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Tesla CEO Says Gov't Loan Is 99% Sure and Deserved
N!NJA writes "Two major themes of our time — the desire to achieve energy independence and the furor over public bailouts — have collided in the drama surrounding swanky electric carmaker Tesla. Late last year, a New York Times column whipped Silicon Valley innovators and bailout-weary taxpayers into a frenzy. Valley professor and writer Randall Stross wrote that Tesla was hoping for government money to produce its cars, which only the very wealthy could afford. It wasn't exactly true, since the loan was intended to produce the $50,000 Model S sedan, not the $109,000 Roadster. Still, Stross called it a risky, waste of taxpayer money that would only benefit the wealthy and bailout VCs who'd sunk money into the money-losing company. Never mind, Tesla has developed two cars on less than $200 million — compared to the $1 billion General Motors spent developing the now-deceased EV1."
The $50k pricetag already includes government subsidies, and now they want a below-market $350 million government loan to get into business.
If there was a viable business plan here, plenty of private investors would be lining up. The trouble is, there isn't.
Electric cars just can't charge fast enough to be as practical as regular cars, due to limitations of the grid, and this has nothing to do with Tesla's engineering. Household power just isn't nearly enough to make EV's practical, by a couple orders of magnitude, unless people are willing to give up a lot of convenience and performance. (And I bet they aren't.)
I'd love to short their stock.
Loser. Are you even aware Tesla's plans for the third generation are for a sub $30K electric car?
Everyone I know can afford a $50K car, and none of them are rich. Some might spend that much, some are more frugal and would rather put the money toward an earlier retirement date.
Keep playing your pointless little class warfare games, though, loser. I'm sorry the rest of us planned our lives better than you.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move, gets 600 miles to the tank, gets better MPG than a typical hybrid and hosts about 1/5th as much.
Electrical cars are a dead end. If you're calling 3 hours 'good' you're disconnected from reality.
.. and if you're on a day trip and it goes flat halfway through? You're stuck with towing it home.
btw. most people don't have garages, and I'm not keeping half a tonne of lead acid battery in my living room.
I'm curious to see how you think this budget would end up being revenue neutral. Your tax cut handouts would be prohibitively expensive. A flat income-tax rate is a sop to the rich and bilks the middle class. Are you aware that family with 3 kids making less than $26,000 is considered to be below the poverty level? But you'd raise taxes on them? Boy, talk about holding people down. And here I thought you were against "government interference".
Capital gains tax cuts are aimed at the wealthiest Americans, who are able to deduct losses on investments/real estate already. The tort reform proposal is similar to recent Supreme Court cases where states sought to impose limits on awards to victims, and those cases, even with the conservative majority, have sided with the victims.
And finally, where you get the idea of the government making more than the businesses providing the services, besides being indignantly absolute, is flat wrong. In 2005 66% of businesses in the US paid no tax - zero tax, on a collective income of $1.1 trillion dollars (Big Oil I'm looking at you!). Thanks for playing. Oh, and foreign companies operating in the US (who I'm sure you could care less about), 70% paid no taxes in 2004.
PS - if "government lawyers' were actually paying any attention to the wild west Wall Street we wouldn't be in this mess. They would've blown the whistle on the mortgage backed securities / credit default swap shadow market that nearly consumed the entire financial system. So I really don't think the average guy/gal out there trying to innovate and make some cash is facing an 800-lb gorilla lawyer who is trying to keep them down.
PPS - read up on your new best friend, the "Fair Tax", which also isn't the tax panacea your looking for:
http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/unspinning_the_fairtax.html