Darryl Siry at Tesla Motors sent out an email today advising that The New York Times got an important fact wrong about the production delay facing the Tesla Roadster. On his blog are the facts:

I spoke with John Markoff, the author of the article, and he said he was apologetic for the error and will issue a correction and change the story online. After he reviewed his research for the article, he realized he had incorrectly connected our reported delays to battery problems. The primary cause of our delay has been and continues to be issues with durability and reliability of the transmission, as we have reported before.

   Hopefully Darryl’s blog entry will silence those all too keen to do the tall-poppy thing and try to create doubts about the Roadster. Every pioneer must face obstacles from the establishment, though it is sad that The New York Times was among the parties that created an extra problem for Tesla Motors. It is also sad that the whole (and increasingly invalid) belief of “batteries are unreliable” may have contributed to the error.