I can see why they’d be pissed about that.

The initial case was about the roadster likely having a 55 mile range on a track. Which was judged to be true.

Musk was pissed about Top Gear pointing it out, but it wasn’t a lie.

The judge concluded that no reasonable viewer would equate range on a track, with range in normal daily driving.

I think many viewers got a different impression.

We didn’t. That’s a lie told by Tesla, who misrepresented what the case was actually about, and was parrotted by the tesla cult.

I watched it at the time. It was clearly a dramatisation to illustrate a point, and no viewer would have reasonably thought otherwise.

They correctly pointed out the range would be low on a track. They illustrated this by showing the car run out of battery. That’s how entertainment shows work.

That’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of the judge after Musk sued twice, and lost twice.

And you have to remember that UK libel laws notoriously favour the plaintiff:

English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright. In the United States, the 2010 SPEECH Act makes foreign libel judgements unenforceable and unrecognisable by U.S. courts if they don’t comply with U.S. protections for freedom of speech and due process, which was made largely in response to the English laws. The Defamation Act 2013 substantially reformed English defamation law in recognition of these concerns, by strengthening the criteria for a successful claim, mandating evidence of actual or probable harm, and enhancing the scope of existing defences for website operators, public interest, and privileged publications.

So much so, that the US introduced a law to make English judgements unenforceable and the law was eventually changed exactly because it was unbalanced.

Of course, if you go to tesla’s website, you’ll still find an article about the 55 mile range on a track being incorrect.

Unsurprisingly, that’s a lie. As it turns out, they lied about the range of their cars then, and they’re still doing it now:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tesla-exaggerated-ev-range-so-much-that-drivers-thought-cars-were-broken/

I just don’t get why people defend Tesla. No one would defend Hyundai if they lied about the Ioniq’s range.