Virgin Could Take On Tesla With Electric Car

According to a story at Ars Technica, Virgin empire founder Richard Branson says 'teams of people' are working on electric cars. Says the article: Virgin is working on electric cars and could one day take on Tesla, according to company founder Richard Branson. Speaking at a racing event in Miami, Branson said Virgin had "teams of people" working on electric cars but refused to be drawn on specific details. The company's Virgin Racing team already competes in the all-electric Formula E championship, a high-speed, battery-powered spinoff of Formula 1. Branson has now hinted that Virgin's involvement could lead to the company selling its own electric cars. ... Branson's business has continued to expand in recent years. As well as trains and planes, Virgin now has a fledgling space operation and is soon to launch its own cruise ships.

Comments

Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[ArcadeMan]

The title for the real Tony Stark begins.

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[haruchai]

Bitch, please, that's not even a contest.
Branson started off with a magazine & record stores before launching an airline; Elon sold a space shooter video game as a 12yr old and was studying physics & material science at Stanford, is invested in SOLAR energy, considers running SpaceX to be his primary job & still found time to put his thoughts on the Hyperloop on paper while showcasing the launch of the most kickass electric sedan ever made.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

It may be that there's someone more deserving of the title than Musk but it ain't Branson, not now, not ever.

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[JaredOfEuropa]

He's not just spending money, but using it to build businesses that are thus far rather successful in markets considered to be hard to break into, hard to make money in, and/or hard to beat the incumbents. And he's intent on not just making a buck in those markets by being a little bit better than everyone else, he wants to turn things on their heads, and he is succeeding at that as well.

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[bheading]

And Branson will lose any such competition.

The vast majority of Branson's business ventures have been failures. The places where he does well are in monopolies, such as international airline travel and running monopolized train services in the UK (Branson tried to run a regional airline in the UK called Little Red, but failed). Even then these are on shaky ground; Virgin Atlantic has only just begun to return to profitability, probably something to do with Delta taking a 49% stake in the airline over from Singapore Airlines, and he nearly lost his rail franchise, until his lobbying efforts revealed that the UK government had made mistakes in the allocation of the contracts.

The only reason why Virgin Galactic even exists is because the state of New Mexico ponied up massive subsidies (thanks to Bill Richardson) to build the thing there. Branson never risks his own capital on long shots. He's only involved because this is a way to create publicity for his brand. Likewise his Formula 1 efforts, and likewise this nonsensical idea that he has people building an electric car.

Branson is all showmanship and no substance. He wants people to think he is some sort of environmental activist as he believes it will benefit him and his company. You'll see - we'll never see or hear of any Virgin-manufactured electric car ever again.

Hats off to the guy - he's made himself a lot of money (nobody knows how much, though) - but excepting his long-past days in the recording business, he guy has never delivered a manufactured product in his life, and never will.

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[Richard_at_work]

Branson is exceptional at PR, but thats about it - he rarely actually achieves something revolutionary from scratch as musk is doing, he will rather buy up existing outfits that is on the verge of success or has just achieved success. Formula E is easy to compete in because the cars are stock and supplied by a single third party, while their space effort only came about after Scaled Composites achieved their fame. Virgin Atlantic et al are nothing to call home about.

Branson is all about making money, he rarely takes actual risks.

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[MrBigInThePants]

He got rich on it BEFORE it got pure evil.

He sold out before it did.

Stop being jealous. He is just better than us. :)

Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson

[haruchai]

"He makes cars for the upper class"

Oh, for f*cks sake, his stated goal, as published on the Tesla Motors website in Aug 2006 is

"Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model."

He's taking longer than he thought and it'll take one or 2 more models to get to mass market affordable cars but he's making a lot of moves to make sure that happens, eg battery Gigafactory.

Misleading subject

[neapolitan]

It said "Virgin could take on Tesla", so I thought it was about a fellow Slashdotter forming his own company.

Re:Misleading subject

[Kjella]

I was having a thought alone the same lines, what are they going to call it? The Virgin Car? The Virgin S? The Auto Virgin? There's exactly zero ways "I drive a Virgin" sounds good, unless you're talking about tonight's date. And the odds of them releasing it under any other name is also near zero. So oddly enough, what I'm most curious to see is the name.

space business

[itzly]

you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business.

Sure, except that Virgin isn't competing in the space business. Virgin's business is suborbital fun rides.

Re:space business

[Rei]

Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.

In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.

Re:Refused to be drawn on specific details

[TWX]

I was on my high school's electric car team. We had a '73 Porsche 914 converted to use 24 deep-cycle lead-acid batteries located in the trunk and in the engine bay. The DC motor was a starter for an aircraft small jet engine if memory serves. There were six of us, seven if you count the auto shop teacher that was the sponsor.

So I guess we could have counted as one of Branson's teams, strictly speaking, had he sponsored us.

Well of course they "could".

[hey!]

This is the marriage of two mature technologies -- electric motors and automobile chassis -- plus modern batteries. So all you need to create an electric car is the will and enough money to hire the engineers.

The trick will be to create a car that is practical and successful in the marketplace.

It's easy for an engineer to create an amazing car on paper. What's hard is for a company to actually produce an amazing car (electric or otherwise) that people actually want to buy and to make money at it. That requires so many things to go right at so many levels, and that's what's impressive about the success of Tesla.

I look forward to seeing what Virgin comes up with. I wish them success. But I don't particularly expect it.

Re:interestingly ignorant

[ArcadeMan]

The last time those car companies tried to make electric cars, one of them even went as far as crushing their own cars instead of selling them to the people who wanted to buy them.

Tesla is forcing them to start making electric cars again. That's why people are so excited about Tesla.

More competition is always a good thing

[barlevg]

I've been incredibly impressed with what Tesla has done in getting an American public who flat out did not want to give up its gas guzzlers interested in the concept of an electric car. I'll be even more impressed when the Tesla competitors come around, and the question shifts from "Do I want an electric car?" to "Which electric car should I buy?"

Mary

[tomhath]

You insensitive clod.