Guest author David Ewart heads up Marketing and Revenue for IT upstart Loggly.

The epic media battle between New York Times reporter John Broder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk began with a negative consumer review, escalated with a strong-armed public rebuttal by a powerful executive and ended with a bunch of shared log files disputing the veracity of Broder’s driving experience. So what’s the big deal? Was this just another he-said-he-said that ended with data coming to the rescue?

Oh no. It’s bigger than that, much bigger.

(See also Would You Buy A Tesla Model S?)

On first blush, the story spoke of the growing importance of data in corporate America. Log files, typically the chatter of IT managers behind the firewall, had suddenly entered the corner office and the public spotlight. It was a powerful tipping point for those of us who deal with data every day, and spoke volumes to the growing potential of log files to help companies solve problems and identify trends. But what’s the real issue… and why is it such a big deal?

Elon Musk, with all his innovative thinking has become a poster-child for the face of market disruption. Yet he forgot the age-old mantra: “The customer is always right.” By publishing “the truth” of the logs for the world to see, he may have succeeding in counteracting the claims of the reviewer, but he disrupted his own sales pipeline.

Being Right - At A High Cost

(See also Tesla And The Fallacy Of Data-Driven Decisions.)

On Bloomberg TV, Musk admitted: "We did actually get a lot of cancellations as a result of The New York Times article. It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial.” The stock, trading at $39 before the review was published is trading at $34 today. Elon lost customer confidence, trust and their cash.

While data is valuable, releasing it with the sole purpose of roasting the consumer - in this case, a test driver who should have succeeded regardless of any possible hidden agenda - isn’t wise. Musk missed the point: The value of vehicle log files is not to fight battles in the press, but a tool to vastly improve the product and deliver a better experience for the next customer.

Imagine the backlash if Weight Watchers CEO David Kirchhoff read a customer’s Facebook post saying that she followed the plan and still gained weight, by publicly posting the user's caloric intake and exercise log, indicating that she did not stick to the plan? The CEO might win that battle, but he would certainly lose the war.

Big Data And The Customer Experience

So, how can Tesla recover from this PR and fiscal train-wreck? Put those log files to work to improve the customer experience. The right way to create a win-win result for Tesla would be for Musk to acknowledge that as the car breaks new ground, Tesla will incorporate customer feedback and data to make a smart product even smarter and easier to use.

He could acknowledge that the car could still improve: That it should have understood that the trip and route chosen (programmed by the user), combined with the dropping temperatures (weather app) and known charging locations (geo-location data) would not end in a successful commute.

He could speak of the product roadmap and enhancements that will collect and interpret this data to alert the driver by dashboard, text, email or other method of impending failure. He could talk about how the Model S can actually get smarter with a software update. Perhaps the car could automatically initiate a battery warmer in cold weather, alert Tesla service crews of the situation – anything but allow the failure.

It’s not about proving that you’re right and the customer screwed up, but by planning for success of everyone, including the outliers.

Musk missed a remarkable opportunity. He forgot that the customer is always right, and that a bad experience is the perfect time to help existing and future customers have a better experience. Somehow, that critical human message got lost in the data.

We like to pride ourselves on being increasingly data-driven. In fact, we've created a giant new industry frenetically panning for Big Data gold. A healthy $4.5 billion market in 2010, according to IDC, Big Data is set to explode to $23.8 billion in 2016, fueled by our need to be more data-driven in everything from how we do business to how we eat.

I suspect, however, that we're fooling ourselves, as the recent Tesla debacle suggests. As much as we'd like to smugly pat ourselves on the back for being data-driven, the truth is that data is always messy, and never really tells any particular story.

(See also Would You Buy A Tesla Model S?)

Bigger Data ≠ Bigger Answers

New York Times columnist David Brooks nails this in an op-ed piece, wherein he argues that Big Data, while very useful for guiding our intuitions, gets some things very wrong. Like the value of social connections. Or the context for answering a question. In fact, he speculates, Big Data might actually obscure Big Answers by complicating decisions and making it even harder to determine which statistically signifiant correlations between data are informative and not simply spurious.

Such thinking won't be surprising to anyone that has read Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan, which posits that the more data we analyze, the more likely our conclusions will be wrong. Taleb writes:

In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects - data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well-discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities - even in moderate quantities.

In other words, the more data you collect, the harder it can become to interpret that data. And even if you can interpret your data correctly, are you actually going to listen to that interpretation?

Which brings us to Tesla. 

Tesla and "Truth"

In case you've been hiding under a rock, a New York Times reporter, John Broder, wrote an unflattering review of Tesla's new Model S. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk got the knives out and slammed the reporter using a pile of data (from the reporter's test drive, which is a little bit creepy). Broder responded with his own view of the data, and finally Margaret Sullivan, public editor of the Times, waded in. Her conclusion?

People will go on contesting these points – and insisting that they know what they prove — and that’s understandable. In the matter of the Tesla Model S and its now infamous test drive, there is still plenty to argue about and few conclusions that are unassailable.

But wait! What about all that data Musk collected? Doesn't it prove his point? Or what about Broder's own data? Doesn't it prove his? In both cases the answer is "Yes," leaving would-be Tesla buyers like ReadWrite's Dan Lyons stymied as to what they should do. Which is why being "data-driven" is the start of a solution, not the end. 

The Human Side of Big Data

As David Brooks notes, reviewing Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, "We have the capacity to sift huge amounts of information, blend data, isolate telling details and come to astonishingly rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something." This is not to suggest that we shouldn't collect data, but that we perhaps need to be smarter about how we analyze it, and how much we trust it.

As I've argued (see Big Data And The Landfills Of The Digital Enterprise), I don't think this is a matter of hiring expensive data scientists to interpret our data. Rather, I imagine it's a matter of guiding our decisions - even those split-second "hunches" that Gladwell talks about in Blink - through data, without becoming consumed with data. Data kicks off the right questions; data doesn't resolve disputes.

Just ask Musk and Broder: both absolutely convinced they're right, and both with ample data on their respective sides to prove it.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Part of me really wants a Tesla Model S. I'm a bit of a car freak, and over the years have owned a string of BMWs, an Audi S4, and a vintage Porsche 911. These days I'm just a regular suburban dad, driving a Subaru Outback wagon. But a few months ago I was talking to Vivek Wadhwa, who was about to take delivery on a Tesla Model S, and he told me I should consider getting one, because sure, it's a little bit expensive, but not crazy expensive, and once you drive one you'll want one. I just laughed it off. But afterward, I started thinking.

The Model S is a gorgeous car, and frankly, at $50,000 for the base model it's really not that expensive, and most of my driving is close to home. We've been looking to replace my wife's old Subaru Legacy wagon, and she's really into this whole eco-friendly green stuff, and some of the SUVs we've been looking at aren't much cheaper than a Tesla, especially if you go for the hybrid version. The Toyota Highlander Hybrid Limited starts at $46,370 and if you throw in some extras you can nudge it close to $50,000.

So, okay. I want a Model S. I drove Tesla's first model, the Roadster, and wasn't impressed. But the Model S is a different beast. I could put my kids in it. I could use it as a daily driver. It's practical (sort of) and beautiful and green. What's not to love?

Can You Deal With A Few Glitches?

Well, I fear that the Model S is still not ready for prime time. Those fears grew a bit when I read "Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway," the controversial story in the New York Times that has aroused so much anger among Tesla fans. The follow-up stories haven't made me feel any better.

The Times reporter tried to drive from Washington, D.C., to New York in a Model S, and claimed the car ran out of juice on the way and had to be towed in. Tesla CEO Elon Musk attacked Broder and called the article a "fake." Then Musk published a blog post in which he announced that - aha! - Tesla had been secretly gathering data about every aspect of the test drive, and that Tesla's data logs proved that the Times reporter had fudged his facts.

The Times reporter, John M. Broder, fired back with his own post saying that Musk's data didn't really prove anything at all. The public editor of the Times said she would ask Tesla to provide all of the data, not just a few cherry-picked points, but Tesla declined. The public editor concluded that Broder hadn't faked his results, but that he also hadn't exercised good judgment and had "left himself open to valid criticism."

Victory for Tesla, right? Well, not quite. For one thing, the public editor also points out that Musk used his data "in the most damaging (and sometimes quite misleading) ways possible." The Atlantic Wire said much the same, arguing that "Musk is, for now, overyhyping his claim for a breach of journalism ethics." 

I'm kind of put off by the fact that Tesla can spy on drivers. I was also put off by the combativeness of Musk's blog post. Most important, as Mashable points out, the whole kerfuffle just draws more attention to some very real issues about the Model S.

The thing is, Broder's car really did run out of juice. Tesla fans argue that Broder should have been more careful, and if he'd only done this and that and then this and that plus this and that, well of course he could have made it all the way from Washington to New York. Even if you agree with those fans, you start to realize that owning a Model S is going to require some extra planning.

Only One In Nine Breaks Down - Awesome!

Then, over the weekend, in a show of solidarity, nine Tesla owners set out to take the same trip as the Times reporter. A reporter for AllThingsD ran into them on the way and spent time talking to them.

Here's the thing. Of the nine who started out, only four actually made the whole trip. Not because of technical problems, but because they just didn't want to make the whole trip.

But down low in the article comes the bothersome side note: "One driver's Tesla S stopped working at the Delaware charging station, due to what they believe was faulty circuitry. The owner called Tesla support, the group said, and a software update was pushed to his car remotely, allowing him to drive it to Milford."

If you're a Tesla fan, you'll say that it was no big deal, and that Tesla provided great customer service and got that software sent out right away.

If you're me, you think, Wait, there's a chance my car will stop working and I'll have to call and get a software update to get it running again?

Maybe you wonder what it says about Tesla when you send nine cars out to make a simple drive from Washington to New York and one of them breaks down on the way. One in nine does not seem like great odds. One in four (if you count only the cars that attempted the whole trip) seems even worse.

Tesla's Electric Halo

Can you imagine if nine owners of the BMW ActiveHybrid 5 sedan made the same trip, and one broke down and couldn't get going again until BMW beamed out a software update? Can you imagine this happening to any car, no matter how modest? I can't. Here's a list of the cheapest cars in the United States. Nine units of any of them could make this journey without incident or drama, I'd wager.

 For Tesla owners these glitches apparently are fairly normal. A writer for Autoweek had a problem with his Tesla when it refused to disconnect from its charger. Jalopnik says Model S owners are complaining about touch screens failing, doors and rear hatches opening on their own, door handles getting stuck shut, cars "powering down randomly" -- and that's with only a few hundred of them in the wild. Jalopnik calls the Model S "the world's most expensive beta test." 

That's a bit harsh. But the fact is, electric cars are not going to go mainstream unless and until they become as worry-free as gas-powered cars. For now Tesla enjoys a halo effect from a rabid fan base and a tech press inclined to give Tesla a pass because of the audacity of its ambitions. That's enough to sell a few hundred cars, but it will only take Tesla so far.

Thing is, I still want a Model S. But I will wait until I see thousands of them out in the wild before I leap. As with most things tech-related, I figure it's safer to wait for version 2.0.

How about you? Would you buy a Tesla Model S? And for the sake of argument, what if money were not an issue? Let's say you could get a Model S for the same price as a Camry. Would you go for it?