Carolyn won't be too happy about this

[doug]

Richard Hammond, "The Hamster" of Top Gear fame has an article about the TH!NK electric car in the Mirror.
THINK - the electric car that's finally worth a plug - Mirror.co.uk

Now, I'm a big fan of Top Gear and of Hammond in particular, but the problem is at the end of the article where he makes mention of the Tesla Roadster.

Tesla Roadster
Now this is different. As you can tell from its shape, the Tesla Roadster is related to the Lotus Elise. But instead of a fire-breathing Toyota engine, there's an electric motor.
Tesla Motors was founded by a bloke named Elon Musk, who also founded PayPal and is obviously not short of a bob or two. And the Tesla Roadster sounds interesting when you look at the performance figures. It'll do 135mph but the 0-60mph time is a staggering 3.9sec.
The range is claimed to be 225 miles on a single charge. And this is no pipe dream - the cars are coming off the production line in California and comic Jay Leno has already got hold of his.​

I found the article through Autobloggreen and already left a comment there.
Top Gear presenter, Richard Hammond plugs the Th!nk City - AutoblogGreen

 

[TEG]

Along with failing to mention the original founders, the article says that Jay already got his roadster. ("comic Jay Leno has already got hold of his.") I suspect that this is inaccurate reporting for a few reasons including:

As far as I know, Elon is the only paying customer to actually get a production car so far. Someone may have seen Jay driving Elon's car and mistakenly assumed that Jay owned it.

Also, I still haven't seen any confirmation that Jay is in fact a customer or not. Either Top Gear has scooped everyone on this detail, or they speculated about that as well.

 

[AGR]

Could we agree that a bona fide paying customer should be at arms lenght from Tesla?

 

[doug]

Along with failing to mention the original founders, the article says that Jay already got his roadster.

Yeah, I didn't bother to mention this other gaff.


Actually, I think who ever did the "research" for for that little blurb simply saw that Jay's Garage video, misunderstood it, and made his own assumptions. Jay introduced the car as the first production model and first customer car. It's never mentioned that it's Elon's personal car. The car is in Jay's Garage, so the guy assumes it therefore must be Jay's car. Also in the video, Jay introduced Elon as "the man behind the whole project" and the uninformed viewer takes that to mean founder of Tesla Motors.

 

[DDB]

This whole thing is a darn shame. I hope Martin makes a second EV--one more affordable and better than the Roadster to one up Elon.

I'm not keen on spreading big rumors, but a member here and on other EV sites asked Martin at Teslafounders.com whether Tesla had initiated legal action against him for speaking out. The member stated that he assumed that no response from Martin was an express affirmative response, and has mentioned it on other forums. I'm not familiar enough with the CA or 9th district courts to know how to search the filings to do teh independent research (or even whether this type of legal action is in the courts which it probably is NOT), but it makes me wonder. It's been awfully quiet from the Eberhards.

 

[TEG]

Could we agree that a bona fide paying customer should be at arms lengths from Tesla?

Yeah, when Elon's car still has dealer/manufacturer plates, he is the chairman, and it seems they let him have access to the dodgy 1st gear it isn't exactly a typical customer delivery.

Many of the "signature 100" customers are high profile (celebrities, politicians, billionaires, etc.) so I suspect that many ongoing deliveries will have special arrangements associated with them.

 

[doug]

Another article (well headline at least) that misconstrues Elon as the founder.

Gizmodo: Tesla Motors Founder to Lease No-Money-Down SolarCity Solar Panels

However, the article does propose an interesting financing offer for solar panels.