“Hi David, this is Juno from Tesla. I’m seeing this Munro article. Why didn’t you call me. I’m five days late to respond on this piece now!” began a rant from Tesla’s PR person (whose name isn’t really Juno). From there, the conversation started to become a complete disaster, forcing me to firmly shut it down. But this was the Tesla PR department in a nutshell: overworked, paranoid, and oftentimes just unpleasant.
Welcome new members to our regular “Exhaust Leaks” member-only feature in which we tell you an “inside baseball” story about the car journalism world. This time, we’re talking about the now-defunct Tesla PR department, which was in place when I started as a journalist back in 2015, but was — in an industry-first move — dismantled in 2020.
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