While the whole discussion makes me skeptical of both Broder and Tesla's customer service, I'd like to add here that Tesla most probably would need permission to do that. Even releasing GPS data is already a questionable move - IANAL, but I believe in Europe this would be pretty much unthinkable, except if he gave explicit permission on paper first (general agreement terms probably wouldn't be enough, because of the surprising nature of such a term).
This would be a more significant concern if he was driving his own car, but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it. In addition, given their past troubles with Top Gear I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla wrote it into a review agreement.
> .., but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it.
I doubt that. Say, you lend a car to your friend and let the navigation system log his/her route. The route includes compromising information about work related issues. Even the logging itself is questionable, but then releasing that information to the public - boy, I'd sure check my lawyers first.
As I understand, the 'European sensor' for privacy tingles at quite different levels than the US American one.
Ah, but you're overlooking the extremely strong possibility that the contract Broder / NYT signed as part of borrowing the test vehicle authorized Tesla to use the onboard telemetry in any way Tesla sees fit.
Furthermore, this situation is extremely dissimilar to a private individual lending a car to another private individual to do things where the borrower has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If he was directly calling a person at Tesla it would be unlikely to be recorded. If he went through the normal customer support number - you'd expect it to have been recorded after the "This call may be recorded for training purposes etc" intro
