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Comment by qwanzi77 | Hacker News Reader

Honda, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, or smaller ones like Think, BYD, Tango, or Venturi? I could name many more. Where are their $500M+ loans to build their electric cars?

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Did they ask, and/or meet the requirements? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Vehicles_Ma...

Many asked. Only few were given those loans. Why not give the money to research universities instead? Wouldn't that be a lot more fair? We could all exploit the research, instead of just a few well-connected billionaires and corporations with lots of resources.

I think the aim was to make electric cars a practical reality, and somehow I don't see academia do that.

The critical component, by far, is the battery. If you find ways to build a better battery, electric cars are a practical reality. Academia is perfect for battery research.

Building a car is an engineering project. Building a new kind of car will be a science intensive engineering project, but an engineering project nevertheless. Designing a new car is an attempt at optimizing a high dimensional design space that spans many disciplines that are interdependent. This requires fundamentally different methods and organization than those used conventional research.

byd is small? this knock-off manufacturer is one of the largest in china and now even works with daimler.

I clearly stated "smaller". BYD has a market cap 10% the size of Tesla's current market cap.

"current"—out of curiosity, was it so small before Tesla received the loan?

The key word being 'current', not 'back when the loans were given'.

"Honda, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, or smaller ones like Think, BYD, Tango, or Venturi"

"smaller" was in reference to Honda, Toyota, BMW, and Mercedes. You can substitute Bright Automotive if you wish.

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