I'm not angry at Tesla, though I did cancel my preorder after their response to the NYT. I also had the opportunity to ride in one, and it was a depressingly sub-par quality car for the price.
But in this case: at the time of the NYT article, Tesla's PR department was operating on hair-trigger reaction mode: even the slightest critical comment would send them into overdrive in response. They've since learned about the Streisand effect, and no longer respond to criticism in the way they did before. (This is likely because Musk no longer directly oversees the day-to-day of their marketing.)
As for the trip logs: it's not just the NYT trip. It was every time there was an accident involving a Tesla. Or a negative review. Even Tesla's response to the Consumer Reports review included information from the CR vehicle's trip logs, even though CR acquired those vehicles from third parties. The problem isn't that Tesla is logging the cars (most new cars do), the problem is how Tesla is using that data in ways that violate cultural (and in the case of Europe, legal) norms regarding privacy.
Finally, as to "a lot of potential customers," I count more than a few dozen in LA alone across a number of industries. Jaguar has seen the biggest windfall in terms of putative Tesla buyers switching to the iPace, followed by the BMW. A lot of the rest are simply waiting until the next generation of EVs and are sticking with their current luxury/mid-range vehicles. I am aware that on an absolute basis a few dozen customers isn't much, but it's a few dozen potential customers in the market segement most likely to buy and evangelize their cars.
Hey, sorry but I posted a reply right as you were writing yours, I even refreshed before to make sure you hadn't replied yet but looks like we began at around the same time. I just want to say that it does look like there are real issues now, and I think you did your own valid concerns a disservice in the original post by not having some more details and keeping things more measured. Remember a lot of us don't follow any of this that closely, and after a long time on the net have developed an innate distrustful response (reasonable or not!) for any usage of things like calling fans "fanatics." Even in this post:
>even the slightest critical comment
But I mean, I wouldn't categorize something like that NYT piece as "the slightest critical comment" it was pretty brutal. Maybe correctly, but not nothing. Same with the Top Gear, though since that's more a comedy show it shouldn't be an expectation (but I think a lot of Americans at least don't know that). Unless you can really link to something showing say a bunch of random owners doing little blogs or tweets along the lines of "the color wasn't quite what I expected" or "range is overall fine but a few miles lower then was represented" resulted an "overdrive response" your argument would be stronger if you just stuck to a basic "negative reviews". And as far as the "a lot of potential customers" you must realize that we've all seen the anecdote/data thing a ton of times right and a few dozen out of hundreds of thousands of sales and an enormous backlog of demand kind of seems not very compelling either? Particularly given all the confounding factors of their genuine other fuckups?
Anyway, that's all. I'm not saying you're wrong to be critical, but I don't think you did as good a job of it as you could have.
But in this case: at the time of the NYT article, Tesla's PR department was operating on hair-trigger reaction mode: even the slightest critical comment would send them into overdrive in response. They've since learned about the Streisand effect, and no longer respond to criticism in the way they did before. (This is likely because Musk no longer directly oversees the day-to-day of their marketing.)
As for the trip logs: it's not just the NYT trip. It was every time there was an accident involving a Tesla. Or a negative review. Even Tesla's response to the Consumer Reports review included information from the CR vehicle's trip logs, even though CR acquired those vehicles from third parties. The problem isn't that Tesla is logging the cars (most new cars do), the problem is how Tesla is using that data in ways that violate cultural (and in the case of Europe, legal) norms regarding privacy.
Finally, as to "a lot of potential customers," I count more than a few dozen in LA alone across a number of industries. Jaguar has seen the biggest windfall in terms of putative Tesla buyers switching to the iPace, followed by the BMW. A lot of the rest are simply waiting until the next generation of EVs and are sticking with their current luxury/mid-range vehicles. I am aware that on an absolute basis a few dozen customers isn't much, but it's a few dozen potential customers in the market segement most likely to buy and evangelize their cars.