Top Gear beats Tesla Motors in court

No doubt you will remember that last March Tesla Motors filed a complaint against the British TopGear programme for ridiculing the Tesla Roadster in one of its episodes, during a road test. The Tesla ran out of electricity after going up against its British cousin, the Lotus Elise, on the test track.

London’s Supreme Court has ruled that the viewers of the programme could not have used the episode to reach any real conclusion about the vehicle, since it was driven on a track, under conditions different from real-world driving on public roads.

But Tesla is not giving up, as it continues to sue Top Gear over five false claims that the programme’s presenters made about the Tesla Roadster in that same episode. Among them, that the Roadster had overheated so badly that the electric motor refused to work, or that a blown fuse was the cause of a braking problem.

According to BBC executives, all of this is simply a strategy by Tesla Motors to gain more publicity, and they believe the courts will once again rule in their favour when the final decision is announced in a few months’ time.