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Top Gear's Richard Hammond reviews model S

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#2
he has a couple stats wrong about the car, but for it being an overly positive review I will let it slide! Especially since they gave the Roadster such a harsh review in the past. I am really looking forward to when they show it in Top Gear! (The UK one... since that is really the only Top Gear that actually matters)
 
#5
Merrill said:
Yes an overall positive article but it always amazes me that these journalists cannot get there facts straight when writing an article. As far as I know there is no 80kWh pack.
Click to expand...

If you look at the end of the article, they address it as 85kwh. So the issue is not a mistake with research but most likely a typo when typing up 60kwh they most likely accidentally wrote 80kwh. But then again, they should have editors that check these things.
 
#6
evme said:
If you look at the end of the article, they address it as 85kwh. So the issue is not a mistake with research but most likely a typo when typing up 60kwh they most likely accidentally wrote 80kwh. But then again, they should have editors that check these things.
Click to expand...

If anything, I'm impressed by the level of accuracy. Put it this way: I've seen many articles written about products I've developed, and if the worst error in a review was an 80 vs. an 85, I'd be ecstatic.

The worst: 20 years ago, I worked on a supercomputer whose launch was covered by the local news. The anchor described it as having "31 jiggaflops of memory". The amount of wrong packed into that sentence is impressive: it's giga, not jigga; FLOPs are floating point operations, not memory capacity; and the machine we built didn't have 31 of anything.
 
#7
The thing about a lot of general journalists is that their brains kind of melt when writing about technical things (even some of the more "technical" oriented journalists can get things wrong, like the frequent mix-up between "kW" and "kWh" for example). They can even get things wrong when it's written on the spec sheet. It's also not caught in editing because it doesn't stick out as something wrong to the editor either (unlike grammar or word choice for example).
 
#9
flashflood said:
If anything, I'm impressed by the level of accuracy. Put it this way: I've seen many articles written about products I've developed, and if the worst error in a review was an 80 vs. an 85, I'd be ecstatic.

The worst: 20 years ago, I worked on a supercomputer whose launch was covered by the local news. The anchor described it as having "31 jiggaflops of memory". The amount of wrong packed into that sentence is impressive: it's giga, not jigga; FLOPs are floating point operations, not memory capacity; and the machine we built didn't have 31 of anything.
Click to expand...

Don't tell us it had 42 of everything? :)
 
#10
A journalist family member was writing an article on some new fangled commercial oven - he couldn't even cook and had hardly ever seen a kitchen!

When I challenged him he said that he could read the maker's bumf; research the internet; chat to a few cooks and so on and presto an article in some trade magazine.

The mind boggles..............

I think it is called 'research'!
 
#12
stopcrazypp said:
The thing about a lot of general journalists is that their brains kind of melt when writing about technical things (even some of the more "technical" oriented journalists can get things wrong, like the frequent mix-up between "kW" and "kWh" for example). They can even get things wrong when it's written on the spec sheet. It's also not caught in editing because it doesn't stick out as something wrong to the editor either (unlike grammar or word choice for example).
Click to expand...

I was going to mention just that, the confusion that will never end between kW and kWh. Especially for electric cars and solar panels, this will always confuse some - like journalists, politicians and 6th-graders.
 
#13
I remember Clarkson joking that Hammond wishes he were American. He is interested in muscle cars. He owns a 69 Charger. When they did their US sports car drive, salt flat drag, I think he went for the new Charger. When they did a US drive in cheap old cars he went for a pick-up.

So a large performance sedan from the USA should be right up his alley.
 
#14
stopcrazypp said:
The thing about a lot of general journalists is that their brains kind of melt when writing about technical things (even some of the more "technical" oriented journalists can get things wrong, like the frequent mix-up between "kW" and "kWh" for example). They can even get things wrong when it's written on the spec sheet. It's also not caught in editing because it doesn't stick out as something wrong to the editor either (unlike grammar or word choice for example).
Click to expand...

Was don't journalists simply develop sources or contacts who will browse their articles for stupid errors? Not content maybe but simple things like the 80 vs 85kWh bit. Heck I bet even media relations at Tesla would look over major news articles and say what typos or errors they found. The journalist could then check with an independent source to see if Tesla was telling the truth or maybe even consult Google. That probably takes time that they don't want to take though.
 
#15
dsm363 said:
don't journalists simply develop sources or contacts who will browse their articles for stupid errors
Click to expand...
I've had a conversation with someone recently about journalists nowadays (local news reporters), and I think they have it tough too. Unless they can find someone to do it for free, their bosses likely won't pay for this. Basically a lot of journalists have to do plenty of extra work themselves nowadays. This includes video recording, sound recording, and editing of clips and images (something that in the past was handled exclusively by other people).

And I believe that there used to be dedicated fact checkers at media organizations (which would handle the fact checking part independent of the journalists and grammar related editing), but that might be in decline too.
 
#16
stopcrazypp said:
I've had a conversation with someone recently about journalists nowadays (local news reporters), and I think they have it tough too. Unless they can find someone to do it for free, their bosses likely won't pay for this. Basically a lot of journalists have to do plenty of extra work themselves nowadays. This includes video recording, sound recording, and editing of clips and images (something that in the past was handled exclusively by other people).
Click to expand...

In what will seem a long time ago to many people, many positions (even positions like sales) had either secretaries or secretarial pools to do the typing, letter writing, trip planning, etc. With the advent of personal computers, those went away and now often more than half the job consists of doing work that was formerly done by a secretary. While it saves money in salaries, I wonder if it's actually more efficient as the person is often not doing the job they were hired to do.
 
#17
stopcrazypp said:
I've had a conversation with someone recently about journalists nowadays (local news reporters), and I think they have it tough too. Unless they can find someone to do it for free, their bosses likely won't pay for this. Basically a lot of journalists have to do plenty of extra work themselves nowadays. This includes video recording, sound recording, and editing of clips and images (something that in the past was handled exclusively by other people).

And I believe that there used to be dedicated fact checkers at media organizations (which would handle the fact checking part independent of the journalists and grammar related editing), but that might be in decline too.
Click to expand...

That makes sense. They are time pressured and resource constrained. Some of the errors though seem a little odd especially when they can be found on Tesla's own website.
 
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