Early in December we finally had the opportunity to have all of the top car magazines put the Tesla through its paces on the roads of northern California. This was a major milestone for Tesla in that, for the first time, we were handing over the keys to third parties who were not customers and letting them experience the car first hand. (I wrote a blog about it during the first day’s testing and while I revisit some of the same themes here, I’ve included a heckuva lot more eye candy to make it go down easy.).
For a new car company building a breakthrough product, this is no small thing. Tesla has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of attention for being the first to put forth the vision that a car can be zero-emissions and also a beautiful, fun car to drive. In the time since the unveiling of the early prototypes on July 19th, 2006 we have seen that trend catch on with the mainstream automotive manufacturers. In fact, the dirty little secret of the marketing department is that we rarely ever actually pitch a story to the media. The amount of incoming requests greatly exceeds our capacity to handle them. What we end up doing is triaging incoming opportunities and supporting those that make sense for what we are trying to get accomplished (it’s harder than it sounds. 
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I may have marketing in my title but I can assure you it is a team effort managing all of the interest in the company – and that extends well beyond the marketing team to the engineers and other employees of Tesla.
This was all well and good in the early stages of the company, but the hard truth is that eventually you need to “put up or shut up” and deliver a great car to your customers. No amount of good press means anything if the product you build is not up to expectations.
So in the context of last fall, with a schedule delay and a leadership transition, handing over the keys to some pretty hard-nosed journalists was one part excitement, two parts anxiety. Many of us who drive the car have developed a sense of confidence that it is a great car, but of course we might be a bit biased . Some additional confidence was built up by our customer drive program, where over 100 customers drove the car.The response from our customers was great, but our customers are also a very passionate bunch of visionaries and progressive-minded people. What would the mainstream automotive press make of our Tesla Roadster?
The week of drives went very well, aside from the fact that the weather was nasty for all except Motor Trend. Each day consisted of several hours of driving, with both VP10 with a fixed gear transmission and VP9 with the 2-speed unit. After the drive, the journalists had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with the key engineers of the various subsystems of the car so that they could get the straight dope from the engineers (see photo below).
All of the journalists thought this aspect was great and some of them were like kids in a candy store, asking highly detailed technical questions and getting straight answers from the folks who actually do the design and manufacturing.At the end of the week we could all breathe a sigh of relief but the fact was we wouldn’t actually get a chance to see what was written for about 2 months. That kind of wait in today’s world of instant feedback is torture, but what can you do?
Resting at Alice’s Restaurant
“Well,” said some bloggers eager to try the car out, “you could just let us drive the car.” But the irony of the situation was that in a world where the internet and blogging has played such an important part in the development of the Tesla brand, it was actually the right decision to work with the traditional, long lead media (hence the title of this blog) to get our message out to the mainstream customer who still relies on the judgment and skill of the established automotive journalists like Csaba Csere, Editor-in-chief of Car & Driver.
Chat with Csaba
I made the decision to work with the long lead times of the traditional print media and refrain from offering the car up for test drives with bloggers until such time that the print magazines were about to hit the stands. The way I see it, for Tesla to become accepted into the mainstream as a legitimate car company, we need to offer the type of mainstream validation that comes with being in the pages of the magazines that most of our customers grew up with and still read.
Kissing cousins?
For all the talk of the death of old media, there is still value in the quality of journalism, trust built by decades of service, and the tactile look, feel and smell of a magazine in your hands as you read about the new car of your dreams. Besides, we will have plenty of time to let everyone drive the cars now that the magazines are hitting the stands.
Foggy Lane in Half Moon Bay
So here we are, with the first of the reviews from Motor Trend, AutoWeek and Road & Track hitting the web. I think the articles are great and I look forward to reading and seeing all the print versions! I heartily recommend going to the store and buying up all the copies (P.S. I heard a rumor we will be the cover of Automobile Magazine. If it is one of the shots they took of VP9 on a foggy lane in Half Moon Bay, it will be a beauty!)
Update: With the recent news about our plan for mass production with a higher powered, single speed drivetrain, it raises the important point of how the cars tested in these articles will be different from what is ultimately going to be delivered to customers. From the perspective of performance testing, I actually believe that our numbers will improve. The 0-60 should remain the same at about 4 seconds (which is the result that Motor Trend achieved). Where you will see significant improvement is in quarter mile times. With the lack of a shift and a better torque curve in the midrange (which in our motor would be defined as 6-10,000 rpm) we should see a much improved quarter mile times.
