I have to agree with the article's points. When your entire idea is to build really expensive cars in a down economy using rare Earth elements (Lithium etc) while competitors have access to the same technology but already have the supply chain infrastructure and experience? You're screwed. The point that Tesla could default in 2017... that's probably about right. And cars for $65K? That's not affordable. You can get a really nice F-type Jaguar race car for that.
Tesla S review by Car and Driver magazine.
I'm not sure that electric cars are the future. Electric trains, sure, but cars need special batteries and have limited range. If you can work with that range, fine, but for the distance, a very small engine car or scooter will also work, for far less money, and the tanks of gas you could buy with the difference is way more economical. Now that we know that there's a Saudi Arabia of Oil underneath California, and Two Saudi Arabias of oil under Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, fracking our own oil shales is a lot less disruptive than going to war for Bolivia's Lithium, or waiting actual years for the leach fields to drain out enough lithium from the only US Lithium mine, located in Nevada. Technology has to answer its demand quick or competition spoils it. Don't bother arguing. That's life.
When you consider that the 2.0L turbo in a Subaru WRX has the same seating, comforts, speed, and many times the range of the electric car in the tank for HALF the price? Duh. And Subaru also makes a really nice turbo diesel engine that they nearly released in the USA in 2010. You can buy it in the EU and its good. And it will run on biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil or algae or fracked from the shales. Whatever. Still, even paying to swap from the gasoline Subaru to the Turbo Diesel is cheaper than the Tesla. And you don't have to go to war for the Subaru.
This Subaru Forester Diesel would sell here. Half the cars on the road in the Sierras are Subarus. We get snow, you see. And barely half the roads are paved. Can the Tesla do this? Would you trust it enough to try? If you run out of juice in the boonies with a Tesla, you have to rent and haul a construction generator there, then run it for hours to charge it enough to get unstuck. Its not a matter of a friend dropping off a gallon of diesel or gasoline in a little red can. I agree with the article that the Tesla SUV is a flop. Gull wing doors for kids on the school run? Really? How are they reaching those? Does it open and shut with electric motors? What do those weigh? Sigh.
I'm glad I didn't go work for them. My interview there three years ago left me wondering if they were nuts. "We just need to know if you are comfortable lifting 20 pounds and twisting every 45 seconds for 10 hours a day. We've lost prior operators due to back injury, but we don't have any plans to fix this problem because its expensive." Yeah, that's what the interviewer said. After that, I wasn't shy asking about Peak Lithium and how that's supposed to work when the goal is electric cars for everybody. Yeah, no followup interviews after that.
Diesel subarus make sense. You can even build them out of recycled steel and retrofit the engines and tanks onto existing gasoline subarus. Would make a great contract business for car mechanics someday. Far cheaper option than buying a $65K electric car with 100 miles of range and guaranteed to be carrying somebody rich enough to buy one. Total kidnapping opportunity there. In a world with 26%-48% unemployment rates, and no futures, kidnapping rings make sense. Sensible rich people don't advertise their wealth.
See? The rich will be buying Subarus too. So who's the market for Teslas? Rich Liberals? How long will that work? Collective guilt only works on certain religious groups. The rest of us don't care and change the channel. So yeah, Tesla is an interesting experiment with a receding horizons problem and a shrinking market. So long as they're using Lithium batteries, it has no real future.
No comments:
Post a Comment