Tesla: Bonfire Of The Money Printers’ Vanities
The Wall Street casino is now festooned with giant deadweight losses waiting to happen. But perhaps none is more egregious than Tesla—–a crony capitalist con job that has long been insolvent, and has survived only by dint of prodigious taxpayer subsidies and billions of free money from the Fed’s Wall Street casino.
Click the link for the full Tesla and "green industry" story. Sadly, I've seen comments here on the Gulch lauding Elon Musk as a brilliant entrepreneur. He's today's version of Orrin Boyle.
Click the link for the full Tesla and "green industry" story. Sadly, I've seen comments here on the Gulch lauding Elon Musk as a brilliant entrepreneur. He's today's version of Orrin Boyle.
Excellent. sll!
Now a "Taggart Aerospace" would have its own space program, planning its own missions, and building and lofting its own space station, whether all at once or in sections.
Now if they throw in with the International Space Elevator Consortium, then maybe...
It would be difficult for anyone to survive on making only luxury cars, so they are launching their SUV and their $30,000 price point car over the next couple of years.
I kind of applaud him, starting a new car company from scratch, in a completely new segment is tough.
If you have ever driven or own an EV, its quite a bit of a game changer... I wouldn't want one yet for our only transportation, but my wife drives a Chevy Volt, and its only needed an oil change on the generator a couple of times in the 40,000 miles she has on it. 90% of her mileage is on battery - which requires zero maintenance.
Drive-wise... it outperforms any similar gas car by miles... electric motors have 100% of their torque at 0 RPM, so the performance is basically what you want it to be. More amperage = more performance in a linear curve, basically.
The battery technology is a constant focus of most of the research & development, so while you can go about 200 miles today and charge in about 2 hours, Tesla has already got that down to about 20 minutes with their "superchargers" along the freeways. Something akin to putting gas in your car. They will eventually get to 400 and then 600, and maybe 1000 miles on a charge, and this stuff will become ubiquitous just because of the financials.
I grew up in northern Minnesota, fighting starting a car in -45 degree temps. Oddly enough, the EV's tend to do just fine in that, the batteries have warming/cooling systems on them, so when you plug in at night, a small amount of power goes to keep the battery acclimated, so you still just push a button to leave in the morning. My wife even set up her Volt to turn on the heater in the morning and warm the car (using the charger's current) and its ready to go at 6:30 when she normally leaves. Most EV's can do that stuff. She can also program it to cool the car in the afternoon before she leaves the office and gets in a nice A/C when its 110 out here in the summer.
The SUV models have separate / independent motors on each wheel, so off-road performance should be pretty impressive without the wheel-spin/slip characteristic of a transmission & transfer case setup. You are not going to go super-bog-running with an $80,000 SUV, but for the typical Lexus SUV buyer or whatever, the urban-assault should be pretty easily handled.
So how good are they? Cost-wise, the Volt averages the equivalent of 370 miles per gallon when on electric power. When using the generator to extend the range (indefinitely), we see closer to about 59 mpg (with something that looks/drives like a sports car). Overall, with a typical charge and a 400 mile drive to the extended limit of the range before you need to get some gas, we around 67 mpg combined (6 gallon gas tank). - battery first 50 miles or so, then consuming gas and it averages out over the day-trip.
On my wife's commute, a typical car/truck would easily eat through a couple of fill-ups per week - or around $90 an gas +/- (a week), the Volt is about $10,000 to $15,000 higher (keep in mind that gas car isn't free either), so the differential is if you can cover that $10,000 additional price with the $400 of gas - of course, over the typical 5-7 years someone keeps a car, that is very easy to do, and it also came with a $9000 California tax rebate, which covers the lion's share of that differential anyway. People b*tch about that, but realistically, there is $5,000 in sales tax on that car, so most of that, we pay at the pump immediately anyway... its more of an incentive than a "subsidy". Numbers-wise, the Volts sell about double the number of Corvettes that Chevy sells, and they are not giving that up anytime soon, so I don't expect the product line to diminish... they are actually doubling-down with a new model this year (The Bolt).
Of course, here in California... the carpool lane stickers for it are very handy, my wife has a 60 mile round-trip commute each day, and used to take her an hour+ each way in her VW, and now takes her a reliable 30 minutes each-way using the carpool lanes.
90% of the road maintenance budget goes to maintaining the right two lanes, where semi-trucks are required to drive (because they are limited to 55 mph). CalTrans triples the thickness of the roadbed and the concrete layers for those lanes.
The EV's are authorized for carpool lanes, which are more or less fully funded by the federal government. The reason they are popping up everywhere is because most of the federal funds available to state highway departments for Interstate/freeway widening is for carpool/HOV lanes and can't be used for others. So they use the federal funds for HOV widening and use their own money for other stuff. Again... same people are paying full-freight on the federal income taxes (and then some).
Whether or not paying a couple of hundred dollars a year in gas tax to a family paying $50k or so in state / federal income tax is pretty non-consequential. The argument is pretty much BS, it's only a method to drum up class warfare support for taxing people's cars as personal property tax next.
Everyone has sales tax... we do too... around the same amount (varies by county), from about 8% to 9.x%.
You did miss my point though, the wear & tear of an EV on a the roads is extremely light, particularly here where they use otherwise-minimally-used parts of the freeway. Semi trucks pay pretty large amounts, and should, as they use the public road system for their business and more or less 24x7. They pay much higher registration and business asset taxes, plus a heck of a lot of fuel tax.
Same argument could be said of me - I have a new 2015 Colorado, pay a lot of taxes on it, but I work from home, the only place it goes is the Starbucks down the street or the airport for business travel and stays there all week. I pay the same freight as anyone else, but I minimally use public roads.
It's a circular argument. And it comes down to free markets and free choice. I could easily drive a Volt, I happen to like crew cab 4x4 trucks. My last one was a Titan and I spent a heck of a lot more gas tax than anyone else in my zip code I'm sure. I buy them knowing I'm going to get from 8 to 20 mpg, depending on which one/era I'm talking about.
The person you mentioned getting 20 mpg, certainly could have also bought something that gets better mileage - used Honda Fits are pretty cheap I'm sure. But they choose to have a little more steel around them (and not a terrible idea on major urban freeways).
Those choices have always been there, and its not never "equal" as to who pays what, its your choice. Burning more fossil fuels no-doubt increases harm to the environment as well, so using more should pay more for spill cleanups, greenhouse gases, etc.
The point is, you are talking about a segment of the market that will never be particularly large. I'm talking about a parking lot of 200-300 cars and you might see 3-5 EV's in there. We also use a heck of a lot more electricity, which is also highly-taxed... (although I tend to circumvent that again by choice).
All the talk of that nonsense has far more to do with the lobbying strength of car dealers and their serious p*ssing match with Tesla over not selling through dealers (and only on the Internet). They are getting them banned in any state they can (such as New Jersey), do you really think they are not behind the 'use tax'?
Always follow the money before you make a judgement. OpenSecrets.org is your friend.
As for Elon Musk using smog tax credits to fund part of the business... why not? He didn't make up the system, he just figured out a way to benefit from it. If not him, someone else would. I personally don't believe in any subsidies & what not, but b*tching about something on forum groups doesn't make it go away, or change the world.
Bonds? High-grade ones are yielding a paltry 1-2%. That doesn't even cover inflation.
Savings accounts? One is lucky to get even 1.25% annual interest.
CD's? More of the same.
Mortgages? Not only are real investors skittish because of Fanny and Freddy, the real market is bubbling again because the first pop wasn't the big one. Loan rates are still too low to support stability so people are building new houses instead of purchasing existing. What this does is introduce a glut of housing in "growing" markets (like mine) based on false perception of value. And since property taxes are based on perceived values, there is a temporary spike in those as well, leading to government spending and such. And when the crunch comes and everything crumples, you get a huge mess.
So what are investors left with? Speculation via the stock market. The reason prices are so high based on no value and a stagnant economy is because of basic dearth of options! Cash is cheap right now, so investors are chasing every temporary option in the hopes of making a few quick bucks and pulling out.
Now you won't hear this from any professional investment advisors because they only make money by persuading you that there is money to be made, but the reality is that any sane person wouldn't touch the stock market right now (except to short) with a twenty-foot pole.
While I still have a passion for the technology, it is obviously at a great cost both economically and environmentally. Still very cool. I drive a Volt and love the quiet ride and acceleration, but really leased it just for the attention it gets. I have it lettered up with my business info. Just like Elon is doing, you go with the flow of money. Good or Bad, the masses think that we need alternatives to conventional oil.
Tesla may or may not succeed, long term, but there haven't been all that many 'advances' in battery technology in many decades, and some of the recent developments may cause some market-changing shocks in the next 5-10 years.
Any and all assumptions on the cost of energy or overall efficiency of electric cars staying the same over 5-10 years are downright silly.
Need evidence? Look at the data for the past decade or two!
con-job - not so sure. Elon has been public a number of times about being surprised Telsa actually "succeeded". Almost warning people not to invest.
Perhaps the ethics of diverting the flow of confiscated government funds your own way could be debated... one might see it (like social security) as a way of recovering previous forced "payments" to the feds.
As to the Tesla car, there's not much Tesla about it!