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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.
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.
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"
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.
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make install -not war
Every president is a proponent of the power of the state. Especially liars like Ronald Reagan and Bush/Cheney, who expand state power to everyone's serious injury as they claim to avoid it.
You want an actually sensible explanation? You got it.
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make install -not war
Maybe pushing work back to the home region?
I doubt the company have a secret agenda about pushing to Finland. Why?
Manufacturing costs in Scandinavia is a lot higher, it's not uncommon for unskilled factory workers to make 25 USD per hour, not counting overtime, late hours etc.
From the article:
Henrik Fisker said the U.S. money has been spent on engineering and design work that stayed in the U.S., not on the 500 manufacturing jobs that went to a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive.
Seriously in the process of spending half a billion how much is 500 manufacturing jobs?