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$529M Gov't Loan To Develop $89,000 Hybrid Sports Car
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that a tiny car company backed by former VP Al Gore has just gotten a $529M US government loan to help build an $89,000 hybrid sports car in Finland. The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive follows an earlier $465M government loan to Tesla Motors, purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Fisker's other investors (PDF) include the Al Gharaffa Investment Co., a Cayman Islands corporation."
I agree; look at any commodity...in this case, let's say the home computer...and then look backwards in history. Early on, the progeny of such items were expensive, and there's a reason for that. It takes a hell of a lot of money to solve the early challenges, and only after they get solved do issues of producing something more cheaply get worked out. In addition to that, if you look at normal automotive development, you'll see that a lot of the R&D actually takes place in the F1 circuit. Talk about expensive, but it's what gave us a lot of the features we now have for ordinary cars, like ABS. But even then, it was only the most expensive cars that got those features first, before it became cheaper and cheaper. At this point, every Chevrolet made has ABS, and it's been like that for years.
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When did the WSJ sink to the level of Fox news?
When Rupert Murdoch bought it?