Tesla Used To Have A PR Department That Was Stressed Out Basically All The Time

“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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