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$529M DOE Loan Spawns $97K Made-in-Finland Cars

Posted by Soulskill on from the mission-accomplished dept.

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."

5 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Sincerity? by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Sincerity? by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, the availability of certain manufacturing processes and related skills is often localized. There are several kinds of modern manufacturing process which appear to be unavailable or uncommon in the US.

      One of the products I designed has certain parts (passive, but necessarily complex in shape) which are made in Finland, simply because no US or Canadian supplier could be found who could make them in moderate quantities. 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 supplier in Finland uses an entirely different industrial process, and can produce single digit quantities if necessary, at quite acceptable unit prices.

      --
      Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
  2. Great by benjamindees · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"
  3. Hybrid that gets 20MPG?? by Amigan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"
  4. Re:The DOE loan is for the Nina by mtrachtenberg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, the DOE loan is for the Delaware plant. This fact is well-known: http://www.examiner.com/electric-car-in-national/fisker-automotive-grabs-529-million-from-the-doe

    And that omission, soulskill, is either incompetent or dishonest.