When the Merc, KCBS and the Business Journal reported yesterday that Tesla had shifted gears and reversed direction, and might not be building a plant in San Jose after all, it was old news to readers of Watch Dog Silicon Valley.
The upstart anonymous blog has been following serial entrepreneur Elon Musk‘s upstart electric car company closely for some time, in a series titled “The Tesla Chronicles.” On Jan. 15, Watch Dog posted a piece headlined: Tesla Plans “Abandoned” in San Jose. The quotation marks in the headline are intentional –- Watch Dog attributed the information to his/her “spies” in City Hall.
In a slightly self-congratulatory follow-up post yesterday, humbly headlined “We Told You So,” Watch Dog gently chided Mayor Chuck Reed’s press secretary, Michelle McGurk, who told the Merc that the city is still “scurrying” to find new sites in San Jose: “If Ms. McGurk had just read Watch Dog earlier, she would have known the Tesla deal was in trouble and the City wouldn’t have to scurry so much…”
For the record: Although SJI got scooped along with everyone else this time, we broke the initial the Tesla story on this site on Aug. 12, including a pretty cool test-drive video.
Sorry, not true.
San Jose’s 1590 KLIV Radio reported the pending demise of the Tesla deal a full month before the Watchdog.
http://kliv.com/pages/1827212.php?
(Scroll way down the page to Dec. 15, 2008…30 days before Watchdog’s Jan. 15, 2009 story.)
Watch Dog has been working hard for weeks to do straight investigative reporting. It does work hard and regardless of its views of junkyard dog commentators like me, I have to respect its efforts. Yes, they got the story about Tesla right. Now we have commented about the fact that Dale Warner wrote on these lines that Tesla was not going to happen. Indeed, Chuck Blair, a candidate for Santa Clara City Council commented about his skepticism about Tesla at the Portugese American Forum, one of the premier candidate events in Santa Clara. Another candidate, Mario Bouza, who has little influence on any local affairs in the Mission City kept boasting about Tesla, and it is a testament to San Jose Inside and Watch Dog that they both have reported what Blair and Warner were predicting and demonstrated that Bouza’s comments had a lot of cavaties,
I think San Jose Inside carried the first prediction about the Tesla failure. I was just off by two years and eight months in my prediction of failure posted on Thursday, September 25, comment #18:
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TMcE says, “This clean-tech entry is a natural. In fact, Tesla officials credited Chuck Reed with sharing Tesla’s vision of making San Jose the epicenter of the clean-tech revolution—kind words indeed, and perhaps the clincher.
“Clearly kudos are deserved. Let’s apportion some of the credit now. Mayor Reed and his staff get a lot of it; Deb Figone, the City Manager who directed the staff effort, deserves a big slice too; and jack-of-all deals Paul Kutko [sic], as the lead staff person, must be high on the list of thank yous. Job well done.”
These kudos may be hastily disowned when this new company follows the trajectory of the downtown auto races. I predict it will have about a three year lifetime. I hope Reed, Figone, and Krutko gave very close examination to the past successes of these investors and to their business plan. This project may very well make the Gonzales garbage plan look really clean and very green.
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I hope the city gets its money back. No wonder Reed looks so depressed so much of the time.