The federal government seemed almost too happy to dish a $465 million loan to Tesla Motors.
The federal government seems to be quite happy with dishing out money for environmentally friendly ventures, and there are plenty of companies that are willing to take the funds and put them to good use. One such company is Tesla Motors.
Tesla Motors is probably most notable for its sexy all-electric Roadster. The $100,000+ sports car, which is based on the Lotus Elise chassis, has a driving range of 244 miles – one Tesla Roadster, however, was able to travel 313 miles on a single charge — and can zip to 60 mph in less than four seconds. However, Tesla is looking to take its electric car-building prowess to a somewhat more mainstream audience with its four-door Model S electric sedan.
This is where the federal government steps in to work its magic. According to the Detroit News, Tesla Motors today closed on a deal to secure $465 million in low-cost loans from the Energy Department. The funds will be used to build manufacturing plants in California for the Model S and its powertrain.
The company was originally approved for the loan back in June of 2009. The $465 million will come from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program which is providing a total of $25 billion to automakers that develop new fuel efficient vehicles. Other notable names to get in on the loans include Nissan ($1.6 billion) and Ford ($5.9 billion).
“This is an investment in our clean energy future that will create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
“It will help build a customer base and begin laying the foundation for American leadership in the growing electric vehicles industry. This is part of a sustained effort to develop and commercialize technologies that will be broadly deployed throughout the American auto industry.”
As previously reported by DailyTech, the Model S will have a driving range of up to 300 miles and can dash to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds. The fetching sedan weighs in at a portly 4,000 pounds (1,200 pounds of which comes from its lithium-ion battery pack). If all goes according to plan, the base Model S will cost around $50,000 after a government-backed $7,500 tax credit is taken into consideration. For comparison, the Chevrolet Volt is expected to cost in the “low 30s” after the $7,500 tax credit is applied. At that price point, GM still contends that it can make a profit.
The Model S is scheduled to go into production in 2012 and yearly output is pegged at 20,000 units per year.
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RSSThese car guys just lie and lie.. Chrysler and GM said “Oh everything will be rosy if you just give us billions in bailout and now we know they fully knew they were going to go bankrupt, they were just hyping it up in order to grab some more cash, Tesla is the same but more. So let me get this right, the Tesla head guy paid GQ magazine to write an article about how arrogant he is and ditched his smart wife and left her with 5 kids for a teenie bopper that he was cheating with and announced a battery deal that was really just an R&D contract and has multiple lawsuits against them by other companies, and may have a car that causes cancer from battery EMF and has created a pool of past staff that write endless blogs about how bad they are and then raised prices because they had no idea how to build a car and lied to the City of San Jose and their customers and applied for their only source of funds without even reading the rules that told them in advance they should never try to build a factory and is trying to sell an insanely expensive car in a depression while every investor has deeply reviewed them and turned them down and Musk won’t even put his money in (of which he has hundreds of millions) and all of their technology has now been superseded by Fisker, Bright and others with cars that do more for 2/3rds less money. ?? Tesla employees are so ready to jump ship that Musk spies on them with fake internal emails… hmmmmmm
Cheating:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/21/profile-of...
http://gawker.com/5196054/money-cant-buy-elon-m...
Battery Deal:
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/08/16/some-co...
Lawsuits:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/380125/tesla-finds-...
Cancer:
http://www.saxton.org/tom_saxton/2009/01/tesla-...
Bad karma from the start:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/tesla-s-mYu...
More problems:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/more...
http://greenfuelsforecast.com/ArticleDetails.ph...
http://erith1.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/tesla-si...
Pissing off the customers:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/tesla-to-angry...
Tesla is a “BAD THING”,:
* Marty, the founder of Tesla, has said that Musk is a “liar”, “cheat”, “manipulator” and has “no idea what he is doing”
* Musk abandoned his wife and kids for a teeny bopper actress and cheated on his marriage vows
* Musk blew tens of millions of dollars on wasted engineering and office fluff that has never been, and never will be, used in the car and that has been proved to be wrong by the new engineering staff.
* Tesla has sent a pitch letter to almost every VC on Earth and not a single one of them will invest in Tesla because their investigations in due diligence showed the company to be so poorly managed and to have one of the worst debt and financial structures in industry.
* Musk had his PR liaison pay GQ magazine to write an article about him about what a stud muffin he was so he could get more dates.
* The company has increasing numbers of lawsuits against them and most of those are for ethics issues.
* The company needs to sell 1000 cars per day to even come within a hair of meeting their investor, financial and operational costs. They are barely within 5% of that figure.
* Now that so many people have quit or left GM , they have revealed that the EV1 (Who killed the electric car) was recalled and crushed because the battery pack was shown to cause cancer. When Musk was told the Tesla battery pack could also cause cancer, he told the engineers to “not dwell on non-issues”.
* Tesla conned the city of San Jose and other politicians to write letters for their DOE loan knowing full well they were never going to put a factory in San Jose because it was too expensive to ever do that.
* Tesla applied for the DOE loaned even though they do not have the viability or debt ratio to qualify. Tesla has worse financials than Chrysler.
* Fisker, Shelby, Bright and dozens of other companies now offer more EV, faster EV, more features in an EV for less money, so there is no reason to buy a Tesla now.
* No customer is going to install a 220V or 440 V extra plug on their house and pay for that and the extra energy in any volume.
* Musk spied on his staff unethically and created a work environment where nobody cares about the company or the car so the quality is in the hole.
* Darryl Sir, Marty the founder, and hosts of famous people have left and blogged or tattled at tech parties on the extreme ills of Musk.
* Musk spends almost 400K per month on PR services to exploit his name instead of his company brand.
* Tesla changed the prices after customers bought cars because they still are too screwed up to figure out how much to charge.