Jeremy Clarkson ‘declares victory’ over Elon Musk 17 years after Tesla boss sued him
Jeremy Clarkson has declared that 'victory is mine' over Elon Musk almost two decades after the Tesla boss sued him for defamation over a bad review.
Things haven't been going great for Tesla lately, with sales of the electric cars plummeting both in the US and around the world, leading Donald Trump to try and drum up support for them.
Since Tesla CEO Musk is deeply embedded within the Trump administration, his products have become tainted by association, as it were.
Musk is Trump's man and Tesla is Musk's car, so there are a lot of people who have decided they don't want anything to do with Tesla.
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One man who seems to be rather enjoying this situation is Jeremy Clarkson, who explained in a recent column for The Times that he'd been sued by Musk after he gave the Tesla Roadster a bad review on Top Gear all the way back in 2008.
Clarkson explained that he'd found the Roadster 'unreliable', with the first model he reviewed conking out after 55 miles with the brakes failing and the second overheating, and Musk had really not enjoyed that verdict, launching a lawsuit over it.
He wrote: "I said it was unreliable, which it was; that it was ridiculously expensive, which it was; and that because it weighed more than most moons, it didn’t handle very well. Which it didn’t.
"Musk was very angry about this and sued us for defamation, claiming I had a problem with electrical cars and had written the piece before even setting foot in the car.
"He lost the case, and the appeal, and he’s never really got over it. He still claims I was biased and that we pretended his car had broken down when it hadn’t. Even though it had.
"I should really have sued him back, but I feared he’d call me a paedo, so instead I just waited on the river bank for his body to float past. And now it has."
Ouch, Jeremy.
Clarkson said he was 'was always scrupulously fair with my car reviews' and was delighting in seeing Musk being 'pecked to death by the very people who put him on the pedestal in the first place'.
The Clarkson's Farm presenter's musings on 'eco-hippies' aside, it would seem as though the Venn diagram of people who are eager to usher in the age of the electric vehicle and those who are ardent supporters of Donald Trump is very far from being a perfect circle.
Musk's lawsuit against the BBC for negative publicity was dismissed in 2013, and when he spoke about the matter to Newsnight that same year, he suggested that Clarkson was not the right person to be reviewing an American electric car.
"I was surprised to learn Top Gear was even on the BBC. Clarkson's show is more about entertainment that it is about truth," Musk said back then.
"And I think most people realise that, but not everyone. I've actually enjoyed a lot of his shows so it’s not as though I just hate Top Gear or anything.
"He can be very funny and irreverent but he does have a strong bias against electric cars and particularly he seems to hate American. Like, his two pet peeves are American cars and electric cars.
"And we’re an American electric car so we're in the worst possible situation for someone like Clarkson."
The discussion over Clarkson's Roadster review was revived a few years later when Joe Rogan had Top Gear presenter Chris Harris on his podcast and accused Clarkson of doing Musk 'dirtier than anybody ever did'.
Rogan claimed the show had mocked up the Tesla Roadster's unreliability for comedic effect, something Clarkson strenuously denied.
He wrote in a column: "Talk turned to the story that I wrote a road test of the first ever Tesla before I’d driven it. And that the breakdown we showed on television was fabricated.
"Joe and Chris perpetuate the myth that my Tesla road test was unfair. On Top Gear we c**ked about and upset a lot of people over the years. But our road tests were always scrupulously fair."
Topics: Jeremy Clarkson, Elon Musk, Tesla, Top Gear, Cars
Joe Harker