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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.
The company name is "Fisker"? It's nice to see the American taxpayer getting exactly what he's paying for these days.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
They couldn't find a facility? Wasn't the whole point of these programs to build new facilities?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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"
The DOE loan is for the Nina, it'll be built in An shutdown Saturn plant in Delaware. Not the Karma.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Maybe pushing work back to the home region?
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?
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.
Also, it's just a flat out lie to make the title "$529M DOE Loan". It's a loan guarantee, not a loan. The taxpayers are in no way on the hook for anywhere close to $529M.
That's not how it worked with Solyndra. They borrowed the half-billion, using the government loan guarantee as collateral, and then declared bankruptcy, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for replaying the loan.
Electric car investment is clearly necessary. Without the investment, no electric cars. Private industry has had the opportunity for years, but blew it off in favor of gas guzzling SUVs and other trucks with suspended emissions regulations that it could sell to a market greased with fakeout balloon credit. That bizmodel crashed the car industry, while helping to drive up gas prices to $4+ and oil prices to $120+ - and made the Greenhouse even worse faster. Only when the public bailed out the US car industry (to save the rest of the US economy and industrial base) did it start to turn to serious electric product development.
But it's not enough. And because a lot of strategic progress hides behind multiple risky options, private industry (and finance) doesn't invest in it. Because those normal investors don't know how to invest in anything - which is why the entire investment industry had to get bailed out by the public. So the electric car investments have to come from the public, too.
Now, those investments are risky, as I said. Not too risky to do any of them, but too risky for each one to pay off. And when the government invests, it's far more efficient for it to invest in larger single investments, because managing a lot of little ones is beyond the ability to centrally plan and organize, especially given the volume and complexity of reporting and oversight that comes with any government contract. And then some of these investments will fail. Big ones will lose a lot of money.
Which is why private investment is better. Except private investment isn't doing it. Even before the Credit Bubble crashed, across many different bubbles (and even sustained growth), private investment wasn't doing it. Yet if we don't do it, either our resources and pollution crises will damage us more than the cost of the investment, or a foreign government will do it in ways that hurt us to help them, or most likely both.
So the government will have some Solyndras. It will have some Fiskers. Just as private investment would have had, though probably overall less wasted investment because there is so much more transparency (even if not enough) than when private investors make their deals - and fail. Plus government investment tends to take other policies, like US labor growth, into account that private investment ignores or worse. Not all the time, as is perhaps the case here with Fisker, but more than when private investment does it. Which, again, it is not doing here. And government investments, even when the commercial venture fails, tend to produce more usable lessons learned (and tech spun off) than private failures that usually keep the intellectual value suppressed in some new owner, or just left to rot entirely without a new use.
--
make install -not war
After Solyndra there will be more failed green energy companies backed by socialist spending. One of my client's, a silicon crystal grower, is busy buying up equipment from green energy companies as they liquidate and pay back the original investors using taxpayer money.
Unpopular as it may be with the Slashdot crowd, the government is not smart enough to pick winners. The government should not be in this business. Taking tax money to invest in initiatives like this is at best foolish and at worst theft.
This was $529 million dollars taken from Americans and given to Obama's cronies. Where did that money come from?
Top 10% of earners: ~$365 million dollars
Top 50% of earners: ~$520 million dollars
If that money had not been taxed and wasted it would have been wasted mostly by those in the upper middle class and the rich. It would have gone to support private schools, yoga teachers, golf courses, 5 star restaurants, designer stores, etc. Each of those business provides jobs and incomes for the service industry: the bottom 50% of earners.
If you want to create more jobs in America then stop taxing Americans.
"The only US bids received stated that they assumed we had made an error in the RFQ, and actually required quantities in the tens of thousands. These suppliers relied on a manufacturing process which required that scale and would result in prohibitively expensive unit costs for a production run of mere hundreds."
The downside of "economies of scale". You're right, I'm sure. Sometimes, in order to make lots of stuff cheaply, you have to give up the ability to make small amounts of stuff cheaply.
It's not uncommon for /. editors to add a story update when significant new information comes to light, or there was a major f-up in the original. This is one of those times, Soulskill. I know a lot of stuff rotates through your in-box, and you got suckered by @theodp. You need post the correction:
- Fisker Karma, made in Finland, no DOE loan.
- Fisker Nina, to be made in Delaware, with DOE loan.
Luke, help me take this mask off