Aside from press releases we receive via email (we get a lot!), I scan over 100 sources in order to find “the biggest” or “most interesting” stories I can for our team to cover. One of those sources is the Tesla Motors Club forum. Just after Christmas, I noticed a post that included two new Elon Musk tweets. I saved it for later, but when I went back to it, Twitter said the tweets didn’t exist. In other words, they were deleted. “Odd,” I thought. “Wonder what they said.” Soon after, I found another post on the forum referencing them and discussing why they had gone missing. The discussion brought other matters too — most importantly, range of the P85D. A lot of the comments were negative/critical in nature, painting the picture of a brewing storm.
You can find the screenshots of the deleted tweets at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to the forum thread, but first, I’ve got info from Tesla and thoughts of my own that I think are important lead-ins.
I reached out to my main contact at Tesla Motors (the car and battery company, not the club and forum), asking about the tweets and the range issue that was being discussed. I wasn’t actually planning to write a story, since I figured that the tweets were just a bit premature and the matters they referenced as well as the range issues would be dealt with in an upcoming Tesla blog post or press release. However, I wanted to be ready to cover the story the best that I could in the case that others picked up on it and gave a warped view of things. Luckily, I haven’t seen any such stories, but with the information provided to me and a Tesla blog post published today by Tesla CTO JB Straubel, I’ve decided this is worth covering anyway.
My nice and helpful contact at Tesla told me: “The tweets were correct; no deletion necessary.” She added that she wasn’t sure why Elon pulled them. I’m going with the idea that, while true, Elon didn’t want to bring too much confusion or premature attention to the topic, preferring to wait until more complete announcements were made about the topic on hand. (There’s only so much info a couple of tweets can provide, and then they stimulate massive speculation and premature questions from the media, owners, investors, and fanbois & girls.)
The first tweet was from December 23, and it dealt with a range topic that has apparently been a bit controversial. Basically, owners of the new Tesla Model S P85D who previously owned or still own a Tesla P85+ have noticed that the P85D doesn’t have nearly as much range as the P85+. Elon’s tweet said that a software update would soon bring the range of the P85D into very close alignment with the range of the P85+.
source: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/12/30/elon-musk-deleted-tweets-tesla-range/
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