I agree with all of that, but did you learn it all in the few minutes briefing before you got into the car? Was your first trip at the limits of the cars and infrastructures capabilities? I doubt it.
You are wrong about my experience. I got my Model S during Tesla's awkward ramp up phase of Signatures (poor communications et. al), and was surprised by at least a week by the early arrival of my car, which meant I had yet to install a 14-50 outlet at my house. So, I was forced for almost a week to massively conserve as much energy as possible and definitely pushed the car to its limit, because I was charging on a 110v during that time. I did a couple of things that any rational person would do -- I asked my delivery specialist for advice on how to conserve as much energy as possible until I had my outlet installed, and I read the manual (and tried to find tidbits online) that would help as well. I don't consider these steps I took to be extraordinary nor were they particularly difficult, yet somehow I managed to live my life (work, kids, errands, socializing, test drives etc.) with minor modifications without incident during that time period.
I don't think anyone is suggesting "only tech-minded people can comprehend it" but rather that as an EV novice Mr Broder may have made some mistakes especially when confronted with unexpected behaviour like the drastic loss of range overnight.
When Walt Mossberg (WSJ) or David Pogue (NY Times) get a new piece of technology to test out for review, they always push it to its limits (especially Mossberg), but also always read the manual and try to use it as a regular person would so that they can give it a "real life" test as much as possible in an effort to aid the reader in understanding whether it will work for them or not. For this reason, I find their reviews to be helpful to me as a non-techie, average consumer. Shouldn't Broder have endeavored to do the same?
For example, many reviews of the Model S have said something to the effect that it is going to take some getting used to different habits to drive an EV v. an ICE, but overall the experience is great etc. etc. I would have had no issue with Broder saying, "I'm used to just jumping in a car and driving it and not having to worry about power. It was annoying to me that, as an EV novice, I had to do all this 'learning' about how to charge, and the difference between max and normal charge, and to always plug in at night, and to try to find an outlet before road-tripping etc. etc." These were things that were shown to me by my delivery specialist and I learned in the first hour I had the car! These were obviously completely new concepts for me as someone who had never owned an EV, but they seemed pretty logical, and the explanations and giant on-screen buttons made it incredibly easy to understand.
Instead, Broder was, under the best case scenario that I can draw for him, ignorant/negligent in how he managed the car's power supply. He basically 100% relied on whatever Tesla told him (allegedly) and did nothing else to try to figure out on his own, as a regular "EV novice" (like, presumably, almost all of his readers) whether he could figure this stuff out on his own WITHOUT the benefit of having Tesla hold his hand the whole way, which most buyers of the car obviously wouldn't have. Wouldn't that be a better review for the NY Times' readership than what Broder did?
Your continued defense of his actions is frankly baffling to me. The Public Editor, whose every reflex at first was to viscerally defend Broder, basically threw him completely under the bus when she looked into the details of the situation. Broder's review was helpful to no one because all it did was essentially mislead people as to what the difficulties are with taking a road trip with a Tesla. There are obvious challenges and different behaviors that will need to be learned for that type of trip for any new EV owner, but Broder's article is particularly unhelpful in pointing those challenges out. Instead, he went the easy (and sensationalist) route which not only hurt Tesla, but much more importantly left the readers of his review with an essentially false or misleading impression of the capabilities (and limitations) of the car.
