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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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But why can't we just build hydroelectric dams or fission reactors right into the car itself? Or better yet...wind powered cars. Just think how fast a wind turbine would spin on top of a car going 80MPH. The thing would practically power itself.
Furthermore, even if the power comes from fossil fuel plants, emissions can be controlled to a much higher degree at a central location compared to thousands of car engines scattered everywhere and moving around. For instance, technology is currently being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the combustion and pump it back into the ground.
Another advantage is that excess heat may be used to heat buildings (i.e. a CHP-plant).
When did the WSJ sink to the level of Fox news?
When Rupert Murdoch bought it?
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.
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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
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.