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Tesla Model S Owners Successfully Recreate Broder’s “Failed” Trip

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Tesla Model S Owners Road Trip Group - Success!
Tesla Model S Owners Road Trip Group – Success!

After CNN did the story where one of their reporters successfully finished the famous “Broder” trip in a Tesla Model S, now a pack of actual owners want to defend its reputation, too.

I would say that this is adding more fuel to the fire, but that just doesn’t make any sense, considering that the Tesla Model S is an electric vehicle. Instead, we could say that anyone with an opinion on electric vehicles is getting charged up over a recent story that appeared in The New York Times.

If you’d like to read up on it, you can check out the original story here, as well we our recent coverage, starting here, here, and here. You can also read Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s brilliant response on his blog.

This isn’t the end of the story, though, and I wonder how much further it’s going to go before it burns out. After reviewer John Broder left his mud on the wall, a number of other people rushed to wash it off, proving that a test drive from Washington, DC to Boston, MA would be done in no less than a Tesla Model S and the newly installed Tesla Supercharger Network. Peter Valdez-Dapena of CNN Money managed with no problems. “I wasn’t even trying that hard,” Dapena quipped at the end of his test drive.

Could a group of Tesla Model S owners do the same, just to prove a point? The main group of six Model S owners made the trip successfully, at times joined by up to six other Model S owners along the way. They even coined a new term, which I hope will find its way into the lexicon, perhaps to the shame of its namesake. Brodering – the act of “running out of power due to human error, or generally dropping the ball when dealing with electric cars.” Oxford and Webster, if the word “duh” can make it into the dictionary, then surely “brodering” can.

The official Tesla Road Trip group tweeted at the end of their journey, “The trip was a success and everyone has diverted to their homes.” On the other hand, the Atlantic Wire [AW] criticized CNN Money’s road trip recreation, saying it was done “in a Tesla-controlled PR bubble,” that is, it only proves that it can be done, but doesn’t really say much for owners of the vehicle. Electric vehicle owners “might not want to drive it up the coast without going above 65 miles per hour or, on a particularly bitter day, turning the heat up,” continued AW.

The fact of the matter is, “there is a learning curve to taking long road trips in an EV, especially in the cold,” as Mr. Musk pointed out in his blog. I am loathe to point out, too, that driving over 65mph ruins your fuel economy in any vehicle, and saves you minutes at best. If you feel the need for speed, then you’ve missed the point altogether, and should stick to trains, plains, and conventional automobiles. Don’t worry, we’ll save some carbon dioxide emissions for you.

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