Car Company Gets U.S. Loan, Builds Cars In Finland
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
It's weird-looking, expensive ($100K), has a very limited electric range (32 miles) and is incredibly fuel-inefficient (20mpg) once the battery runs out.
Furthermore, unlike Tesla, they don't seem to have a firm plan to proceed from a low-volume luxury model to a higher-volume cheaper model.
Besides, Tesla seems to have the rather limited "I'm a rich dude who wants to show how much I care about the environment by driving around in an expensive electric car" market sewn up pretty well. And the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are far cheaper, generally better, and I'd trust 'em a lot more.
The only real question is how many Karmas will get built before Fisker goes bankrupt taking $528 million of US taxpayer money with it.
Car manufacturing is a really hard business to break into. If you look at the world's big car companies, they've practically all been around since the 1920s, and possibly slightly before. Kia was founded in 1944. I can't think of any companies (aside from offshoots of existing car or related motorized equipment companies) that have been sucessfully founded since the end of WW2.
The others Land Rover, Hummer, MINI etc, were all bought by others. Tata also counts...but they are part of a conglomerate that's been in business since mid 1800s
I have places I go that are > 200 miles from home. I want to drive my fun car to these places. The Tesla can't do this. I can never be a customer of Tesla's with this restriction.
I will be buying the convertible Fisker Karma if they ever get to the point of selling it!
You'll have better fuel economy and about $20K in change.
Could be fun to try driving a Tesla transcontinentally with a trailer and... however many generators it would take to keep it running.
I've always wondered about that. Tesla only shipped about 2500 Roadsters before they were discontinued. I find it hard to believe that there isn't demand for 2500 units per year of a unique, high-performance car like the Roadster in California alone. It seemed like the real constraint was Tesla's inability to produce them in volume, or make money doing so.
Proton : formed by the Malaysian government in 1983. Yes- government created so not a fair comparison. Perodua : other Malaysian manufacturer. Both exist under a heavy tariff protection scheme, so possibly not good examples.
Pagani : started selling with no govt backup or protection in 1991. Very high priced, but similar market to Fisker. Koenigsegg : created in 1994, again high priced. Mclaren : created in 1989 as an offshoot of the racing team. To be fair both McLaren and Pagani get assistance with engines from larger manufacturers.
There are a few more specialty/small manufacturers that have been created and still exist.
I think your original point stands that no new mass-production car companies have been created without severe government intervention.
Some of the chinese manufacturers would be interesting to study from this point of view.
I'm not sure why this is - I suspect it's related to the massively high fixed costs, but also the huge amount of government intervention that goes on in the vehicle market. There's not a market in the world that isn't affected by some type of regulatory requirements, tariff and trade protectionism etc.
I think vehicle manufacture is a bit like airlines in that many people seem to want to be involved for reasons other than making a profit.
I have moderately high hopes for Honda, but I can't really see toyota being a success. Why don't we just have one company succeed and the rest of them can just go to hell. Why is it always a zero sum game?
* ( http://www.grist.org/cleantech/2011-10-21-the-facts-on-fiske... )
Maybe it's a bit long for a headline
This news is also 2 years old!
Oh, I looked it up. Apparently it's an assumption of the risk if the company defaults. So if I'm understanding this correctly, from the US Government's point of view it has all the risk of giving them a loan (we're on the hook if they default), with none of the upside (if they pay it back we don't get the interest). Right?
It's subsidized research.
Compare to, say, the budget of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
For five hundred million dollars, you can get, say, five thousand man-years worth of actual research. As opposed to a business that makes a few funny-looking sports cars for rich people and then goes broke.
Homestead land grants cost taxpayers nothing and went to small family farmers. That's nothing like half-billion dollar taxpayer loans directed by politicians in Washington.
After the film, it was explained that for Disney World, including EPCOT, to succeed, a special district would have to be formed: the Reedy Creek Improvement District with two cities inside it, the City of Bay Lake and the City of Reedy Creek (now the City of Lake Buena Vista). In addition to the standard powers of an incorporated city, which include the issuance of tax-free bonds, the district would have immunity from any current or future county or state land-use laws. The only areas where the district had to submit to the county and state would be property taxes and elevator inspections.[1]
Think of it as trying to do what the stimulus should have done, leveraged quite a bit (because you only need to pay out what it cost to cover the loans that go bad).
And the headline is just misleading (like most headlines on Yahoo News): not only did the company say they've spent the money in the US, they actually can't spend them outside the country...