Tesla Nabs $465M Government Loan To Build Model S

SignalFreq writes "Tesla Motors, based in San Carlos, California, was approved yesterday for $465M in loans from the Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. Tesla plans to use $365M of the money to finance a manufacturing facility for the Model S (review, Letterman video) and $100M for a powertrain manufacturing plant in the SF Bay Area. 'Tesla will use the ATVM loan precisely the way that Congress intended — as the capital needed to build sustainable transport,' said Tesla CEO and Product Architect Elon Musk. Tesla expects the Model S to ship in late 2011 and the base cost to be $57,400 ($49,900 after a federal tax credit). Ford received $5.9B and Nissan received $1.6B under the same program."

Comments

Re:It's a Loan.

[geekoid]

It must be great to be old, stupid and wrong.

Many banks and financial organizations are ALREADY preparing to pay it back, starting next month.
In fact, there some people are saying they should be allowed to until the enact the changes they promised when taking the money.
That's not going to happen. Almost all of that money will be paid back within a year. Why? because the financial institution don't like the strings that came with it. That's right, the government add string that would pretty much guarantee a payback.
Maybe you should read up on things instead of letting libertarians spoon feed you? You might be able to actually look at facts can come to your own independent conclusion.

"But if it was a sure fire moneymaker they could have raised the money on the private markets"

You've never looked for VC funding, have you?
Frankly I would rather get a loan I can pay of then give up 60+% of my company to a VC that want's to make 10 times the money they invested immediatly.
Wouldn't be the first company a VC forced a sell of so they could make a quick return, and destroying the company at the same time.

No, that is not a reasonable assumption, and if you knew anything about financing companies at this stage, you would understand why.

Re:More bullshit

[joocemann]

Henry Ford had no idea that using fossil fuels could lead to dire consequences of worldwide magnitude.

In all honesty, we should have made these serious changes over a decade ago.

Why no diesel-electric cars?

[Pfhorrest]

I know this is a tangential question, but I've been wondering about this for a while, and this seems like the best forum to get a decent answer from intelligent people:

Why is all the development on electric and electric-hybrid cars going into fancy new systems with lithium ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells and (for hybrids) complicated switching between a conventional drive train and electric motors, instead of using and improving upon the time-tested diesel-electric technology which has efficiently powered many trains for quite some time now?

Build a simple all-electric car - just a body, steering rack, four wheels with a dynamo on each (there's your propulsion and your regenerative brakes), some circuity to control them all, and a small battery that holds just enough charge to get you up to speed, maybe twice that for a safety margin. Then stick the most efficient diesel or gas generator you've got in it to provide electricity to keep the battery charged. You lose a bunch of weight and mechanical complexity by ditching most of the drive train and transmission system for some simple wiring between the generator and the dynamos; the alternator and the standard car battery become redundant with the generator and main battery; heck you could even replace the radiator with a small steam engine for still increased efficiency, turning that excess heat into electricity instead of just disposing of it to the air.

Yes, it still uses some fossil fuels, but in the end most of our electricity comes from coal anyway (even for a wall-charged all-electric vehicle like the Model S here, which I am very excited about). This just seems like it would have been far cheaper, more efficient (in terms of both money and thermodynamics), and simpler a solution than the complicated hybrids they've been building for a while now; plus the technology has already existed in widespread use on trains for decades!

So why isn't anybody doing it in cars? Is there a good technical or economic reason?