Tesla Sues BBC's Top Gear For Libel 547
thecarchik writes "About two years ago BBC's Top Gear aired a test drive of the then relatively new Tesla Roadster. In the particular episode, Tesla Roadsters are depicted as suffering several critical 'breakdowns' during track driving. Host Jeremy Clarkson concludes the episode by saying that in the real world the Roadster 'doesn't seem to work.' Tesla claims that the breakdowns were staged, making most of Top Gear's remarks about the Roadster untrue. Tesla also states that it can prove Top Gear's tests were falsified due to the recordings of its cars' onboard data-loggers. What's Tesla asking for in the lawsuit? Tesla simply wants Top Gear to stop rebroadcasting the particular episode and to correct the record."
FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
This may or may not be an uphill battle for them.
Under track conditions (with one of those jackasses pushing the pedal to the floor), yeah, the mileage on the Tesla is probably going to be atrocious.
As for the rest, not sure who exactly takes Top Gear seriously. It's a fun show, but I don't really look at it for good car facts. Nor should anyone else.
Finally, a reasonable lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if they turn out to be wrong, Tesla just got a small point of favor with me for that. It's kind of sad that "not being evil" is noteworthy in a lawsuit nowadays...
Re:Some people don't understand entertainment (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, I still like Top Gear. I'm just going to be way more skeptical about anything they say about a car, ever. Maybe the Morris Marinas is a great car, afterall.
Re:I remember that episode.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or it could be that Clarkson has such a big stick up his ass about "ecomentalists" that Top Gear will bash anything that doesn't burn fossil fuels, even if that thing is a sports car.
Re:Some people don't understand entertainment (Score:5, Insightful)
Entertainment or not, when you claim that a car broke down a lot and it turns out you were lying about it, there's a problem.
We see a lot of this "Oh, we don't have any responsibility because we're entertainment used to excuse a lot of really reprehensible stuff. Whenever some right-wing turd makes fun of a handicapped person or says something really racist or homophobic, it's always "oh we're entertainment" but then they turn around and tell their viewers how they're serious journalists (I've got a list if you really need examples).
You don't get to have a show that gives opinions about products and then say those products broke when they didn't break, no matter how much "fun" you're having.
Re:Finally, a reasonable lawsuit (Score:2, Insightful)
"This car sucks" is different from "this car broke down twice while we were testing it", when the latter didn't even happen.
Re:Finally, a reasonable lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
being in a different country doesn't have much of a matter on it. it wouldn't even if tesla didn't market their cars in the UK - which they do.
on your first point, apples and oranges. the prius bit was obvious comic exaggeration stating an opinion. the tesla bit isn't comic exaggeration, it is an alleged misrepresentation of facts. it wasn't the lawyers that decided whether or not to sue; it was the sales executives who got tired of hearing "the most-watched automobile program in the world said that your car breaks down, doesn't do what you're telling me it does, and the technology isn't up to real-world use. who is lying?"
i agree with gp; it's nice to see a lawsuit that is "you are lying and costing me money, please stop," instead of "your product bears a similarity to my product, so now i have to sue you for godzilla dollars, lest i lose my patents."
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
an extremely narrow track covered in very loose dirt, and you don't think a car would have significant trouble getting to any speed and keeping it?
i think the dog winning that race is a lot more likely than you believe it to be -- i'm honestly a bit impressed he didn't lose it around one of those corners
Re:It didn't break down, it ran out of power (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the cars didn't run out of charge, the brake system failed. Tesla claimed that it was something simple (blown fuse I think) and Top Gear was making it worse than it really was
You know, I don't think it really matters if the problem was a junebug on the windshield if it made the frigging brakes fail.
Or, as Big Mike, my old wrench-monkey buddy put it: when prioritizing motorcycle problems: "Go" is optional. "Stop" is mandatory.
I think that fits just dandy for cages, too.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Finally, a reasonable lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
"bad" is not equivalent to "factually incorrect"
Re:This Case Is Going Nowhere (Score:4, Insightful)
It is clear from the episode that they were highlighting the issue of charging. 16 hours from a wall socket and a 200 mile range. As noted, it would take days to go from one end of the country to another.
It is a fact therefore, that the car does not really work in any practical sense.
I would disagree. Such a car works, in a practical sense -- just not for crossing the country.
If you never drive more than 100 miles a day and go home every night and recharge ... it sounds like the car works in a very practical sense.
But you wouldn't use it to drive 3000 miles any more than you'd use it to haul eight kids to a soccer game. (It also sounds like you wouldn't use it on a race track for any race over 40 miles, but most sports cars never make it to a race track either so that's probably fine.)
Re:Finally, a reasonable lawsuit (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing you haven't heard much about British libel laws.
Re:I remember that episode.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It irritated me at the time.. they made the thing seem like a poorly-designed money sink that barely worked. It really makes me wonder, though, what would they get out of saying stuff like that if it weren't true? If Tesla has the records and they really did stage breakdowns and dead batteries, to what purpose? It's a show about ridiculously expensive cars that most of us ill never even see, much less drive. Tesla is definitely in that category, and considering the drooling they do over some pretty ridiculous (and ugly) cars.. why pick on them? They made plausible claims, mostly, but the one where they ran out of power after 55 miles I thought was weird. The others (overheating, brakes) could have happened, but there seemed to be a LOT of problems for what is basically a straight-from-the-factory Lotus with an electric drivetrain. (In the show they raced it against a Lotus, you can barely tell the cars apart without looking at the badges).
Anyway, just makes me wonder if they made it seem like crap (assuming Tesla is telling the truth) in order to appease the old-school dream car companies so they'd keep sending them toys to play with, or maybe Tesla was being a pain in the ass and they wanted to tweak them, or if they just thought it's be funnier.
My intuition tells me Top Gear will turn out to be right.
When an overhyped product gets a bad review and the maker threatens to sue, you know which way it usually turns out. I'm going with the odds, until the evidence says otherwise.
If they do in fact have evidence, they're welcome to present it.
Re:Some people don't understand entertainment (Score:5, Insightful)
Who apparently doesn't mind making stuff up.
Companies provide cars to Top Gear. Forget for a moment about the stupidity of lying to make one of your benefactors look worse. If the only way you can make a story compelling, even comedy, is to be fraudulent, then there's a problem.
All they had to do is run a disclaimer saying "The car really didn't break down like we pretended" and it would be OK. Or run a disclaimer saying "The events portrayed are entirely fabricated and are in no way indicative of anything real about the cars' quality". But they would never do that. Why? Because they are trading on the notion that there's something useful buried in what they are doing. My guess is that they're afraid of making it clear that none of what is portrayed on the show is in any way real.
And if any part of what they're doing is supposed to be taken as real, then they've got a responsibility to make it clear when they're making stuff up.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:1, Insightful)
Thank you for your insight Dan Rather.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess TG crossed from Informative to Infotainment to Entertainment over the years, as the stunts and big "races" drew more and more audience response. Clarkson & Co. obviously had an opinion about the Tesla prior to receiving the car for testing, and they didn't let the actual car influence them into changing it.
They used the Tesla to give an opinion, not a report - if you remember the episode, you'll recall the point they were trying to make was that Hydrogen was the better alternative fuel/power source for the future of cars, and demonstrated it with the Honda FCV. The main issue is that the "reviews" are presented as factual, whereas we see now an agenda is being pushed - and yeah, I agree, that makes me angry. Angry to think Clarkson & Co. are letting personal views influence ostensibly objective reviews. I don't agree with Clarkson's politics, but I expect at least that the car reviews aren't influenced by it. It's a slippery slope from scripting a review against a car to scripting a review for a small cash payment.
Re: (Score:4, Insightful)
Top Gear is for cars, what Slashdot is for tech.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Clarkson is a twat.
He's an opinionated, loudmouthed, immature cock. This makes him and his cohorts highly entertaining. And that's what top gear is, entertainment.
Clarkson also writes for the papers and whilst he, very occasionally, says some of the sort of "nobody else is daring to say it so I will" stuff, most of what he says is tripe, IMHO.
I still watch and enjoy top gear, it's funny and has fast shiny things. But I wouldn't consider much of what they do to reflect reality very well, not least because it's pretty bloody unlikely I'll ever drive (let alone own) one of the shiny things they play with. And any time he goes off-message from light entertainment and petrol and starts giving opinions (especially if globabl warming is involved in said opinions) it breaks the mood and just annoys me.
Right, there' s my two cents. I do also find it highly amusing that a british show about three muppets and some big engines is now one of the world's most popular tv shows!
Re:This Case Is Going Nowhere (Score:4, Insightful)
More than 70% of Americans have a roundtrip daily commute of 30 miles. If you're too dumb to buy an electric car and rent a gas car for those few times you're going out of town, then don't be pissed when folks like me speculate on the price of oil to make money off your irrational behavior and poor critical thinking skills.
The cars did break down, but so would many cars (Score:4, Insightful)
They say the cars didn't break down. Take note: cars. Top Gear claimed on-air that not only did both require recharging (Tesla also says neither ran out of charge), but that they both broke down. Tesla says that's a fabrication.
One car's motor overheated and basically shut down, "reduced power" was what Clarkson said when it happened. The other car's brakes failed.
Those are failures, regardless if they were temporary or not.
The problem is, Top Gear tests cars as though they are going to be driven on "track days" which are basically amateur racing where the cars are pushed hard for a long time - totally unlike the real-world road driving most people do. Most mass-market cars would suffer brake failures or other problems when used this way.
Frankly, given that Top Gear tests cars on their track the way they do, the review was pretty balanced. They showed that although the Tesla didn't handle quite as well as the Lotus that it's based on, it could out-accelerate the Lotus on the straights.
On almost every episode of Top Gear there is a multi-hundred-thousand dollar (up to millions of dollars) car sliding around the test track, being pushed to its limits in ways that no street driven car would be. The Tesla, like many cars, isn't built to take it. Would you be upset if your $2,000,000 Bugatti suffered the same problems? Yes. Would you even be surprised if a $20,000 Honda's engine overheated or brakes failed when driven that way for an extended time? No. The issue is that the "real world" Clarkson was talking about was on their track, not on public roads.
The Tesla is built to be a sporty car, but not a race car. There are some cars that can take abuse all day long and do just fine, and some that can't. There's nothing wrong with that. When I owned a Porsche I was able to drive the car very hard all day long and then drive it home as though nothing had happened. My V8 Camaro could beat the Porsche in a drag race (wouldn't come close on a corner though) but it would have ended up ruined given a day of the same treatment the Porsche took.
Top Gear has also driven a Prius around their track as fast as possible, with a V8 BMW M3 following it to prove that hybrids aren't the end-all of fuel economy (the BMW got far better gas mileage because the Prius was never designed to be driven on a track). The same type of driving is a recipe for using up 100% of an electric car's charge pretty quickly, and given that type of usage, the comments about recharge time are valid. But, if you just want to drive sedately to work and back, the Prius is going to get much better gas mileage than the M3.
Sending a "performance" car to Top Gear that isn't designed for the rigors of track use is guaranteed to result in a bad review. It's not like they're doing bland consumer reviews of family cars like PBS' Motor Week.
Sometime the Tesla guys should watch the review of the Bentley where one of the rear tires explodes, and think themselves lucky. Heck, the seats in one Mercedes-Benz (an AMG Black model) were compared unfavorably to a pile of rocks. You don't see M-B complaining.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it's more entertainment than information, but outright lies about a car on their test track will have a very real impact on the sales by that car's manufacturer. It sounds like a valid lawsuit to me.
Re:FIRST LAWSUIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I would say that Top Gear is NOTHING LIKE Fox News (which still tries to cast itself as serious, and more importantly have viewers who genuinely think its serious).
Top gear prides itself for being brash, corney and the viewers over here in the UK fully understand that. Even my wife, who is about as serious about documentries and facts, love the show. She sees it as greatly humourous and entertaining. We think the three are huge cocks, and totall idiots.. But we love em for it! And both of us are immensly jealous, and would love to have their jobs!
The only people that really complain about Top Gear, dont really watch, nor understand it.