Hatin’ On The Tesla Model S Seems To Be An Edmunds Pastime
Update: Based on some comments, I figured it was worth adding some extra notes:
1) Not every Tesla article on Edmunds is negative. I didn’t say that, of course. I was simply shocked (as were others) at how many articles are negative. The article below is my representation of the things that stood out to me as I scrolled through the top & bottom of Edmunds’ long-term Tesla Model S review.
2) Of course, it also seems that Edmunds got dealt some rather abnormal and unfortunate problems with its car (which I don’t discuss at all below). But I don’t think that has any relation to the most recent articles, and it certainly doesn’t have any relation to the first articles in the long-term review. And objective technical problems don’t really relate to subjective dislikes, which is what many of the articles seem to be focused on. That’s a different matter completely.
3) Notably, several different writers wrote the articles of which I took screenshots (of titles and excerpts) and shared below. I don’t assume there’s any kind of conspiracy at Edmunds — I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m just very surprised at how much the Edmunds crew doesn’t like its Tesla Model S.
On to the original article…
I’m completely aware that people can have their own preferences and opinions, but one of my friends (and a regular CleanTechnica reader) recently noticed that the crew at Edmunds has quite the negative opinion of the Tesla Model S… despite the car being pretty widely considered the best mass-manufactured car in the world. Of course, some auto journalists think their job is just to nitpick and give “surprisingly critical” views on cars. But it’s hard not to think that some people at Edmunds are on the wrong side of Tesla stock.
If you jump over to the Edmunds long-term Tesla Model S road test, the most recent posts are all very obviously negative. Here are titles and excerpts for the three most recent:
And this one is a bit funny: apparently, the writer had run down a list of things missing from the Model S and accidentally included the Homelink universal garage door opener. So, to fix the matter, the writer followed up with an article about how the Homelink is too complicated.
Now, I really didn’t want to assume the worst, so I thought, “Well, they probably covered all the awesome stuff right at the beginning, and now they’re just covering surprising problems they find in order to get people’s attention and have something new to say.” So, I scrolled down to the first articles in the “long-term road test” archives. Surprisingly, they were also very negative. Just look at the titles:
Well, that’s one way to start a long-term review of the Tesla Model S.
Frankly, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but it’s sort of odd that the car with the highest customers satisfaction rating according to Consumer Reports, and also the highest rating ever given by the Consumer Reports staff, seems to be such a pain in the butt to Edmunds staff.
Via Mr Energy Czar
Top image via Tesla Motors. All other images are screenshots of Edmunds.com pages.
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