I like the idea of the electric car, and I’ve generally been impressed with the style and quality commitment I see in Tesla; friends who drive Tesla cars have been very happy with them. The New York Times posted an article today about aTesla test drive which didn’t go so well, and Elon Musk, head of Tesla, used Twitter to post an allegation that the author was not being totally honest about his experience:

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn’t actually charge to max & took a long detour.

Wait a minute. Forget the question of battery performance in cold weather; that’s old news. Forget the question of whether the journalist lied – disappointing if true, but we’re not exactly talking Judith Miller-level malfeasance here. No, what really concerns me is this: what the hell are “vehicle logs”? Obviously the Tesla cars are deeply dependent on computers: are those computers infested with spyware? How much does Tesla know about what the car was doing? Is this custom spyware for demo models only or is this something they can enable for every car? Do these cars record GPS traces or something? I’m suddenly worried that the Tesla future is actually a grim police state dystopia, where anyone who gains physical access to your car can reconstruct your movements from its computer’s memory.