Remember when Tesla tried to sue Top Gear?

11/03/2024 12:00 AM

It’s hard to believe that just over a decade ago, Tesla was still experimenting with its first production car, the Roadster. Way before Elon Musk was an outspoken household name, he was just a man with a dream to start a futurist car company.

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Before the Model S, 3, X, and Y, there was the Roadster. At its core, the Roadster was an electric vehicle based on the Lotus Elise chassis released to the public in 2008.

It was an impressive foray into early EV technology, with a claimed 0–100km/h time of 3.7 seconds, a top speed of 201km/h, and a claimed range of 393km.

Enter Top Gear, one of the most-watched shows in the world at the time. The British program was hosted by motoring journalists Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.

Known for testing the most premium and of-the-moment cars, the Roadster was perfect fodder for the show, and it wasn’t long before Jeremy Clarkson took it to the test track in Season 11, Episode 7 of Top Gear in 2008.

Clarkson first commended the Roadster, saying, “This car is biblically quick” and “Not bad for an engine the size of a watermelon and only has one moving part”.

Clarkson went on to mention the difference in costs between putting petrol in the Elise and charging up the Roadster, and even went so far as to demonstrate that the Roadster was much quicker than the Lotus upon which it was based.

He specifically mentioned Tesla’s claim that even if you drive quickly, you should be able to travel 200 miles (321km) between charges.

Clarkson then continued to compare the Roadster’s handling to the Elise, complaining that the Roadster did not tackle the track as well as the Elise due to its weight and tyre set-up.

All was going well, and Clarkson was enjoying the car until it suddenly stopped on the track.

At that point,Clarksonsaid: “Although Tesla says it’ll do 200 miles (321km), we worked out that it’ll run out after just 55 miles (88km). And if it does run out, it’s not a quick job to charge it up again”.

He further noted that it takes 16 hours to recharge the Roadster instead of the matter of minutes it takes to refuel a petrol car.

While discussing how expensive the Roadster was, Clarkson added: “It seems like you don’t get much in terms of reliability”.

The Roadster then stopped for a second time on the track due to an overheating motor. The Top Gear team then pulled out the second Roadster they had on hand, “only to find out that the brakes had broken”.

“I did think that the Teslas would bring a bit of peace and quiet to the track; I didn’t think it would be this much peace and quiet, though,” Clarkson joked, walking down an empty track with no working cars.

“What we have here is an astonishing technical achievement, the first electric car that you might actually want to buy. It’s just a shame in the real world it doesn’t seem to work.

“I tried to be fair, it just doesn’t work. Once they make a few of them, the reliability may get a bit better.”

Why did Elon Musk sue Top Gear?

When you’re a brand-new car manufacturer, the last thing you want or need is the number-one automotive show saying your car is “unreliable”.

And so, Elon Musk and Tesla launched a legal assault on Top Gear, suing the BBC for libel in March 2011, with the case reaching the high court.

Tesla accused Top Gear of staging the Roadster running out of charge, with a spokesperson for the company tellingThe New York Timesin 2008 that the vehicles never dipped below 20 per cent charge when the show was in possession of the two cars.

The car maker also said it had an issue with Top Gear characterising the blown fuse as a brake failure and claiming that the vehicle was immobile as a result of overheating.

As reported by The Guardian at the time, Tesla sought damages from the broadcaster, claiming it had seen a “continuing impact” on sales from what was said in the episode, which included the sale of 200 Roadsters and $US171,000 [$AUD260,000] in investor damages.

Years later, Elon Musk claimed in a podcast with Joe Rogan that the episode had been scripted before Tesla even dropped off the Roadster.

“One of my engineers goes and delivers the car, and he sees a script on the table; how can you write the script? We only just gave you the car. And in the script, the car breaks down,” claims Musk.

“The car never broke down, they just pretended that it did. Their [Top Gear] objection was that ‘this is just entertainment, it’s not meant to be true’.”

Clarkson later claimed that the show never said the Teslas ran out of charge in a 2008 column for The Telegraph.

"We never said once that the car had run out of power," said Clarkson.

"The car had to be pushed into the warehouse because you are not allowed to drive cars into a building… We calculated that it would have run out of power after 53 miles, but they can't argue with that because that is a fact."

The Guardian reported in a 2013 story that Tesla later admitted in the court case the vehicle had suffered a fault due to a blown fuse, but was unhappy that Top Gear had characterised the issue as a brake failure, and maintained that the cars never ran out of charge.

In 2011, High Court Justice Tugendhat ruled that no viewer would compare the Tesla Roadster’s performance on the racetrack to its performance on a public road.

“In my judgment, the words complained of are wholly incapable of conveying any meaning at all to the effect that the claimant misled anyone,” Tugendhat said.

“This is because there is a contrast between the style of driving and the nature of the track as compared with the conditions on a public road… are so great that no reasonable person could understand that the performance on the track is capable of a direct comparison with a public road,” Tugendhat was quoted as saying in 2011.

The court proceedings continued for many years as Tesla launched an appeal to the verdict. In 2013, Tesla was ordered to pay £100,000 [$AUD 200,000] to the BBC in legal fees.

In the appeal, judge Lord Justice Moore-Bick ruled that it was unlikely Tesla suffered losses directly due to the Top Gear episode.

“In my view, the case pleaded in support of the claim for special damages is, to say the least, very thin on its own terms,” Moore-Bick said in 2013, according to The Guardian.

“Moreover, on the basis of the material currently before the court, I do not think that there is any real prospect of Tesla’s being able to demonstrate at trial that it has suffered any quantifiable loss by reason of any of the actionable statements.”

Following the episode, Tesla never reappeared on the show until Jeremy Clarkson was sacked, triggering the resignation of Producer Andrew Wilman and co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May.

When the BBC began running Top Gear with a new selection of hosts and producers, Tesla models started to appear on the show once again.

Since then, Richard Hammond has managed to test a Model S for a written review in The Mirror and Clarkson reviewed a Model X in his new show, The Grand Tour. Both vehicles were obtained from an outside source that was not directly related to Tesla.

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