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Slate Technology

What Next TBD: Tesla's Big Lie

Slate Technology

Slate

Society & Culture, Technology, History

4.6636 Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tesla sold a vision of how electric vehicles would work: just like gas-powered cars, but cleaner, better. But as a scandal about misrepresented battery life and driving range unfolds, and the price of their cars remains high, it increasingly looks like the transition will be anything but seamless—if it happens at all.  Guest: Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors. You can check out Reuters reporting on Tesla’s range scandal here.  If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

I made you think you was real.

0:02.0

My name is Caden Sinclair.

0:04.0

Some people call us American royalty.

0:06.0

We were Liars.

0:08.0

A new series on Prime Video.

0:10.0

We were happy. We wanted for nothing.

0:12.0

Based on the best-selling novel.

0:15.0

Something terrible happened last summer,

0:17.0

and I have no memory of what or who hurt me.

0:20.0

No one in my family will tell me.

0:22.7

When you're left for dead, you want answers. We were liars. New series, watch now, only on

0:28.9

Prime Video.

0:36.9

On Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Edward Niedermeyer took a drive down the West Coast.

0:43.3

Edward covers cars, and he drove from his home in Oregon to a place called Harris Ranch, California.

0:50.0

It's roughly halfway between San Francisco and L.A.

0:53.5

Kind of in the middle of nowhere, and I spent four days sort of smelling cow poop, you know, out in the Central Valley, waiting to see if this thing would be used.

1:02.3

This thing that Edward is referring to is a battery swap.

1:06.4

Tesla was advertising that you could drive up and swap out the empty battery in your car and get a full new one swapped in, in minutes, which would solve one of the main annoyances of driving electric cars.

1:19.6

It takes a lot longer than a gas-powered vehicle to charge.

1:23.6

I started to talk to people, asked them if they did that drive often.

1:26.9

Many of them did. None of them had said that Tesla had reached out to them to let them use this swap system as Tesla said they had. And so I asked them, you know, would you like to be able to use this? Is this something you would pay? And they said, sure, you know, I'm sitting here waiting for one or two more cars in front of me. Each one of those is going to take an hour to charge and it'll take me almost an hour to charge. I'd pay almost any amount, you know,

1:47.6

to swap my battery in and get going. But as Edward sat there, it became clear that Tesla was not

...

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