The BBC's hugely successful motoring show Top Gear has never made any secret of its dislike of electric cars. The presenters were so nasty about the Tesla in 2008 that the company sued them - and won! - but that doesn't seem to have slowed them down.
This past weekend they got Nissan and Peugeot amped up with a "road trip" that had Jeremy Clarkson in a Nissan Leaf and James "Captain Slow" May in a Peugeot iOn.
And, of course, the cars ran out of amps in - you guessed it - Lincolnshire, famous among eco-freaks and anoraks for having absolutely no public charging facilities.
But, says The Telegraph, it turns out the whole thing was staged - especially the scenes where members of the public were roped in to push the Leaf. The Top Gear crew had parked the cars in Lincoln and deliberately left them with their lights on to drain the batteries - and the presenters carefully didn't say that Nissan (or Peugeot)'s claims for the cars' range were false.
They even said some nice things about them; Clarkson admitted that the Leaf was a lot like a conventional car to drive (what was he expecting - electromagnetic force fields?) and May compared the iOn to a Porsche 911 - although that may have been intended more to wind up Porsche enthusiast Richard Hammond than to flatter Peugeot.
Nevertheless, Nissan UK media maven Tom Barnard was sufficiently irked at seeing a juiceless Leaf being pushed on national television to say: "Pictures rarely tell the whole story, as is the case here.
"Top Gear has confirmed to us that the crew intentionally drained the battery to inject suspense into the mission of finding a public charge spot in Lincoln, which is renowned for not having any public charging infrastructure."
It was left to green car website AllCarsElectric to point out that, although Lincolnshire has no public charging points, it has thousands of homes, each with a number of 220V sockets perfectly suited to charging a battery-powered car.