Tesla Motors Draws Korean Backlash for Map Showing Sea of Japan

Definitely not a good way to enter the Korean market by Tesla Motors, but it did give their website a lot of free publicity:

Tesla Motors launched its Korea website Friday and began preorder sales of its products online as well as reservations for test drives. But in less than a week the automaker has already drawn harsh public criticism for its web translations that contain misspellings and show its lack of understanding of the Korean market.

Tesla has been especially pounded by the Korean public for the map the electric-car manufacturer earlier used on its website that labeled the East Sea as the Sea of Japan and the controversial islet between Korea and Japan Dokdo as Takeshima, its Japanese name.

As of Tuesday, the American company had upgraded the Korean website, changing Sea of Japan to East Sea. However, the map on its U.S. website still has both the Sea of Japan and East Sea.

An online automobile community user said the level of Korean on the local website was equivalent to that of Google’s translator.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but pretty clearly the Tesla website for Korea is in a beta stage and I would think they would have people working on updating the website to meet Korean marketplace standards.