Your right: Top Gear is quite literally is a joke. They make absurd claims about cars all the time in the interest of humor, because at the end of the day, they are a comedy show that occasionally talks about cars.
Tesla should have realized their car was going to be the butt of some joke: it's what the show does. If Tesla can't handle being made fun of, then they shouldn't have given Top Gear a car to test.
It depends what the joke is. The joke about the DB9 and the Veyron is that they are ridiculously cool. The joke about Teslas is that the battery runs out.
I agree here. Anyone who has ever seen more than 15min of Top Gear knows that it is not what you would call "journalism", but more "entertainment". What's more, they are not like those American car shows, which get their revenue from ads, and thus never have anything bad to say about any car review ever, and thus the programming is just drab and droll...
edit: I also enjoy the fact that top gear is much more opinionated and un-PC than anything else out there. It's keeps it interesting. Yeah, so Clarkson hates EVs, hates Ford, and hates "caravans". Once you can get past this and accept you and him very well may have different viewpoints, he's hilarious.
It's a love/hate relationship. He bought a GT40 (and then had many problems with it, but loved it, from what I remember). From what I can gather from the series, Ford is fairly popular in the UK (with the Mondeo?), so it's an easy target.
You're right. I knew it was a newer re-make if the original, but forgot the name difference, and a quick google search seemed to verify I had remembered it correctly.
Tesla should have realized their car was going to be the butt of some joke: it's what the show does. If Tesla can't handle being made fun of, then they shouldn't have given Top Gear a car to test.