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Tesla Motors To Suspend Roadster Production
Wyatt Earp writes with news that a recent SEC filing from Tesla Motors revealed the company plans to stop production on its electric Roadster (and the Roadster Sport as well) in 2011. This will leave the automaker without any cars to sell until the launch of its Model S sedan (financed in part by $465 million in DoE loans) in 2012. Tesla plans to resume production of Roadster models "at least a year" after the Model S arrives. From Wired's Autopia blog:
"'As a result, we anticipate that we may generate limited, if any, revenue from selling electric vehicles after 2011 until the launch of the planned model S,' the company says in the SEC filing. That may not be a problem if S production starts on plan and goes off without a hitch, but if Tesla hits any snags, things could get ugly fast — a point it concedes in the filing. 'The launch of the Model S could be delayed for a number of reasons and any such delays may be significant and would extend the period in which we would generate limited, if any, revenues from sales of our electric vehicles.'"
When Subaru came out with their 2010 Legacy model they brought out the big guns and re-engineered the body design completely. Subaru redesigns the Legacy on a five year timeline and instead of building on the tried and true Legacy platform, they designed the new Legacy around the WRX STi platform. The result is a car with a great engine, large interior, and aggressive styling.
The other result is terrible sales.
No one likes the new exterior. It resembles Honda's generic styling more than Subaru's conspicuously different styling. No one buys a Legacy because they want to drive an Accord.
You can't build a city by burning it to the ground. You need at the very least a Granary and a Marketplace so that you can grow your population while making income. This allows you to finance all the other fun stuff you want to do like developing war trolls or building sorcerer's guilds. Without the basic income stream, you're just going to get screwed when some bear rushes in and eats all your citizens because you don't have even a single halberdier around to guard the town.
This is a bad idea that will put Tesla out of business soon. I feel almost bad for all the people who prepaid.
Or they need to retool their existing plants so they can start producing the model S.
You have to give 'em credit for courage. Moving away from the incremental change model transforms the consumer's unacknowledged secondary role of beta tester into that of alpha tester, so they either get it right the first time or they likely become a blip in automotive history.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the Model S will fail not because Tesla Motors is staffed by idiots (it isn't), and not because the gubmint won't support electric vehicles, but because fully electric vehicles cannot be competitive with liquid-fuel vehicles.
Forget unit prices, horsepower, yadda yadda, here's the only statistic that matters:
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg
Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Vehicles are unique among energy technologies in that they typically have to carry their energy source around with them. So energy stored per mass is the most important figure of merit for vehicle propulsion, and electric vehicles are inherently 45 times worse than their liquid-fuel competition.
To compensate for that factor of 45, serious sacrifices have to be made: either you accept a huge reduction in vehicle range, a huge reduction in vehicle performance, or you spend ridiculous amounts of money reducing drag and friction -- spending that shows up in the final price of the vehicle.
I predict that electric vehicles will never be able to overcome the energy density barrier and become popular, until either liquid fuel is no longer a readily available competitor, or vehicles no longer have to carry their own energy supply (think electric trains.)
And if you think you'll be able to convince the public to stop using gasoline "for the good of the planet", or for any reason other than prohibitive cost, I think you're probably naive. I've been trying to think of times when humans gave up an energy source for any reason other than cost vs performance. The only example I can think of is human slavery, and we had to destroy half of a nation to convince them to give it up.
Bullshit. If you want to encourage technology development, then let people keep their money and invest it as they see fit, rather than having their money diverted to failed companies for political reasons. Tesla is not a viable business.
-jcr
Sorry, the fact is that major technology jumps in modern history have government intervention, from vaccines to biotech to railroads to the internet. I know it doesn't match the way some people want things to work, but not much I can do about it.
Private money goes mostly to short term, 3-5 year horizon projects. You don't need to subsidize those (not that we don't, through IP law), but any technology that has longer time to profitability needs help.
If they're successful then more Americans start using power from hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, solar, and so on power produced in the USA, instead of oil imported from the middle east. More money stays in the US economy and the government takes its cut every time it changes hands, so it's not like there's no benefit to the taxpayer if it's successful. It would be nice if the execs shared a bit more of the risk though...
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You don't start by making a $2,000 car. You start by making a $100,000 car, then a $50,000 car, then a $35,000 car....
If you do enough of something, then you get good at it. Costs like engineering can be spread over a line of cars.
If there were only one _____ car it would be outrageously expensive; however, there are many.
--
Paper tape calculator with keys taped down. The boss walks in. "What is that?"
The answer: "Its calculating my salary in real time."
If you are worried about running out of charge while driving through rural areas or something, why not invest in an EV Trailer?
http://www.evnut.com/rav_longranger.htm
It's a bit heavy, but it essentially temporarily turns your car into a hybrid when you need a gas engine for longer trips etc. They will likely become less useful as quick charge stations and battery swap stations become more popular, but it is a good temporary solution.
Nope - which is why the electrics need to get into the 250 mile per charge range and we need to have "battery exchanges" at gas stations (where you would pay $10 and swap for a fully charged battery similar to how you pay to fill your gas tank). Until we have that, it totally does NOT make sense to have to have multiple cars. I am with you there - my average day's commute round trip is about 80 miles with no feasible place to charge until I return home. Get me a longer range car and a place to swap batteries on longer trips and I will then buy into it.
I would really like to see trailers with electric wheel motors, for cars. You can't tow a 2000 pound trailer with a 1500 # car, because the trailer would drive it off the road in a emergency stop. A hybrid trailer could have the batteries and motors, and never use the car's brakes and help with accelerate... We could rent just the trailer. Then again too many people never learned to drive with a trailer.
Especially a hybrid RV trailer, the main reason I have a 3/4 ton pickup.
Interesting speculation, but after reading about Tesla's founder Elon Musk I think you're wrong. He made a fortune on PayPal and could easily have called it quits and retired rich. Instead he doubles down again and again, pouring his own money into Space-X and Tesla. He's an engineer and he what he has accomplished so far, and looks poised to accomplish, is quite amazing.
Many other major things in modern history had something to do with government invention and usually some million people died in the ordeal.
So loans to a company making a roadster is like . . . oh, wait, you're trying to get *me* to stumble into Godwin's law in a discussion about electric vehicles. Well played, sir. ;)
Keep the market competitive, keep contracts honored, protect the goddamn borders and then some. Everything else is pissing the taxpayer's money away for issues of political importance, more often than not political capital. Once you enable political capital to be a viable alternative to monetary capital, you will notice that people are constantly producing political capital, because it's so easy to write pamphlets, manuscripts, ideas, manifests and declaration and so incredibly hard to have a viable business running.
Since there has never been a successful government that declined to intervene in economic matters of import--whether for technology, societal or just plain politica onesl--an assertion that a government like that would do better than the market system we currently have is a huge leap of faith. Since I'm not a radical, I'd prefer to tinker with hours rather than trust people who just sort of make up wild claims about some new organizational system.
There's certainly no mainstream theoretical economic model that supports claims of zero government intervention. There are empirical arguments about rent-seeking and dangers of over-intervention, which are entirely legitimate and should be remembered. But there are also empirical cases of highly productive government intervention, so I'm not buying argument from first principles on Tesla. Whether these loans are good or bad will depend on the specifics of the situation and how likely they are to produce something.
The range problem has been long solved for electric cars, until such a time as a cheaper and better battery system is developed. It's a non issue, a red herring against electric cars. And it doesn't require exotic battery swap out stations and all that nonsense, which *don't* exist and would cost hundreds of billions in unnecessary infrastructure cost to create, money we just don't have right now for that, when we already have enough regular gas stations.
Now, look at this short video, see the thing on the back of that pure electric car? That's a rigidly attached range extender generator trailer. Not only does it give you unlimited range, just stop and fill up with gas as you would normally, but being a two point hitch instead of one, it doesn't flex, and even trailer noobs can use it, and back up easy, etc.
You can have your shorter range electric commuter car, and still be able to do just as long of trips on the highway as any other pure fuel burning car.
That can be taken any way you want it to go (I'd prefer a larger trailer that also had some cargo space to it), but that's the gist of it. A range extender turns your pure electric commuter into a "modular hybrid"** on demand, for those odd times you need a lot more range. You could buy one, use it also at your house for when the grid goes down in storms, etc, as is common now in suburbia or the country to have, the home backup genny, or just rent one for those longer trips.
**modular hybrids like this setup in the video make more sense to me than the "everything on board all the time" models like you have with the dual gasoline engine plus electric motor, plus batteries, plus fuel tank rube goldberg traditional hybrids like the prius or the upcoming volt. And heck, as to a generator trailer, you could DIY in one day with all off the shelf stuff from home depot, today, right now. Small trailer, appropriate sized generator, some u-bolt clamps, etc, and then build your charging plug and cable.
We just need the affordable electric cars out there on the dealers lots, and small trucks. And we could have them, if they just picked one steenking closed factory and retooled and just built the damn things, like a Model A electric car, just do it, in mass quantities rather than fooling around with more studies and only coming up with exotic sportscar high performance expensive electric cars, and with wasting time on those dual everything hybrids, which are the worst of both worlds, hauling around all the dual weight and taking up space when you don't have to most of the time.
30-40 mile range is plenty for like the bulk of commuting in the US, not all, but the bulk of it, potentially tens of millions of customers right there, with the affordable, non real exotic, battery tech we already have.
It still has a gas engine, a fuel tank, an electric motor, and batteries, all crammed in the same package, this time with more weight than current hybrids. It's a traditional hybrid, albeit with more battery storage so it has some useful range on batteries alone, so they call it a "plug in", but that has been an aftermarket mod option guys have done to their priuses already. The potential was always there, just the cost shoots up fast (also the priusus have wimpy electrics, they need to go to a larger motor there). Anyway, did you really look at that genny trailer thing? It's tiny, you wouldn't even notice it for trips when you really needed that extra range, it isn't like it would be some huge chore to tow it, and the two point hitch is a spiffy idea.
One of the promises of pure electric, once made in mass quantities and not in limited production runs of exotic high performance sportscars, or "sports sedans", is a cheaper vehicle, plus more dependable and less maintenance. With the modular hybrid approach, if you just need to rent the generator trailer a few times a year at most, you eliminate all that maintenance, cost, etc, and stuff to break down, at least for yourself, the shop maintains those with pro mechanics. Just depends how much you really need to go beyond 40 miles (which I think is supposed to be the volt's range on batts). The volt is going to come in high, in the high end sedan class price wise, like 40-50 grand I bet once it stops being "coming soon" and they really sell the things. Glad some folks will be able to afford it, but I couldn't now. Or, they will sell it at a loss and hide the fact, just to sell them and justify their big loan to keep from going really bankrupt.
I used to work for those guys..I am not a huge fan of GM. I have one of their old vans, it was swell, but have seen too many other really not so hot rides come from there, and they all are overpriced (IMO, that's subjective..I don't like the management there, and being in the UAW..echhh).
Different strokes. I think there's a decent market for pure electrics, especially if they can hit around 20 grand, with grade B batteries and not top of the line. I know eventually I would like one, a small truck, as long as it has about a 40 mile range, that would suit my needs OK, that's the round trip to town for me, without completely depleting the batteries (it is really a bit over 30 miles in actual distance, so a 40 mile range is a nice cushion all around). That would help make the batts last longer. Or quite a bit of cruising around the farm here, I can get by there just a couple miles a day (800 acre farm). Most of the time, I would never need to burn any fuel at all then, could go all year and never burn any fuel, just charge it, and I have some solar panels already, and would get some more if I needed them. That would be full transportation independence, and no worries about either the grid being up, or price/availability of fuel *at all*, which to me is the ultimate goal, I dig on independence in things. right now, we are very close on food, real close.
Already went through that opec embargo and so on, actually lost my job at the time because I simply could not get to work at all, huge lines at the stations, two gallons max, ten bucks a gallon. It went from normal to that almost overnight. And if anything, the US imports a lot more than it did back then, (30% then, 60% now, around there) so any global oil availability "issues" would be worse than back then..say all those dummies decide to light up Iran, then Iran lights up all sorts of other interesting places, then the straits of hormuz go down, and etc. and this is not a wild improbability either. Oil is a global fungible, so the market would..take yer pick, I could see it hitting 3-400 a barrel within days. Because they could get it. When they got ya by the short and curlys, you squeal.
For a ride, I make do now with a small four cylinder diesel truck, gets around 40 MPG highway, 35 or so on secondary roads or going in a lower gear, etc.