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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."
The article makes it sound like it would only be a car for the "elite", but I think the hybrid/electric car development also plays a big role in it. Considering how shitty hybrid car development is by far, its only good. And maybe now US can stop relying so much on oil too.
I'd say this is a typical example of an elite environmentalist. I pity the people who don't see they are merely using people and care only minimally for the environmment.
Much is being made of the US Govt is funding these cars that are to be built outside the US, but the fact is that the technology is going to be owned by a US company. Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development but the resulting technology, and the profits, will accrue to the US business and be taxed in the US. It seems perfectly reasonable for the US govt to underwrite creation of valuable technology that will benefit the US in the long term. People need to get over the fact that the US is now a post-industrial nation who's future lies in innovation rather than manufacturing.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Actually, I am a realistic and moderate Libertarian. I don't believe the state should tell people what to do with their bodies, I don't believe in so much government (and taxes). I believe in more personal freedom *AND* responsibility that goes with it (including the ability to fail and suffer). But I understand the need for regulation and fair markets plus inclusion in the world economy and affairs (...to a point).
Extreme Libertarianism doesn't work any more than extreme anything.
But one thing is for sure, without REAL competition in the party system, there can be no real change. Even if people are not "for" any of the so-called "third parties", they should still support the idea of it being POSSIBLE for "third parties" to really participate and put real pressure on the "two parties". Choice is good. It is good for people, it is good for business, it is good for government. The way the system is setup now, there is no real choice... your vote only really works for the Republicrats or the Democans.
This simply proves there's money to be made in green. It isn't earned money like the way real businesses operate. It's confiscatory profit from you and me. This is why the global warming debate is so damn tainted. People want to make it out like you're a freak if your skeptical about causation or about what can really be done. I'm skeptical when people are getting "loans" like this from people like you and me under the guise of going green. It's going green, alright. Isn't envy and greed said to be "green?" I know American cash is "green!"
Neither of them likes Capitalism anymore, that's for sure.
Money is the root of all evil?
When did the WSJ sink to the level of Fox news?
When Rupert Murdoch bought it?
Development of the $89,000 sports car is already complete. That car ships in a few months.
The DOE loan is for a $39K family car that will be built here.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/fisker-39k-plug-in-hybrid-electric-car-2012-ray-lane.php
I think the niche of electric sports cars, so far occupied by Tesla, has been an incredibly cunning strategy. Consider some strengths and weaknesses of an electric car:
+ Instant high acceleration; high torque available at any time, at any speed
+ Shiny and novel and impressive
- Heavy and bulky batteries
- Short range
- Have to charge it a lot
- Expensive
And the requirements and constraints of a sports car:
Need: Good speed and acceleration
Need: Shiny and novel and impressive (i.e. expensive), so you can show off
But: Drinks fuel faster, may have shorter range.
But: You probably won't go very far in it, or very often.
But: Often have lots of interior luxuries stripped out in the name of weight saving.
Bingo! The requirements of a sports car are - to a reasonable extent - satisfied well by an electric motor. You get incredible acceleration, whenever you want. You get something impressive and futuristic-sounding and exotic. The constraints that lightweight sports cars have *already* do well to mask the disadvantages of an electric vehicle - with a sports car you probably expect reduced range, you don't want to use it all the time (so charging time not an issue, just keep it in the garage plugged in), you don't expect to carry groceries (bulk of the batteries doesn't matter), you don't expect lots of luxuries (so they can be stripped out to somewhat compensate for battery weight). And if you wanted a sports car you were already prepared to spend something expensive (and probably susceptible to image-based marketing - so the futuristic, green, responsible but exciting thing an electric sports car has will probably work on you!).
As a bonus, sports cars are usually expensive in terms of fuel, whilst an electric car is going to be cheap. Probably even in the US, even more so in other markets.
Genius. Goes to show that all those companies trying to make practical, electric town cars might have been starting from the wrong place!
The majority of the people working at Financial Institutions aren't Republicans, just take a look at their campaign contributions.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I am all for developement of greener alternatives! But why the fuck are we giving loans and grants to companies to build these cars outside the US? These loans were designed to stimulate the economy. The only thing we are doing is stimulating the UK and Finland while we have 10% fucking unemployment. Our current president is no better than Bush. This angers me to no end. We are still giving money away with No Strings Attached that we will never see again. More wealthcare! I, for one, am just puke sick and tired of it. Anyone else?
Wow, I don't recall the WSJ being this biased. Did this all happen after the Mrudoch purchase?
Who cares if Fisker is backed by Gore? Why would that surprise anyone? Gore has money and is an environmentalist. Gore backing an electric car company is almost expected. Both Tesla and Fisker are American companies. Tesla is building a manufacturing plant in CA and it sounds like Fisker is going to be American built, at least for the mass produced version. Yes, Teslas are currently British built but that's for their supercar and first model.
Seeding electric car startups is one way we're going to rebuild the American auto industry. Trying to reboot GM and Chrysler might very well be a lost cause, as some of us had suggested. If these two companies are successful, they will allow America to leapfrog the Japanese and Germans in the making of efficient cars. The Chinese are trying to do the same thing. An electric car is in many ways much simpler than a gasoline driven one. All the accumulated advantages and knowledge of traditional car companies go out the window because the electric motor has a lot less parts than a gasoline engine.
If you disagree with government aid to companies, then it doesn't matter what kind of companies, venture, or backers a companies has. However, if you are OK with some government aid, then Tesla and Fisker are pretty good choices in my opinion. For once, instead of aiding old, antiquated corporations, the government is aiding nimble startups that can potential disrupt and jolt an entire industry.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The consumerist faux environmentalism backed by mainstream politicians like Gore is little more than fraud intended to enrich them personally.
The last thing a sports car, any sports car, can be is green. Sports cars are toys for the rich that consume massive amounts of energy both in their production and their use. Whether that energy is elecric or fossil fuel is almost secondary at this point. As a species we need to both make massive cuts in our energy use and change the way we generate that energy if we are to have any hope of survival.
If you take environmentalism seriously it means no more cars full stop. At least for the forseeable future. Putting a 50-100kg person inside a ton of steel is simply not an energy efficient method of transportation.
If you think AGW is some kind of fraud, why build electic cars at all? if you take the predictions of climate scientists remotely seriously you need to realise that the infinite growth demanded by consumerism is an insane pipe dream that will desroy us.
Al Gore, saviour of Gaia, is going to pocket huge amounts of money in a Us government-funded foreign-business deal to build a hybrid Camaro?
Well, color me a retarded limp-dicked tofu-eating socialist.
I never would have guessed this would happen...
~
Rupert Murdoch doesn't hate Al Gore, but he loves misinformed people bickering about half-truths on both sides of any issue.
Mind the frickin' laser...
So why did the WSJ play up Gore's involvement, but not Powell's?
Because they want to make sure people still think Republicans and Democrats aren't sleeping together and pushing the same agenda. Ventura said it best: Politics is a lot like pro wrestling... They fight for show, but off the ring, they're best buddies.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Tesla got a loan to develop a sedan (from the ground up) that they will produce in the US.
They currently sell a Lotus Elise-based sports car, because (as a start up) they couldn't afford to develop both the drivetrain AND the rest of the car. It was more efficient for them to source the body/frame from Lotus.
Not only that, but the current generation sports car that Tesla's selling is intended to bring down the cost of the drivetrain package through production volume, while subsidizing development for the sedan.
THE MORE YOU KNOOOW~
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Yes the corporate bailout was welfare, yes the $200 a child for school supplies is welfare, yes the cash for clunkers was welfar...
Conservatives were against it...some republicans weren't, you decide of republicans are still conservative.
To quote the definition of demagogue (Oxford English Dictionary):
Note first the prominent placement of "Al Gore" in the article. Immediately the prejudices against Gore are brought out in the reader, as much work has been done to demonize him. Then the "luxury car" moniker, implying that this isn't for the good of the "common people", but only for rich elites. Finally comes the "rights of the taxpayer" meme, where firmly instilled prejudices against government taxation and spending are brought out.
Nowhere in the article is any real perspective given about the development cycle of high tech products, and about how new tech often first appears in luxury goods before percolating down to the mass market. Nowhere is it mentioned that government has often helped nurture other high tech companies in the past (Boeing for example via military spending). The article is much like the bell for Pavlov's dog, where certain words such as "Gore" and "taxation" elicit a conditioned response in indoctrinated readers. The Wall Street Journal has become the Pravda of the right.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Large dams and hydroelectric facilities there are only one half the benefit, we also store water for drought times, and this is critically important and we just slap need those dammed up reservoirs now. In fact, we need more of them, not less.
Yes, there are environmental negatives to them, same as anything else, but we simply *need* the water storage facilities, there is no replacement for them with any other practical tech out there at this time, and as long as we need that, might as well get some electricity from it at the same time.. For example, where I live in Georgia, we are coming off a near three year drought with plenty of rain this year, like right now in fact, but we got to within a few weeks of no water but emergency supplies only for millions of people in the Atlanta region last year, and that is *with* large reservoirs. If they didn't exist and got torn down, well....it would fall into the maximum suckage area. Same with any number of other places around the US and the world. We have little choice. Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, desalination is just way way way too expensive to do it for billions of people,even nuke powered. It's just better to store up rain when it is plentiful.
As to that "salmon" bugaboo, we have the tech to mitigate that, it's called fingerlings and tanker trucks. They don't do it a lot but *they could* for wild salmon. They can get moved around the dams without major loss. It doesn't take many adults to get thousands and thousands of fingerlings either, they could net some adults when migrating up the river to go spawn, or they use what are called "fish ladders", move em around the dam, then re capture the fingerlings later and put them back in the river downstream of the dam, or do it in long concrete runway tanks that are already old and used tech. Using tanker trucks is the main way they move around and stock trout now for instance.
As to the methane, that's what natural gas is, methane with some scent added to it so people can smell it. If we can eliminate the need to burn natural gas in generating plants by using hydropower and windchargers and so on, that's the tradeoff for the dammed up areas releasing some methane. It's not perfect, but we get a lot more benefits from the hydropower and reservoirs than not. *Everything* we humans do is a tradeoff with "nature", so the best is to look where we can be cleaner and more efficient. And that's it.
Also, many adults are not able to understand the difference between "million" and "billions". The total amount of the government loan (not handout) of given to these two innovative automakers add up to less than a billion dollars. Compared that to nearly a trillion dollars that has been spent over the last year to rescue banks and investment bankers. It is very likely that a lot more than a billion dollars of the government handout to the banks was used to paid "guaranteed bonuses" for the executives who were (ir)responsible for bringing their financial institutions to the brink of bankruptcy. And the "Citizens Against Government Waste" somewhat did not bother to make any comments regarding the $1 Trillion handout to Wall Street...
Giving money to the winner does not a Democrat make.
Why does an unelected government bureaucrat get to spend the money of hard-working individuals and legitimate companies on this risky, politically connected startup?
Do we really think that an unelected bureaucrat, who won't be accountable for the success or failure of his decisions in the span of his tenure, will make better investment decisions that the people who earned the money in the first place? Even if by some chance it beats the odds and is successful, does that make it right?
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, except with a different set of special interests suckin' at the taxpayer teat.
..that's why I wrote this "Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, ..".they should just go to desert styled landscaping. I for sure don't want tens of millions of people to just leave the desert areas where they are now and go move to other places where they take productive farmland out of the picture. We already lose too much farmland to development as it is. More water we can store up and move where required, we can't just store up and move good farmland. And even irrigated farmland we have now would benefit, look at California's central valley this year with tons of farms put out of production because they just can't get enough water. This is our number one winter vegetable area. It's wiping them out, whole communities going bust now, unemployment just through the roof, plus loss of all that food. And we need replacements for the other ag areas that are pumping fossil water for irrigation. The farm land is good, it is developed and in production already, they just need an alternative water source. We have excess water yearly in several areas, just oceans of it, if we can capture and use just a small fraction of that, it's a big win all around.
I've supported a plan to create many more national strategic reservoirs all over (just like we have a strategic petroleum reserve and like we *should* have with basic foodstuffs, they ended that program unfortunately) and capture excess water,(like all the flashfloods we got yesterday here in north Georgia, billions and billions of gallons, just a huge amount, our bottom fields flooded out so bad it has smashed a lot of fences, it was medium awesome to see it) then a system of interconnected pipelines to move the water around on demand based on real needs, perhaps with concurrently developed windchargers along the routes with more hydropower at some of the reservoirs if practical. Sort of a national highway system, that scale of a project, but with water. Something like the Pickens plan idea, but on a hugemongous scale and using reservoirs instead of underground sources. More electricity, more water available where required, and better management thereof, a lot more useful productive jobs, better national physical and economic security. Fund it with seriously large and multi year, perhaps even multi decade, tax credits. The benefits would more than outweigh the costs on a large enough construction and time scale.
I lived several years with zero modern conveniences people take for granted, including running water or electricity. I tell you, and I have thought about this a lot and lived it, clean potable water on demand is *the* dividing line between stoneage raw existence and civilization. I don't care *what* other tech advances you have, if you have no water, or way too much water, all the rest is useless. As such, I think it should be our number one national scale priority and emphasis in this century. People just don't care about it much until it is *too late* to do much about it when a disaster strikes.