60 Minutes ran a segment on Elon Musk Sunday night which, after a brief intro, opened with some sweeping shots of the Tesla Model S cruising down the highway. But someone at 60 Minutes spiced up the audio with what sounds like a small V6 gas engine racing at about 5,000 rpm. You can hear the sound in this clip.
The same revving engine sound is added a few minutes later to a different shot of the car driving through a tunnel. The problem of course is that the Model S doesn’t have a gas engine or a shifting transmission. It’s a purely electric car which means the only sound you should hear when it drives by is tire and wind noise.
Fox News got a response from 60 Minutes Monday afternoon which said “our video editor made an audio editing error in our report about Elon
Musk and Tesla last night. We regret the error and it is being corrected
online.” I checked the current online version and sure enough the revving engine sound has been removed from the segment.
Kevin Drum, who caught the mistake when it happened, wonders “WTF is going on with 60 Minutes these days?”