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Top Gear Responds to Tesla Accusations

Before we start discussing what Top Gear has stated, let’s just re-familiarize ourselves with what this is all about. Tesla Motors claims that the famous car show bent the truth a bit in the seventh episode of the twelfth season. According to the Californian carmaker, the episode misinformed viewers about the Roadster’s performance, behavior and most importantly the reliability. As a result, it has accused Top Gear of defamation and malicious falsehood.

In response to the accusations, Andy Wilman – Executive Producer of Top Gear – responded with an extensive story making a clear statement, pointing out “out one or two things to Top Gear viewers”.

First off, he discussed the whole issue about the limited range the car got on the test track, saying that the 55-mile limitations came not from their hands, but from Tesla’s engineers. “They looked at the data from that car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a range of 55 miles,” Wilman says.

"The first point here is that the track is where we do our tests of sports cars and supercars, as has happened ever since Top Gear existed. This is where cars are driven fast and hard, and since Tesla calls its roadster “The Supercar. Redefined.” it seemed pretty logical to us that the right test was a track test,” the executive producer says.

The second important reliability issue focuses on the broken braking system, about which Wilman says: “Tesla claims we were lying when we said the brakes were “broken”. They now say that all that had happened was that the fuse to the vacuum pump had failed, which meant that the brake just had to be pushed down much harder than usual. Well – to my mind, if the brakes are broken, then they’re broken, and if this happened to your car, you’d take it to the garage to get it fixed. Odd it seems so trivial to Tesla now, because on the day of filming they insisted on repairing the fuse before we could carry on driving the car.”

We think Tesla has taken things a bit too seriously. Top Gear always speaks its mind about everything and electric cars are definitely not Clarkson’s favorite, but the show wasn’t negative about the Tesla.
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About the author: Mihnea Radu
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Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida.
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