$529M Gov't Loan To Develop $89,000 Hybrid Sports Car 293
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that a tiny car company backed by former VP Al Gore has just gotten a $529M US government loan to help build an $89,000 hybrid sports car in Finland. The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive follows an earlier $465M government loan to Tesla Motors, purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Fisker's other investors (PDF) include the Al Gharaffa Investment Co., a Cayman Islands corporation."
Re:Hybrid car (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, even if the power comes from fossil fuel plants, emissions can be controlled to a much higher degree at a central location compared to thousands of car engines scattered everywhere and moving around. For instance, technology is currently being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the combustion and pump it back into the ground.
Another advantage is that excess heat may be used to heat buildings (i.e. a CHP-plant [wikipedia.org]).
Re:Hybrid car (Score:2, Interesting)
Hawaii is the only place in the US that uses oil for a significant amount of electricity. On the mainland it's coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, plus some wind and solar. I doubt oil is used to produce even 1% of electricity in the mainland US.
Re:Hybrid car (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, There Goes the WSJ (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I don't recall the WSJ being this biased. Did this all happen after the Mrudoch purchase?
Who cares if Fisker is backed by Gore? Why would that surprise anyone? Gore has money and is an environmentalist. Gore backing an electric car company is almost expected. Both Tesla and Fisker are American companies. Tesla is building a manufacturing plant in CA and it sounds like Fisker is going to be American built, at least for the mass produced version. Yes, Teslas are currently British built but that's for their supercar and first model.
Seeding electric car startups is one way we're going to rebuild the American auto industry. Trying to reboot GM and Chrysler might very well be a lost cause, as some of us had suggested. If these two companies are successful, they will allow America to leapfrog the Japanese and Germans in the making of efficient cars. The Chinese are trying to do the same thing. An electric car is in many ways much simpler than a gasoline driven one. All the accumulated advantages and knowledge of traditional car companies go out the window because the electric motor has a lot less parts than a gasoline engine.
If you disagree with government aid to companies, then it doesn't matter what kind of companies, venture, or backers a companies has. However, if you are OK with some government aid, then Tesla and Fisker are pretty good choices in my opinion. For once, instead of aiding old, antiquated corporations, the government is aiding nimble startups that can potential disrupt and jolt an entire industry.
Re:You're right. (Score:0, Interesting)
And if there were a market for that car then they wouldn't need Uncle Sam using our tax dollars to finance the company. Have we already moved past socialism and into communism where the state knows what is best for us all?
you left a very important point out (Score:5, Interesting)
Large dams and hydroelectric facilities there are only one half the benefit, we also store water for drought times, and this is critically important and we just slap need those dammed up reservoirs now. In fact, we need more of them, not less.
Yes, there are environmental negatives to them, same as anything else, but we simply *need* the water storage facilities, there is no replacement for them with any other practical tech out there at this time, and as long as we need that, might as well get some electricity from it at the same time.. For example, where I live in Georgia, we are coming off a near three year drought with plenty of rain this year, like right now in fact, but we got to within a few weeks of no water but emergency supplies only for millions of people in the Atlanta region last year, and that is *with* large reservoirs. If they didn't exist and got torn down, well....it would fall into the maximum suckage area. Same with any number of other places around the US and the world. We have little choice. Dams/reservoirs and better usage and conservation are our only options, desalination is just way way way too expensive to do it for billions of people,even nuke powered. It's just better to store up rain when it is plentiful.
As to that "salmon" bugaboo, we have the tech to mitigate that, it's called fingerlings and tanker trucks. They don't do it a lot but *they could* for wild salmon. They can get moved around the dams without major loss. It doesn't take many adults to get thousands and thousands of fingerlings either, they could net some adults when migrating up the river to go spawn, or they use what are called "fish ladders", move em around the dam, then re capture the fingerlings later and put them back in the river downstream of the dam, or do it in long concrete runway tanks that are already old and used tech. Using tanker trucks is the main way they move around and stock trout now for instance.
As to the methane, that's what natural gas is, methane with some scent added to it so people can smell it. If we can eliminate the need to burn natural gas in generating plants by using hydropower and windchargers and so on, that's the tradeoff for the dammed up areas releasing some methane. It's not perfect, but we get a lot more benefits from the hydropower and reservoirs than not. *Everything* we humans do is a tradeoff with "nature", so the best is to look where we can be cleaner and more efficient. And that's it.
Re:Hybrid car (Score:4, Interesting)
But why can't we just build hydroelectric dams or fission reactors right into the car itself? Or better yet...wind powered cars. Just think how fast a wind turbine would spin on top of a car going 80MPH. The thing would practically power itself.
I was listening to the radio a couple days ago, and I literally heard someone, in all seriousness, call in and ask the guy:
"Why don't we just make one big windmill, and have it blow at the little windmills so they're always turning? Wouldn't that give us free electricity?"
The state of science in our country is sooooooooo goddamn appalling...
-Taylor
Re:The Tesla Roadster is NOT 'British Built' (Score:1, Interesting)
"Assembled" is one of those weasel words though, isn't it? It's been abused in the past no end to get around import restrictions in many places around the world where cars are shipped part-finished and "assembled" in their destination market to appear local.
For example, I used to own a "British-built" Peugeot 309. It consisted of the engine and drivetrain from a 205 GTI (designed and built in France) mated with some Simca bits (designed in France, built who knows where) and a body designed in part of the UK whose contribution to architecture is the Bull Ring. It was "assembled" in Coventry, but the contributions of the locals were limited to knowing which end of a screwdriver to hold.
In the case of the Tesla roadster it's a bit different - Lotus's involvement is a bit more than to stick some Elises on a boat without engines (they did a fair bit of chassis development too), but the important bit isn't the screwing it together (which happens in Norfolk) but the development of the idea, which is 100% Californian.