but the visual portrayed is that of Clarkson actually being
surprised by a dead battery followed by the hanger scene.
My guess is that was live footage-- not a staged shot. He appeared to still be moving under power, and had power steering. When the Roadster's battery runs low, it drops into a low power mode, with a dramatically lower top speed and crippled acceleration. You'd have to endure "limp home" mode for a couple dozen miles before the cell-protection circuits kick in and shut everything down.
Which would be bad.
Lithium ion cells are twitchy, excitable beasts at the best of times, and like to burst into flames when abused. The Roadster's battery is liquid cooled, and if the pack is completely discharged, then the coolant pump will stop running, which could result in the entire thing going Fukushima. Just completely discharging a pack will dramatically shorten its lifespan, (The Roadster's is only rated to 100k miles) which isn't something Tesla wants to be done to US$109,000 worth of car which the BBC did not, in fact, own.
So it dropped into low power mode, and they switched cars, and they had a nice dramatic shot of it being rolled into a garage, something that would be unpleasant enough for a gasoline car, but would almost certainly be a multi-thousand dollar maintenance catastrophe for an electric one.
That's all fine and good - but watching the show segment, it very clearly gives that they suddenly ran out of power and had to push it into the garage.
One can argue the details of what really happened - but even knowing how those things work, that segment very strongly makes it look like the Tesla Roadster will simply DIE without warning, requiring you to push it into the garage.
Which would be bad.
Lithium ion cells are twitchy, excitable beasts at the best of times, and like to burst into flames when abused. The Roadster's battery is liquid cooled, and if the pack is completely discharged, then the coolant pump will stop running, which could result in the entire thing going Fukushima. Just completely discharging a pack will dramatically shorten its lifespan, (The Roadster's is only rated to 100k miles) which isn't something Tesla wants to be done to US$109,000 worth of car which the BBC did not, in fact, own.
So it dropped into low power mode, and they switched cars, and they had a nice dramatic shot of it being rolled into a garage, something that would be unpleasant enough for a gasoline car, but would almost certainly be a multi-thousand dollar maintenance catastrophe for an electric one.