Before you read the article, watch the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPltV7Dk7Ck
Of course, I guess there’s no wonder seeing the face of a fun-making, disappointed Clarkson and an electric car, since they shot a Prius with an automatic rifle and claimed that Tesla’s Roadster is less of a ride than Elon Musk says it is.
Now, filming for a new series of their Top Gear show, petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson and his crew apparently rode a Nissan Leaf for 30 miles until the battery ran out, only to show how they don’t believe electric cars are the future, and have some spectators push the car to the nearest wall socket, at the University of Lincoln.
On the other hand, a Nissan Leaf’s battery couldn’t have lasted for only 30 miles, as these guys pretended, and neither would the car stop working without giving any warning, since its sat-nav system and on-board computer are heavily involved in communicating the driver when to charge, or how many miles can the car be driven with the current charge.
Ben Webster of The Times had said about the “experiment” that “at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip.” He also notes that Clarkson and May had been seen running the battery down before they had filmed any of the scenes.
Are Clarkson and his otherwise entertaining Top Gear crew trying to create a false image to the unknowing public about electric and hybrid cars, in general? Are they being paid by oil companies to shift the attention of their 350 million viewers from the electric car market towards fuel-sipping beasts such as Bugattis or Ferraris? Or is it just their ever-older pleasure of contradicting everything new, such as the electric car, still in its early infancy?
Whatever the answer, it surely doesn’t do any good to anyone’s green consciousness to see flagship figures of the BBC joking around a technology that was meant to actually save the world from oil addiction, and save the economies of countries that depend on the damned black fossil liquid.
I personally admire these guys’ flair and sense of humor, but I’m really sick of them trashing every new electric car that comes to the market once in a while.
Whatever the starting charge was for the cars in the scene, one thing is evident the cars take waaaaaay to long to charge for a roadtrip.