Let me get this out of the way up front: This blog post will not be the definitive word on the contentious subject of a Times article in Sunday’s Automobiles section. It’s just an early effort to put some claims and counterclaims out there, while I continue to look into it.

I will keep reporting on this, and, for now, am simply telling readers what I know so far.

John M. Broder set out to test drive the Tesla S Model electric car with a trip up the East Coast, starting in suburban Washington. His trip ended unsuccessfully, he wrote – so unsuccessfully that the car made one of the last parts of its journey on a flatbed truck.

He wrote: “The Model S has won multiple car-of-the-year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet. What fun, no? Well, no.”

Elon Musk, the chief executive of the Tesla car company, strongly disagrees about what happened. In a blog post Wednesday night, he used the driving logs to state that Mr. Broder misrepresented what happened on the test drive.

“Our Model S never had a chance with John Broder,” he wrote

Mr. Musk said that, along the way, Mr. Broder unplugged the car before it was fully charged, drove faster than he claimed and drove around in circles to deliberately run down the battery.

And, he added, “He simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.” Mr. Musk released screen shots of the car driving logs to reinforce his points.

Mr. Broder’s article was certainly negative for Tesla. And Mr. Musk’s contentions are devastating ones for any journalist.

I will be interviewing Mr. Broder later on Thursday. When I reached him earlier, he said that he and his editors were working on a point-by-point response to Mr. Musk’s blog that would appear on The Times’s Wheels blog. An earlier post on that blog made an initial response on the matter, but that predated Mr. Musk’s release of the logs. I’ll link to the new post when it’s available.

Mr. Musk has not returned my call, made at about noon on Thursday. I eventually intend to ask him to fully release and “open source” the driving logs, along with whatever other data might be necessary for better understanding and interpretation.

Here is a discussion on Reddit.

And here is an article from Wired, and another from Forbes.

There will be more to come.



UPDATES: This piece from The Atlantic Wire questions the validity of Mr. Musk’s assertions and his use of the data. Many of the commenters, though, disagree with the article. By late afternoon, I had tried two more times to reach Mr. Musk, to no avail.

Mr. Broder’s detailed response to Mr. Musk’s accusations has been posted on The Times’s Wheels blog. I hope to post again Friday with some conclusions, but for now, based on a day’s reporting, I will say this much: I reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s Sunday piece was faked to sabotage the Model S or the electric car industry.