tech because it threatens their wealth.

This is the same thing with gun humpers. I’m not talking about someone who shoots a deer every year or goes and hammers targets on Saturday, etc. But the people who feel they need an armory to prevent a fascist takeover (I would argue “too little too late”) because a half dozen Bushmaster AR clones with 100 round drums will somehow stop tanks and Apache gunships in their fantasy. These are people who watched “Red Dawn” and couldn’t wait to get home before jacking off.

Essentially, scarce charging stations allow these companies to lock in customers.

Sprint for cars?

If hybrids are the gay marriage of cars, electrics are the Folsom Street Fair.

faster fueling than charged solutions

Not necessarily. Li based cells have been shown to be chargeable at ferocious rates given suitable technology. Around 1000C IIRC.  See http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423597/batteries-that-recharge-in-seconds/?mod=chfeatured for some info

Ceratinly the electricity may have been generated by a coal station. Or maybe it might have come from hydro, or wind, or solar, or geo, or spinning pussies. That’s the nice thing about Watts; they can come from a lot of sources and adding a clean source improves the average cleanliness of all of them.Me, sarcastic?