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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
DOE places $465Mil bet on Tesla
Tesla landed a $465Mil DOE loan according to a Wired article. The loan is supposed to aid the development of the Model S, a car the vast majority of Americans (and Earthlings) can not afford. That's an interesting amount of money to be sure.
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Apparently the Feds don't know a goodbattery when they see one. Tesla uses off-the-shelf 1st generation batteries designed for flashlights. A recent electricla engineer observed that it's impossible to reliably maintain 6700 electrical battery connections, such as are contained in the Tesla battery pack. Looks like a class action lawsuit is coming.
Tesla is using the profits and experience with the very expensive Roadster to help finance more moderately priced electric cars. What is wrong with that?
The best thing that the government could do to advance the electric car industry is to force Chevron to release the NiMH battery for use in electric cars. It is a national scandal that this battery which has proven itself has been locked away while we focus on lithium batteries, which are still unproven for cars.
"a car the vast majority of Americans (and Earthlings) can not afford..."
But they allege to have cut the price per passenger by a factor of greater than FOUR! (Price is less than 1/2 Roadsters', Model S holds more than twice the number of Roadster passengers.)
They probably won't be able to perform that same trick for model #3, but if they only cut the Model-S price by half, they will finally produce a vehicle for the middle class. If Tesla can survive until 2015, we may finally have the car that many of us have awaited from the start. In the meantime, they'll keep selling Roadsters and Model-S cars to those who can afford them, which, while unarguably a minority of the market, will still be a large absolute number: thousands or even hundreds of thousands, all told.
3 comments:
Apparently the Feds don't know a goodbattery when they see one. Tesla uses off-the-shelf 1st generation batteries designed for flashlights. A recent electricla engineer observed that it's impossible to reliably maintain 6700 electrical battery connections, such as are contained in the Tesla battery pack. Looks like a class action lawsuit is coming.
Tesla is using the profits and experience with the very expensive Roadster to help finance more moderately priced electric cars. What is wrong with that?
The best thing that the government could do to advance the electric car industry is to force Chevron to release the NiMH battery for use in electric cars. It is a national scandal that this battery which has proven itself has been locked away while we focus on lithium batteries, which are still unproven for cars.
"a car the vast majority of Americans (and Earthlings) can not afford..."
But they allege to have cut the price per passenger by a factor of greater than FOUR! (Price is less than 1/2 Roadsters', Model S holds more than twice the number of Roadster passengers.)
They probably won't be able to perform that same trick for model #3, but if they only cut the Model-S price by half, they will finally produce a vehicle for the middle class. If Tesla can survive until 2015, we may finally have the car that many of us have awaited from the start. In the meantime, they'll keep selling Roadsters and Model-S cars to those who can afford them, which, while unarguably a minority of the market, will still be a large absolute number: thousands or even hundreds of thousands, all told.
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