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$529M DOE Loan Spawns $97K Made-in-Finland Cars
theodp writes "With PR successes like the Fisker Karma, does the Department of Energy need to worry about PR failures like Solyndra? ABC News and others are reporting that electric car company Fisker, which received a $529M federal loan guarantee with the approval of the Obama administration, is assembling its first line of $96,985 base-priced hybrid cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work. According to Green Car Reports, Fisker said the EPA had rated the Karma at 54 MPGe (MPG-equivalent) when running on electricity from its battery pack, and that the EPA-rated electric range would be 32 miles. Omitted from the press release was the 20-mpg rating for a Karma running on power from its range-extending gasoline engine."
Considering the high price of labour in Finland (where even illiterate cleaners make $13/hour), could this be a rare instance of a company telling the truth when it says it had to outsource because it couldn't get the work done in America? It's hard to believe that this work is being relocated just to cut costs.
You never know what you didn't buy that you're paying for anyway!
So, not only are middle class tax dollars used to bail out and ensure the bonuses of those capable of affording a $90,000 "green" sports car, but they're also used to subsidize the production of said sports cars in another fucking country.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Sounds more like reactionary garbage from a once grand newspaper sullied by it's new ownership.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
So for $89K you get an electric vehicle that doesn't go as far as the Chevy Volt (which costs $40K)? As a hybrid, it gets the equivalent of 20MPG? I thought the goal of the electric car was to do better than the gasoline powered vehicles. Tesla at least is all electric and has that wow factor. What was the business model that allowed the US Government to invest $500+M??
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
proponent of the power of state, and believes that more of it, the better. He is a proponent of command economy, as evidenced by his goverment allocating economic resources according to ideology, rather than market realities.
How else to explain giving government money to these firms?
No, the point of the program is free money from the federal government. And the politicians can say they've invested $int64 billion dollars in environmental programs. They don't really care what those programs are, they just need to get rid of the money.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Are you really surprised by any of these payouts to completely uneconomic green (as in money) projects by BHO? Do you notice the pattern of $500 million loans? There seem to be BHO Big Bundlers involved in each of them. A Big Bundler is someone who gathered together at least $500,000 for the Obama campaign. Pretty good ROI here: Invest $500,000 and get back $500,000,000.00. We are being robbed by these Progressives on a grand scale never before seen in this country -- and there are still people who just can't wait to vote for this clown again!
And to add insult, their first Fisker $97K car only gets the equivalent of 19MPG -- the same as the average SUV. Damn, I'm mad.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Green is new the buzzword for hiding payments to political allies.
http://dev.publicintegrity.org/2011/10/20/7152/energys-risky-1-billion-bet-two-politically-connected-electric-car-builders
As in, Fisker is connect to an Al Gore group and Tesla is connected to Google leaders who are major fund raisers for ......
So just like Solyndra, none of this was about viability, this was all about who is connected to whom, follow the money. It is nothing more than politics as usual
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I can't really tell from the wording... was "PR Success" meant as irony?
These specs seem to be really poor -- $100K price tag, only slightly less than the high-end Tesla sports car, 32 mile electric range, which the Roberts Electric Car built in 1896 beats by 20%, and 20 MPG on gasoline, which my F150 truck beats by 13% on the freeway. Do the people of Finland really have such low standards?
All this for $592M in US tax money for a product that doesn't create a single US job. This is a success that makes up for the failure of Solyndra?
And now we're calling the Solyndra bankruptcy, with it's loss of more than a half billion dollars of taxpayer money, a PR failure??
Seriously?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Or, we could sit back and wait for the Chinese to do the innovation and use their manufacturing prowess to sell us cheap electric cars.
Which is exactly how it turned out with solar panels, except the Obama administration put half a billion tax dollars on a bonfire in the Solyndra parking lots so we could be warm while we watched it happen. Of course, they rigged that financing situation so that a handful of private investors would get paid back before the taxpayers ... private investors who happened to be friends of and fundraisers for the Obama campaign. Classy, huh?
Let private companies attract private fundraising for this sort of thing. And let only those people lose out if it's a waste. And if it's successful, let them be rich for having been smart about it (though being smart, and reaping those rewards is now an Eeeeeevil 1% thing to do - and we can't have that now, can we).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.