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Tesla offers incomplete, misdirected response to New York Times critique

by mirorita02 Posted on February 14, 2013

Tesla offers incomplete, misdirected response to New York Times critique

Here’s the latest installment in the great war between Tesla Motors and The New York Times, launched after a Times reporter chronicled a troubled test drive of Tesla’s all-electric sedan. For background, see here; for additional commentary, just turn on your computer. There have been dozens of posts on the subject, from the Times’ public editor, GigaOm, Gawker, MIT Technology Review, Jalopnik. But the place to start is where our previous piece left off: with a post on the Tesla blog responding to the Times’ claims, written by chair Elon Musk.

You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S. We are upset by this article because it does not factually represent Tesla technology, which is designed and tested to operate well in both hot and cold climates. …

When Tesla first approached The New York Times about doing this story, it was supposed to be focused on future advancements in our Supercharger technology. There was no need to write a story about existing Superchargers on the East Coast, as that had already been done by Consumer Reports with no problems! We assumed that the reporter would be fair and impartial, as has been our experience with The New York Times, an organization that prides itself on journalistic integrity. As a result, we did not think to read his past articles and were unaware of his outright disdain for electric cars. We were played for a fool and as a result, let down the cause of electric vehicles. For that, I am deeply sorry.

It is not clear for whom Musk feels sorry, but it is quite clear whose feelings have been hurt: his own. It’s clear in the emotion behind his post, emotion that he bolsters with nine bullet-pointed counterarguments, five graphs of data from the car, two Google maps, and one annotated graphic from the Times article.

The Tesla Model S, in a sunnier climate.

Those reading Broder’s review were given the impression of a vehicle not ready for the rigors of highway travel — if not of a vehicle that had a flawed power-management system. Both Broder and Musk suggest that the cold weather during Broder’s journey from D.C. to the Boston area reduced its range, but Broder suggests that the car failed to give him accurate information about that reduction.

Oddly, this central premise is only a small part of Musk’s response — a response that, as the above-linked Gawker article notes, has been seen by many as definitive, a data-based refutation of Broder’s claims. After all, look at this chart:

Broder’s article claims he set his cruise control at 54; it was actually at 60. He said he was driving 45 on the highway; it was more like 53. At one point he exceeded 80 miles an hour! The impression you’re meant to get here is that Broder misled his readers into thinking he took extreme measures to avoid draining the car’s battery and still it failed. Nope, says Musk, pointing at the chart. His numbers were off!

What’s missed, though, is the implication of that data for an objective reader. Broder did set his cruise control at about 60 mph for about 100 miles. He spent another 50 driving at just over 50 mph. Almost all of Broder’s driving was on highways, as was intended in the test drive. Is it actually a win for Musk to show that Broder drove at 50-60 mph on the interstate instead of 45-54?

Musk’s post uses a common rhetorical tactic: overwhelming the audience with small refutations of unimportant points to give an impression of overall victory. The Atlantic Wire has a graph-by-graph breakdown of how strong and important each point is to Musk’s case; on the whole, they aren’t that important.

One commonly cited point from Musk’s post suggests that Broder drove in circles at a rest-stop charging station. “When the Model S valiantly refused to die,” Musk writes, Broder “eventually plugged it in.” Musk offers a graph that shows no circling, no distance, just faster and slower driving. Broder has already responded to this claim: He was circling the rest stop trying to find the charging station. The graph loses.

Elon Musk is a smart man. He understands the damage the Times review did to his company’s reputation. He’d hoped, as noted above, that the paper would report “on future advancements in our Supercharger technology,” those free charging stations that Broder tried to reach — not do a trial that Consumer Reports had already completed to his satisfaction. When Broder and the Times didn’t comply, Musk responded forcefully and, if the online sentiment is any gauge, successfully.

Even by the standards of Musk’s data, the problem lies with Broder’s experience, not his reporting. It’s not a driver’s job to make sure the car works perfectly; it’s Musk’s job, Tesla’s. The problem isn’t whether Broder spent 47 minutes charging the car instead of 58, as Musk ridiculously suggests; it’s that electric vehicles are competing with perceptions and infrastructure determined by traditional cars.

Broder is expected to release a response to Musk’s criticisms this afternoon. It will once and for all clearly settle who the winner is in this fight: gasoline.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Tesla offers incomplete, misdirected response to New York Times critique

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Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

by graptorm Posted on February 12, 2013

Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

Tesla is Silicon Valley’s car. The company’s head of product design, Elon Musk, went from rethinking online payments as a cofounder of PayPal to rethinking automobiles. Tesla’s first vehicle was an electricity-and-testosterone-powered roadster; recently, it added a sedan (electricity only).

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a review of the sedan by John Broder. His test drive, a haul from the outskirts of D.C. to Boston, could have gone better. From “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway”:

The Model S has won multiple car-of-the-year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet.

What fun, no? Well, no.

The problem was power. The electric car, like a regular car, needs to be refilled. But unlike a regular car, you can’t refuel every few miles. Broder’s trip was meant to highlight two new charging stations between the cities, spaced within the range of a full charge of the car. Ideally. As Broder discovered, that wasn’t his experience — something for which the cold weather may have been partly to blame.

As I crossed into New Jersey …, I noticed that the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating. At 68 miles since recharging, the range had dropped by 85 miles, and a little mental math told me that reaching Milford would be a stretch.

I began following Tesla’s range-maximization guidelines, which meant dispensing with such battery-draining amenities as warming the cabin and keeping up with traffic. I turned the climate control to low — the temperature was still in the 30s — and planted myself in the far right lane with the cruise control set at 54 miles per hour (the speed limit is 65). Buicks and 18-wheelers flew past, their drivers staring at the nail-polish-red wondercar with California dealer plates.

Broder’s trip ended on the back of a flatbed truck in Connecticut. But the story didn’t.

After the review ran, Musk jumped on Twitter to criticize it and the reviewer.

The “Top Gear BS” is a reference to a similar problem experienced by the TV show Top Gear when it was reviewing the Tesla Roadster. The show noted that the car ran out of juice well before it should have. Musk and Tesla filed a libel lawsuit, which was eventually thrown out.

Musk’s promised blog post hasn’t yet materialized, but that didn’t stop the Times from rising to the defense of the review. The paper told the Atlantic Wire:

The Times’s Feb. 10 article recounting a reporter’s test drive in a Tesla Model S was completely factual, describing the trip in detail exactly as it occurred. Any suggestion that the account was “fake” is, of course, flatly untrue. Our reporter followed the instructions he was given in multiple conversations with Tesla personnel.

As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, the review did some damage to Tesla. By the time markets closed last night, the stock had dropped 2 percent.

That might be a bit unfair. Tesla got out ahead of its skis a little in suggesting that the car was ready to have a road-trip review even though there are so few charging stations. Limited infrastructure is still a key inhibitor to electric-car adoption. But Musk’s response may have been a worse decision. By attacking the review, he both provides a disincentive to future reviewers and builds the affair into a much bigger deal than it needed to be — though his response did help the stock price rebound a bit. His later tweet indicating that more charging stations are imminent may have made an important longer-term point.

As a Silicon Valley veteran, Musk should know that things go wrong, and it’s the responsibility of the tech company to foresee and handle those problems. And, look, it could have been worse. At least Broder didn’t experience a crash.

Update: Broder posted his own response to Musk. It’s detailed. For example:

Mr. Musk has referred to a “long detour” on my trip. He is apparently referring to a brief stop in Manhattan on my way to Connecticut that, according to Google Maps, added precisely two miles to the overall distance traveled from the Delaware Supercharger to Milford (202 miles with the stop versus 200 miles had I taken the George Washington Bridge instead of the Lincoln Tunnel). At that point, I was already experiencing anxiety about range and had called a Tesla employee from the New Jersey Turnpike to ask how to stretch the battery. She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

Broder ends his response where we would have thought: It’s worth trying the test drive again once there is more infrastructure.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

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Oil companies aren’t happy that the government is making them fix defective offshore rig parts

by donnajansen Posted on February 7, 2013

Oil companies aren’t happy that the government is making them fix defective offshore rig parts

The U.S. government has asked Chevron, Shell, and our old friends at Transocean to halt drilling on wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Why? Because the systems connecting the rigs to the ocean floor contain defective parts.

From Bloomberg:

[The companies] have been directed by U.S. regulators to suspend work aboard rigs that employ General Electric Co. devices connecting drilling tubes to safety gear and the seafloor. The equipment must be retrieved so defective bolts can be replaced, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in an alert issued on Jan. 29. …

The defect was discovered last month after a leak of drilling fluid was linked to bolts that failed because of stress corrosion, according to the Jan. 29 alert. The regulator didn’t identify the owner of the rig or which oil company was leasing it. GE declined to identify the manufacturer of the bolts.

Thanks for your help, GE.

How big a deal is this for the companies?

Installing new bolts and resuming drilling may take as long as three weeks for each rig, Credit Suisse Group AG said. For oil companies paying upwards of $600,000 a day to rent the most-sophisticated deep-water vessels and another $500,000 a day to staff and supply each of them, the delays may be significant, said Craig Pirrong, director of the University of Houston’s Global Energy Management Institute.

“This certainly will be costly for the industry,” Pirrong said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This is a result of increasing government scrutiny of deep-water activities. The question is, will the increased costs be so onerous that they discourage some companies” from searching the deep oceans for crude.

1. You know what’s more expensive than spending $1.1 million a day to replace faulty bolts? Massive oil spills.

2. If a company is going to be discouraged from drilling offshore because it might have to fix defective, leaky parts, it’s probably for the best.

Source

U.S. Halts Drilling on Gulf Wells With Flawed Bolts, Bloomberg

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Oil companies aren’t happy that the government is making them fix defective offshore rig parts

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Find out which facilities near you are doing the most damage to the climate!

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on February 5, 2013

Find out which facilities near you are doing the most damage to the climate!

cm195902

In 2011, American industry produced the equivalent of 3.3 billion tons of CO2 emissions — 10.5 tons for every resident of these United States. Two-thirds of those emissions were from power plants, by which we of course mean fossil fuel power plants.

That’s the topline summary of the EPA’s new report on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — the second time the agency has completed such a survey. The good news is that the GHG emission number from power plants is going down. From The Hill:

In all, 8,000 facilities across nine industry sectors put 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions into the air in 2011. Power plants accounted for about 2.2 billion of those tons.

EPA said that was a 4.6 percent decrease from power plants compared with 2010, which it attributed to growing reliance on natural gas and renewable energy for electricity generation.

Those emissions could drop even more in the future, as low natural gas prices, expanded renewable electricity generation and an abnormally warm winter last year curbed coal-fired generation. …

EPA released its first report from the program last year, when it considered 2010 emissions from 29 sources. Emissions from those sources fell 3 percent in 2011.

Petroleum and natural gas systems were the second greatest emitters, clocking in at 225 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. Refineries ranked third, at 182 million tons.

What’s really cool is the EPA’s interactive map, which lets you zoom in to regions and see what polluters are in any given neighborhood. You can also see where certain types of polluters are more common. Here is pollution from refineries, by state:

EPA

Click to embiggen.

But what the EPA’s map doesn’t show well is where the most pollution occurs. So we made a map that does.

Here’s how our map works: The 250 largest producers of GHG pollution are shown. The larger the orange circle, the more the facility pollutes. The icon over each location is actually a graph; dark orange represents the amount of pollution that is carbon dioxide, lighter orange is methane. Click on an icon and you can see the name, type of facility (see key below), and amount of emissions. (It may be easier to view the map in its own window.)

You won’t be surprised to see that many of the top polluters are in Texas and the old Rust Belt. This is in part because older power production facilities are still grandfathered in under pre-Clean Air Act pollution standards — one of the main gaps in attempts to curb emissions.

What does all of this tell us? Not much that we didn’t know. Power plants create a lot of carbon dioxide pollution. The U.S. creates a lot of greenhouse gases — in 2011, 0.5 percent of the total amount we can still create before tipping into climate catastrophe.

But at least now we know who’s doing it.

—–

Key to types of facility:

C: Stationary Combustion
D: Electricity Generation
E: Adipic Acid Production
F: Aluminum Production
G: Ammonia Manufacturing
H: Cement Production
I: Electronics Manufacture
K: Ferroalloy Production
L: Fluorinated GHG Production
N: Glass Production
O: HCFC–22 Production and HFC–23 Destruction
P: Hydrogen Production
Q: Iron and Steel Production
R: Lead Production
S: Lime Production
T: Magnesium Production
U: Miscellaneous Use of Carbonates
V: Nitric Acid Production
W: Petroleum and Natural Gas Systems
X: Petrochemical Production
Y: Petroleum Refining
Z: Phosphoric Acid Production
AA: Pulp and Paper Manufacturing
BB: Silicon Carbide Production
CC: Soda Ash Manufacturing
DD: SF6 from Electrical Equipment
EE: Titanium Dioxide Production
FF: Underground Coal Mines
GG: Zinc Production
HH: Municipal Landfills
II: Industrial Wastewater Treatment
SS: Manufacture of Electric Transmission and Distribution Equipment
TT: Industrial Waste Landfills

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Find out which facilities near you are doing the most damage to the climate!

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Natural gas is eating coal’s lunch in the Southeast

by Myrna Posted on December 6, 2012

Natural gas is eating coal’s lunch in the Southeast

The natural gas revolution will not be televised, because it’s not fun to watch. But it might provide the power for your television, if that counts — and if you live in the Southeast, the odds that it does are climbing.

States in the Southeast use a lot of coal. On this map, the darker states produced the most coal power in 2011. The Southeast is pretty dark, though less so than Texas and the Rust Belt.

But that percentage is dropping, year-over-year, as the U.S. Energy Information Agency noted today.

The electric power industry in the southeastern United States has undergone substantial changes over the past three years. While coal-fired power plants continue to generate more than half of electricity in the region, coal-fired generation has declined since 2010, and production from natural gas-fired plants has increased. This change can be primarily attributed to changes in the relative prices of natural gas and coal, which altered the dispatch order of power plants in the region.

This is the same story, over and over again. Natural gas is cheaper, so people use less coal. The EIA provided the two following charts as well, showing generation as a function of cost for various facilities in the Southeast. The more expensive the type of fuel, the less likely it was to be used.

Here’s what the curve looked like in 2010. Note the yellow dots: Those are natural gas facilities, which came online as demand increased over the summer. Petroleum production (the red dots) is very expensive, so only when demand increased enough was it used. Coal took precedence over then-more-expensive natural gas.

Click to embiggen.

And here’s this year. Natural gas was used alongside coal, because it is much more affordable.

Click to embiggen.

Note that the Southeast is still not the region most in need of transition. Here are two more maps: The first shows coal as a percentage of each state’s total production, with darker states being more coal-reliant. The second shows natural gas as a percentage of each state’s production.

The increase in use of natural gas has helped drop our carbon dioxide emissions — but there’s a lot of work to be done.

There is only one factor that is prompting the switch from pollution-heavy coal to pollution-(relatively)-light natural gas: economics. Electricity providers are not switching from coal because they love Mother Earth. In other words, the natural gas revolution isn’t even a revolution. It’s just power companies using a coupon.

The coupon-using will not be shown on your natural-gas-powered television. Catchy.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.