"He's lying" explains everything in the same way that "God did it" explains everything. Now you have to explain what John Broder has to gain from falsifying a review and why it was worth risking his livelihood. Tesla makes it sound like he just really hates electric cars.
That is also equally easy to explain:
He gets more clicks because of the picture of motor trend's car of the year on the flatbed.
Also, he didn't think he'd get caught.
People "risk their livelihood" all the time by lying to their boss, etc. I don't think any complex calculus is necessary to explain why someone would do that.
Did we not just read yesterday about a highly paid writer risking his livelihood by making up Dylan quotes? Clearly, it happens.
I know it's mentally exhausting, but when reading anything you have to ask, "what does the author want to be true?" Musk quoted Broder's earlier article:
"Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”
so I think we know what it is that Broder wants to be true.
Do you know how many MILLIONS of conventional cars are manufactured a year? Who are the biggest companies in the world? You will be shock that they are energy companies.
There are HUGE economic interest in the outcome of different transportation methods. The salary of a man is nothing compared with the BIILIONS over the table just delaying the future one or two years.
I had a friend whose only job at a big French car company maker was organizing summer experiences for car journalist vacations in Europe. I could not believe that a journalist will accept that, now I understand the reviews you find in most car magazines(You never find anything negative).
On the contrary, he probably would have been risking his livelihood by posting a glowing review. Major automobile manufacturers would call the NYT and complain that the review was not fair and balanced and did not adequately highlight the drawbacks of the Tesla compared to ICE and to their own electric or hybrid vehicles. Not wanting to do business with an institution that severely misrepresents the products of these major manufacturers they have decided to cut ad-spend at NYT by 50%. Editor is now responsible for multi-million dollar decrease in revenue. Editor cannot afford to publish stories or employ writers that will result in significant loss of revenue.
That seems like a lot of speculation to me. Other reviewers have given the Tesla S a positive review and have not been destroyed by the oil industry so why should this guy be any different? There seems to be a lot of he said/she said going on and a lot of speculation, but not a lot of demonstrable facts.
Other reviewers may not be under the same influences from incumbent auto manufacturers or the oil industry for various reasons. They almost certainly also have less readership than the NYT so what they say matters less.
There may be speculation about certain facts in the case but there is absolutely no speculation as to the fact that this and every other corporate journalist is under systemic influence. In any other industry it would be plainly obvious that employees understand not to insult, aggrieve or otherwise harm their employers customers, especially by way of prominent national media. Somehow everyone manages to convince themselves that what is obvious is no longer so when it comes to journalists and the MSM.
All of his other articles for the NYT are about the oil and gas industry - that might explain his motivation for publishing a fraudulent negative review.
If you're a car reporter driving a loaner vehicle of one of the most sophisticated production cars in the world, you shouldn't really be surprised that the vehicle has data logging. I'd be surprised if most modern luxury cars don't have some level of logging in their systems - I'm pretty sure even my 2007 mid-priced car has logged usage data accessible to the dealer on usage patterns when I take it in, because they've told me things like "you have been driving the car only very occasionally."
It's true they could guess that, but the issue was the interval between usage, not the mileage. As I understand it, pretty much every car built in the last 10 years does some degree of logging, if only to provide a record of what the car was doing immediately before a crash. For cars with more electronic systems - stability, ABS, and certain automatic transmissions - they do more logging so that dealers can debug problems.
For example, my car also has an adaptive transmission system that collects data on my driving behavior and uses it to improve when the car chooses to shift. Sometimes folks have the dealer erase this data so the car "re-learns" to shift fo r them.(http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/technology_gui...)
It has been claimed that they are informed when the car is given, and they sign a waiver about that. Of course, maybe it's just in the legalese that nobody reads - though you probably should read legalese that comes attached to very expensive items.