What’s the value of driving around in circles? Arguably, about a million dollars.

Tesla Motors was founded in Silicon Valley and funded in part by a $465MM loan from the federal government.  Touted as the greatest hope for the future of electric vehicles, Tesla has created gorgeous, hi-tech cars that perform like Ferraris and travel over 200 miles on a single electric charge. Unfortunately, for folks who live in the Northeast, where there are very few public charging points, a Tesla has never been a viable option. But then, in January, several electric charging stations were unveiled in the northeast corridor. To mark this development, Tesla loaned a cherry-red Tesla S (MSRP: $100,000) to the New York Times for their review. The Times assigned reporter John Broder to take the car for a drive up I-95.

And that’s when things got really chilly. Broder began his journey with a full charge in Newark, DE, and headed north on a 30-degree day. Almost immediately, the Driving Range figure on the car’s computer started to plunge so fast that Broder feared he wouldn’t make it to his next charge. He called Tesla, and they told him to slow down, turn off the cruise control, and turn down the heat. By conserving electricity he barely made it – cold and grumpy – to the Milford CT service area. After charging for an hour, Broder continued north to Stonington, where he stopped for the night. The Driving Range indicator read 79 miles. But after being parked in the cold overnight, in the morning the Tesla’s Driving Range read only 25 miles remaining, not enough to get Broder back to Milford. So he had to detour 11 miles and sit for an hour in a greasy diner while the car charged again.   And even after that, when Broder headed back down 95, the Tesla’s batteries failed him, and he wound up completely drained on the side of the Branford CT off-ramp.

Broder’s resulting article in the Times was a blistering indictment of the vehicle, complete with a picture of it being loaded onto a flatbed tow truck, entitled, “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway.”

Oh boy, what happens when you mess with folks from Silicon Valley? They bury you under a mountain of nasty data. The Tesla folks checked the car’s on-board computer and then booked an interview with Bloomberg TV. Armed with their statistics, they called Broder’s story a fake, claimed he had traveled faster than he said, that he’d made detours, that he hadn’t followed their instructions. They had charts, they had calculations, they had numbers. (And numbers, unlike journalists, don’t lie.) Perhaps most damning of all, they produced a GPS summary chart that showed Broder had driven around the Milford service center in circles, apparently draining the car’s battery ON PURPOSE! They claimed Broder’s disparaging report had cost Tesla a million dollars in lost sales and many times that amount in stock market value.

The Internet lit up, as Tesla supporters savaged Broder as a tech-cro-magnon and the Times as a relic of the past. The newspaper stood by its reporter, and its story. Broder claimed that he had driven in circles only because he couldn’t find the one charging station in a massive truck stop. The Public Editor of the Times was forced to investigate the whole event, and published an opinion piece supporting Broder’s story, but criticizing him for being “casual and imprecise” in his note-taking and having shown poor judgment in some of his reporting.  Which of course only encouraged the criticisms of the Tesla faithful

It’s a charged moment. Whom are we supposed to believe, the Driver or the Data, the Times or Tesla?  And what exactly does the future hold?

Time may tell, but one thing is certain. The episode has resulted in a new phrase being coined for the age of electric travel: “Range Anxiety”