Why did the reporter have to rope Steven Chu into the article? Even if all the facts are 100% right, it seems lame to try and make this a political issue.
I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions.
Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors?
The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.
I agree with your comments about the politics, but I have one nitpick. 30F does not sound like extreme weather. Where I grew up, below freezing is normal for half the year. I am really curious how they are going to solve the problem of making electric vehicles work at -40F.
The weather described in that article is not extreme. It's normal. Driving at much slower speeds than traffic and not using heat in the winter is the extreme part. Cars that require extreme conditions to drive have problems.
I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions.
Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors?
The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.