Roadster Review

Great to see Doug trying a roadster. I'm getting tempted myself...

 

Congratulations, Doug, you got into the Roadster in exactly the wrong way! Right leg first, then drop your posterior into the seat, then bring in the left leg.

Also, there's no automatic tranny. Sheesh!

 

That "review" contains a lot of amazingly inaccurate or misleading information.

The narrator says that Tesla "borrowed a bunch of Lotus chassis" to build the car. I have never heard such an astonishingly inaccurate description of where the Roadster "chassis" came from. Then later in the video the narrator states 4 parts that the Roadster "shares with the Lotus Elise" and leaves it at that.

The owner says "If my battery goes dead I'm like 6 hours..." and then the video cuts. We don't know what he means to say because of the incoherent video editing.

The narrators asks the owner how long it takes to charge into a standard "wall socket" and the owner says "3 days" and then nothing else about charging, leaving the uneducated viewer thinking that the car always takes days to charge. It is possible the owner had more to say about that but it didn't make it into the video.

As @DaveD notes, the narrator says the car has an "automatic transmission" when in fact it has no such thing.

The narrator says the car "cannot be Supercharged", failing to point out that the Supercharger network did not even begin to be built until 2012, a year after Roadster production ceased and many years after the Roadster was designed.

When the narrator talks about Roadster charging adaptors, he makes an error by saying that only Henry Sharp's JR adaptor will allow the Roadster to charge at a "Leaf charger". He means a J1722 plug but he's likely too ignorant to be aware of that designation, and too ignorant to know that for many years Tesla has sold (and is currently selling) a J1722 adaptor for the Roadster.

At that point, I stopped watching.

I don't know who the narrator is, never seen him online before, but he is glib, uneducated, and clueless about his video subject.

 

Just in case anyone's interested:

Here's the accompanying article referenced by the person talking in the video – Doug DeMuro (who allegedly previously worked at Jalopnik...), titled:


"I Drove an Ultra-Rare Tesla Roadster ... And It Was Amazing"

I Drove an Ultra-Rare Tesla Roadster ... And It Was Amazing - Autotrader

 

Wonder if the owner is on this board? The article mentions "he tells me there's a great group of owners who support each other in an excellent online community". Could only be this one, right?

 

I'm amazed (and highly disappointed) at the utter junk posted for comments on YouTube. Half trolls, half would-be "coal rollers". A couple of sane comments, so perhaps there is some hope.

Doug DeMuro, if you happen by this thread, please consider doing an update to set people right. It's hard for some to put away their preconceptions about what the car is (e.g. one comment on AutoTrader trying to correct you on the range as 40 miles, not 240). Breaking that mind set was one of Tesla's main objectives in making the car.

 

The last paragraph of the written article is prescient (my bolding):

"Unfortunately, Eric told me that he thinks Tesla doesn't feel the same way. Servicing is getting harder, he says, and he's worried that someday soon they'll stop supporting it altogether. Fortunately, he tells me there's a great group of owners who support each other in an excellent online community. In fact, they're probably angrily reading this right now, eager to correct every little mistake I made. This scares me, because I know I'll never be able to outrun them."

 

"Outrun them"? I don't know what that means in this context.

My comments, posted upthread, are criticisms of the person who made the video, not of the Roadster owner. I think that on the whole, Roadster owners do support one another. I hope that Eric (that is the owner's name?) joins TMC and participates in the forums. Maybe he has and I simply don't recognize his username.

As to the comments on YouTube in response to the video "review", it is no surprise that many people who know nothing about EVs or the Tesla Roadster have posted ignorant comments.

 

I agree with many of the comments here. There were some errors made in the video (it doesn't have an "automatic" transmission, it has a "single-speed" transmission) but, whatever. It wasn't really a car review as much as it was a story about him getting to drive one. Most of Doug's videos are along this vein. He's owned several nice cars over the years (a Ferrari 360, and Aston Martin, a Range Rover, etc.) and his videos tend to talk about owning these cars in daily life, in the real world. He's not trying to convince you to buy one.

But, I think a lot of the "errors" were simply editing decisions. It's a 7-minute video, and I'd rather him spend the bulk of that 7 minutes driving it and giving me his impressions of what it's like to drive.

The problem is...a lot of the answers he gave that were "wrong" are questions that can't be answered in under 8 seconds, with 10 words or less.

How long does it take to charge? Well, that depends.
Can you charge it at any of the public charging stations? Well, that depends
How far can you go on a charge? Well, that depends
Etc, etc, etc.

I'm sure most of us here have had that same experience. People want the short answer but, it doesn't work that way. How long does it take to charge? I usually tell people "If I run it all the way down to zero, about 6 hours but, on an average day, it takes under and hour to recharge it from my round-trip run to work." But, that assumes that I've already explained to them that I've installed a dedicated 240V/50A circuit at my house.

 

Sorry, I didn't give enough information.

The article, from which that excerpt was taken, is written by the same guy that did the video: Doug DeMuro.

The "outrun them" statement refers to the idea that we Roadster owners will be chasing after him (Doug DeMuro) with our criticisms in our Roadsters.

There are comments posted to the written article, and many of those are positive and appreciative of the Roadster.

 

That Roadster I recall use to live / be owned here in California in the past year or two... I recognize it, the custom painted black cast wheels and the silver color, was posted in the for sale section here on TMC sometime back so I figure Eric bought it from that guy. Don't know if Eric drives this thing 10/12k miles per year or if its just a car he runs around locally, by the slow / limited response to the Roadster questions it seems like the latter so I don't think he had too much time, unlike some of us, owning and really getting to know this car.

With that said, I wish there were reviews made of the Roadster with senior owners who really understand, know, and can talk technical about this car as well as be able to correct the author / interviewer of the story in order to tell the true story of this unique one of a kind high performance car.

The video above wasn't a video I came out and was like, wow, that was a great video of the Roadster. It was more of an uncertain feeling type of clip, didn't throw me back with any type of high or low emotions other than, "no that wasn't correct what you said...." Even though the video came out with title and ending that the author's impression was really liking the car, watching it made me feel like he was ripping on it a bit. Don't just say there's random parts from other auto manufacturers in the car, state why Tesla did that, that if they didn't Tesla may not be around today putting resources where you don't get a good return. Again possibly if there was a senior owner, they'd guide the uninformed author in the right direction.

A nice 8 minute video done well in that fashion placed on youtube, starting with the proper way to get in and out of the Roadster to a new driver in a graceful style would be a good start. Because that's the pure beauty of this car, its graceful style and uniqueness.

 

We should also thank Eric for reaching out to Doug for the test drive. In spite of the difficulty in relating the details, the overall point of the video and article was that this is an incredible car. No argument from us on that!

 

He should have watched the official unofficial video :