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8K views 28 replies 15 participants last post by  pythagoras 
#1 ·
#4 ·
I personally would love to hear more about the inner workings at FA - like what the folks internally thought of the engine noise, Command Center, efficiency (and how their expectations were so wildly off EPA reality), etc.

Would also love to hear/see the product plan for Karma 2.0 (ie 2013/2014MY) - there was a rumor that they were creating 'Sport' and 'Luxury' options for the 2014MY Karma with different trims and possibly performance differences.

OH - would also really finally like the answer to the question of whether or not we actually get the full 403hp of the electric motors (and if so, what conditions precedent are required for this max - e.g. at least 26 miles of battery range, etc).
 
#5 ·
It is nice to finally get a little bit of insight into what was really going on inside FA. I cannot understand why FA could not have explained some of this to us owners. I finally now have a complete understanding why production stopped last summer. It was because of A123 and the recall due to faulty welding at Livonia.
Can't wait to hear more. I think FA missed out by not communicating properly with us early adopters. If they had been more honest with us, maybe a lot of negativity could have been prevented.
 
#6 ·
Interesting read -- can't wait for reply after this post ...

The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, Chapter 29

The solar boondoggles are modest compared to the crony capitalist capers in the electric vehicle (EV) sector. Here the Obama administration has guaranteed loans of $530 million for Fisker Automotive and $465 million for Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) and provided $270 million in stimulus money for a company called A123 that makes electric vehicle batteries. The first two of these are essentially failing vanity projects of Silicon Valley billionaires that are now being bailed out by the taxpayers for no discernible reason. The third has already filed for bankruptcy, taking the taxpayers down the drain with them.

The US treasury was put in harm’s way in all three of these cases not simply to boost the debatable concept of electric-battery vehicles. The global automotive industry is already rife with efforts in that direction by incumbent car companies including the Toyota Prius, the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt, the upcoming (2013) Ford (NYSE:F) Escape electric vehicle, and countless more.

Instead, the big bucks from Washington are being used to prop up billion-dollar bids by venture capitalists to create totally new car companies. Yet unless you believe in tin-foil hat theories about Detroit buying up all the patents on magic carburetors which get a hundred miles per gallon, the last industry that needs start-up companies fostered by government is autos. In fact, the global automobile industry is hungry for new product markets owing to its vast overcapacity and is endowed with all of the engineering and manufacturing competence that could ever be needed to bring electric cars to market—that is, if consumers wanted to buy them.

Since gasoline still sells at 1973 prices in real terms, however, there remains only a tiny market for hybrid and electric vehicles. Thus, notwithstanding approximately $1.2 billion of venture capital funding, mainly from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Fisker Automotive is literally going down in flames: in addition to massive financial losses, many of the five hundred gasoline-electric hybrid cars it has actually sold have ended in fiery destruction in their owners’ driveways. Indeed, the folly of Washington’s Fisker caper could not have been more poignant than when Hurricane Sandy hit the New Jersey docks with its vast storm surge; more than a dozen Fisker cars ignited and burned to rubble when washed over by seawater.

Given the $100,000 price tag for these vehicles, however, the story is not really about any hardship suffered by the credulous buyers of the Fisker Karma. The actual hardship will soon fall on the taxpayers because the underlying deal stinks to high heaven. It seems that Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firm had a failing auto start-up and Vice President Joe Biden had a failed GM (NYSE:GM) auto plant in his home state of Delaware. Kleiner Perkins’s chief green energy maven and major Obama fund-raiser, John Doerr, therefore arranged a deal.

In return for the aforementioned $530 million from Uncle Sam, Doerr and his purportedly Republican partner Ray Lane would present a new business plan to Henrik Fisker, the intrepid designer-entrepreneur behind their start-up auto company. Flush with vast new money from Washington, the struggling Fisker Automotive would develop a second version of its electric vehicle—a “people’s car” that could retail for a mere $50,000—and build it in Joe Biden’s empty auto plant.

While the vice president thought this was a swell solution and duly cut the ribbon at the plant’s reopening, Fisker was not the most likely man for the job of building a people’s car in Newark, Delaware. In fact, before becoming an electric vehicle tycoon, he had been a famous designer of ultra-luxury vehicles including the 2005 Aston Martin DB9 Volante. The latter carried a price tag of $250,000 and was built by hand in what is essentially an automotive museum in the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, pending the development of a people’s car to be called the Atlantic, Fisker got a $170 million installment from the Department of Energy to complete the design, engineering, tooling, and manufacturing launch of the $100,000 per copy Karma. After repeated delays, the first Karma was delivered to the company’s launch customer (and investor) Leonardo DiCaprio, but it is surely the case that the green crusader–actor had not calculated the full carbon footprint of the Karma when it arrived at his Beverly Hills estate.

In fact, the vehicle had been assembled in Finland based on an aluminum frame that was manufactured in Norway and an interior cabin that was made by automotive giant Magna International of Canada, and sent to Finland for final assembly. Moreover, the heart of the vehicle, the electric battery power train, was also shipped back to Finland after it was made by A123, based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

The latter was both an investor in Fisker and also a recipient of $260 million of Obama stimulus money. A few months after DiCaprio got his car, A123 filed for bankruptcy under a cloud, some of which emanated from the fiery demise of batteries it had installed in the five hundred or so Karmas which had been actually delivered to customers.

So the carbon footprint from its far-flung supply chain is considerable, given that all of these components are shuttled to Finland and back. But that’s not the half of the Karma’s severely challenged claims to being green. One of the great truths of the modern economy is that central-station electric power is grossly inefficient as a thermal matter, with less than 30 percent of the BTUs delivered to plant boilers actually ending up as useful work in homes and factories. Therefore, the fuel efficiency of electric-battery cars can only be fairly measured on a so-called “wells-to-wheels” basis, thereby taking account of the vast thermal losses at power plants and distribution grids from the hydrocarbon fuels originally consumed.

It turns out that the Karma gets nineteen miles per gallon on a wells-to-wheels basis; that is, it has worse fuel economy than the Ford Explorer. So the question recurs as to why public money is being used to fund toys for rich people and to bail out the approximate $1.2 billion that has been invested in Fisker by Kleiner Perkins, Al Gore, and Qatar Holdings, among numerous well-endowed others.

The People's Car From Goldman Sachs

To be sure, electric vehicles are the red-hot flavor of the month, even on Wall Street. That explains how Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) got into the act, too, bringing to market in April 2010 the IPO of the Fisker Automotive clone called Tesla Motors. The latter also makes high-end electric-battery vehicles and was created by another billionaire venture capitalist who has also been a serial harvester of the Washington money tree, one Elon Musk. Indeed, so incestuous is the plot that Musk hired Henrik Fisker in one of the latter’s earlier ventures to perform design work on an electric vehicle, then sued him for design theft when Fisker launched his own EV venture.

Not surprisingly, the ostensible reason Tesla got its very own $465 million loan guarantee from the DOE was to perform exactly the same gambit as Fisker. Tesla had developed a $110,000 electric vehicle called the Roadster, and so the taxpayer money was supposed to help it develop a people’s car called the Model S which would retail at $55,000 before the $7,500 electric vehicle buyers’ tax credit that Uncle Sam also had on offer.

Not surprisingly, Tesla has stumbled bringing its people’s car to market just like Fisker has. In fact, Fisker is so far behind that even the DOE has had to freeze its funding; the company has fired the few workers who had been hanging around Joe Biden’s empty car plant and now suggests the Atlantic may not appear until 2015, if ever.

Yet the Tesla stumble is the more egregious because it was brought to the public market by Goldman and its billionaire promoter in an utterly cynical manner as an upside call on the US treasury. As it happened, Tesla had lost in excess of half a billion dollars building and selling about two thousand Roadsters, notwithstanding their $110,000 sticker price and well-advertised celebrity owners like George Clooney.

So with the company at death’s door by late 2008, Elon Musk had to publicly confess that the long-promised high-volume S Model was a pipe dream and suspended development; that is, until Tesla could get on Uncle Sam’s life-support system by obtaining the massive DOE funding needed to develop the “people’s car” version of his electric battery vehicle. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration had no trouble believing that the world needed another car company, and that a true believer in the green gospel like Musk could bring a volume production vehicle to market.

In June 2009, Tesla got its $465 million in federal money and proceeded to plow it into the development of the S Model and funding of a corporate ramp job designed to suggest a muscular business with orders and factory production capability. To that end, it promoted advance sales through $5,000 deposits which conveniently could be recovered from $10,000 worth of federal and California electric vehicle tax credits.

This was cash-out financing for the prosperous classes. Not surprisingly, the company has booked about 10,000 orders and upward of $100 million of customer cash via this backdoor infusion from the IRS. It also used $40 million of its federal loan in May 2010 to purchase the cavernous but shuttered General Motors–Toyota assembly plant in Fremont, California—approximately one mile from the Solyndra plant, as it turned out. The Potemkin village aspect here lies in the fact that the Freemont plant had assembled upward of 250,000 cars per year in its salad days compared to scheduled S Model production of less than 3,000 vehicles in 2012.

But a bulging order book, even if an artifact of EV tax credits, was exactly what Goldman needed to pump the Tesla story. So the IPO at $17 per share was launched in June 2010, just one month after the company acquired its taxpayer-financed manufacturing plant. After rising 40 percent the first day, Tesla became a favorite rabbit of the momo chasers, and spurred by breathless “research” from Goldman and other Wall Street firms, the stock price reached $35 by later 2010 and has cycled around that level since. In short, Tesla has been valued at about $3.5 billion by the stock market on the strength of the S Model hype and the simulacrum of a company
propped up by Uncle Sam’s $465 million loan and EV tax credits.

The company’s SEC filings leave little doubt that it is the humble taxpayers of America who have fueled Elon Musk’s pretensions of grandeur. During the eighteen quarters since January 2008, Tesla has booked $500 million of revenues, but has racked up $750 million of net losses and nearly $1 billion of negative operating cash flow. Not surprisingly, in October 2012 Tesla got a delay from DOE on its loan repayment obligations and a waiver on its debt covenants. So as Tesla circles the drain, it is essentially following the playbook that had been used by its former next-door neighbor, Solyndra.

It goes without saying that Tesla would have been Chapter 11 bait years ago without the $465 million federal loan, and will likely end up there anyway. Yet the question recurs as to why the public purse was opened to this scam in the first place. After all, the S Model has turned out to be a high-end luxury sports sedan which will retail with normal customer options for at least $75,000. Like all EVs, its environmental benefits are dubious at best. Unlike most of its more stodgy competitors, however, it does accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds.

In truth, the historic boundary between the free market and the state has been eradicated, and therefore anything which can be peddled by crony capitalists like Musk and Doerr in the name of social uplift is fair game. In this instance, the Obama administration adopted the entirely capricious goal of one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 and had the dollars to throw at it, thanks to the bipartisan fiscal follies that have now become firmly entrenched.

While much of the funding for this misguided effort came from the Obama stimulus, the fact is that $20 billion came from the Bush administration’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. This was the source of the loan guarantees for both Fisker and Tesla and, more importantly, also provided the political cover.

Thus these EV boondoggles were not really Obama’s green energy waste; these were “Republican loans” and had been applied for during the Bush administration under a program which it had embraced. Indeed, Fisker’s lead director, Ray Lane, claimed to be a Bush-supporting Republican benefactor, and dismissed as “silly” the notion that an automotive company could be started without government aid.

He was correct on that point, although the idea that the government should be starting car companies, in a world drowning in auto capacity, was apparently not yet a well-known part of the Republican creed. So whether acknowledged or not, it was the Bush White House which paved the way for the abomination of Fisker and Tesla.

That a megalomaniacal promoter like Elon Musk could walk off with half a billion in taxpayer money, blow it in less than four years, and make himself the toast of Hollywood in the process is powerful evidence that the putative conservative party has vacated the ramparts of the US Treasury Department. The latter now stands politically helpless in the face of whatever flavor-of-the-month projects crony capitalist raiders happen to be promoting.

The Green Energy Dog Which Didn’t Bark

At the end of the day, Tesla and Fisker did not have much to do with real conservation. That is evident in the policy dog that didn’t bark; namely, a rip-snorting increase in the gasoline tax. To be sure, it is not evident that dragging BTUs through the roundabout path of the electric power grid would really alter the carbon footprint of the typical auto’s 10,000 vehicle miles per year. Yet if reduced gasoline consumption is the policy objective, a European scale fuel tax, say, $4 per gallon, would cut US consumption by upward of 3 million barrels per day, or about 35 percent.

In fact, it turns out that Secretary Steven Chu spent nearly as much time disavowing his earlier support for a stiff gasoline tax as he did handing out subventions to crony capitalists of the green energy persuasion. And that symbolizes the problem in a nutshell.

The virtue of a high energy tax is that it harnesses the pricing mechanism silently, efficiently, and relentlessly to the task of altering behaviors throughout the nooks and crannies of the entire Main Street economy. That would be especially true if the tax were levied broadly as a variable level on petroleum imports. Using that mechanism, policy could permanently fix a minimum domestic price floor at, say, a $125 per barrel equivalent by raising or lowering the levy to capture the difference between the floor and the world price.

Henceforth, every consumer and producer in the domestic economy would react as they saw fit to the rule of one price: $125 per barrel of liquid hydrocarbon equivalents, always and everywhere. Thousands of entrepreneurs would be thereupon unleashed to conserve liquid petroleum BTUs whenever investments, from insulation to solar panels to electric vehicles, were profitable under the floor price. Likewise, consumers might decide to buy smaller cars with fewer features and less powerful engines under a guaranteed, permanent régime of high fuel prices. They might even choose to live in smaller houses or locate closer to work or make day trips by light rail.

By the same token, there would be no possible excuse for government subsidies and loan guarantees to encourage energy production or for the myriad oil and gas tax breaks now in place. With a permanent price floor, the message of the marketplace would be “Drill, baby, drill” wherever it was economic, including the cost of regulatory compliance. The big bucks would go to petroleum engineers and geophysicists, not K Street lobbies.

It goes without saying that there is a ferocious bipartisan consensus against a variable petroleum levy; that is, against drafting the marketplace to accomplish conservation goals set by the state, if goals must be set at all. Such a régime would put the energy branch of crony capitalism out of business. It would allow the state to sit back with its feet up on a stool, and to abolish its congressional committees on energy and its busy-body departments and agencies which ceaselessly meddle in markets and waste societal resources. Most importantly, it would remove the energy sector from the checklist of spending options next time Washington gets out the stimulus napkin.


Read more: http://www.minyanville.com/business...-Vanities-of/4/10/2013/id/49174#ixzz2Q5xz8XTl
 
#7 · (Edited)
I actually agree that a hefty gasoline tax would be a more efficient way to stimulate cars with fuel efficiency. But it's easy for this high-principle author to throw that scrap out there knowing it's politically untenable even for Democrats.

I think of Fisker and Tesla as frontline warriors in America's battle to reduce foreign oil consumption without building more tanks, bombs, and airplanes, and without sending our sons and daughters to the Middle East to fight more of these uber-expensive wars.

Where is the author's diatribe about all the money that goes to the defense industry?

Oh you forgot to mention this is an excerpt from David Stockman's book.

Seems really silly in light of Tesla success the Model S are everywhere in silicon valley these days-- Apple just had a lunch for Model S drivers and over a dozen showed up. No dozen Fisker lunch for me :-(

We know Fisker product is great the only thing missing for Fisker is decent management!
 
#8 · (Edited)
It's hard to take anyone who gets basic facts wrong seriously, for example:


Here the Obama administration has guaranteed loans of $530 million for Fisker Automotive
Fisker only accessed $190M of the loans, not the full $530M

many of the five hundred gasoline-electric hybrid cars it has actually sold have ended in fiery destruction in their owners’ driveways.
Out of 2000 (not 500) cars sold, exactly two have had fires and the problem was identified and fixed very quickly.

The first two of these are essentially failing vanity projects of Silicon Valley billionaires that are now being bailed out by the taxpayers for no discernible reason.
No one is talking about bailing out Tesla or Fisker.

Yet unless you believe in tin-foil hat theories about Detroit buying up all the patents on magic carburetors which get a hundred miles per gallon, the last industry that needs start-up companies fostered by government is autos
Two of the three major US automakers were in fact bailed out by the US government, and what is being supported is the fledgling Electric Auto Industry, not the auto industry as a whole, and once again, there is no bailout for the EV industry.

In fact, the global automobile industry is hungry for new product markets owing to its vast overcapacity and is endowed with all of the engineering and manufacturing competence that could ever be needed to bring electric cars to market—that is, if consumers wanted to buy them.
Internally inconsistent. Until there are EVs on the market, the consumer can't buy it, even if they wanted to.

But when the author finally stops saying nonsensical things and gets down to his point, he comes off as sane and sober, and hard to disagree with:

The virtue of a high energy tax is that it harnesses the pricing mechanism silently, efficiently, and relentlessly to the task of altering behaviors throughout the nooks and crannies of the entire Main Street economy. That would be especially true if the tax were levied broadly as a variable level on petroleum imports. Using that mechanism, policy could permanently fix a minimum domestic price floor at, say, a $125 per barrel equivalent by raising or lowering the levy to capture the difference between the floor and the world price.
My first quarrel with this point of view is that support for EV and a variable energy tax are not mutually exclusive and can work together synergistically. Secondly, the US Government has always supported new and promising technologies with strategic potential as an investor, customer or both. The Wright brothers' first customers were the US Military and that support continues to this day, the semiconductor industry got a huge boost from defense spending before the consumer products revolution, railroads needed government's eminent domain power to build railroads, car companies benefited greatly from interstate highways, and on and on and on. So this is hardly an aberration, but a tradition and normal practice. Of course, some technologies don't make it, but some do and we all reap the benefit of their success. I actually agree with the author's conclusion, but he takes too many liberties with facts along the way, which makes me suspect his integrity.
 
#10 ·
Interesting - doesn't sound like "Joe" was part of the senior management team or senior engineering team.
Yeah. Doesn't sound like Joe actually knows anything. Instead of any real insider info, he just seems to parrot Tony Posawatz's talking points. E.g., "the Karma meets the 2025 corporate average fuel economy standards today" and "they still managed to get the Karma from concept to production in just 47 months", etc. He must have been in marketing/PR.
 
#11 ·
Doug what's wrong with the "Karma meets 2025 fuel economy standards today" talking point? We owners know we don't drive the Karma on gasoline very often so the common reviewer complaints about the low gasoline MPG are irrelevant to the way commuters use the car!
 
#18 ·
Doug what's wrong with the "Karma meets 2025 fuel economy standards today" talking point?
There's nothing wrong with that as a talking point, just that that's all "Joe" had to offer. Talking points. I.e., no actual inside info. I doubt R&T asked, "So Joe, can you tell me if the Karma is able to meet 2025 fuel economy standards?" Joe volunteered that, and other Fisker PR info we've heard before.
 
#17 ·
"The Potemkin village aspect here lies in the fact that the Freemont plant had assembled upward of 250,000 cars per year in its salad days compared to scheduled S Model production of less than 3,000 vehicles in 2012".

"Freemont?" A typo or a clever play on words?
 
#21 · (Edited)
If I could change on thing in the Fisker business plan, it would be the DOE loan. I really wish they would have raised money without gov't loan, or scaled their business to do without it. It is the thorn in the side, and the dependency on money that never arrived was a big problem. Plus, it allows too many haters to have a complaint that we've taken their money for our cars.

For example the $7500 tax rebate, sure I claimed it on my taxes. But I paid almost $25k in taxes on the car. I would not have bought a car for a few years but for the Karma being so amazing, so the tax payers are +over $15k from my purchase (not down $7500 because of the rebate).

The 190M loan is harder to dismiss. Though, I did some back of the envelope on payroll taxes and income taxes of employees, and my bet is that the IRS & CA Franchise Tax Board collected about the same as what the DOE lent. All the same, i think the DOE loan did more harm, ultimately, than good. Ford was certainly much better off running its business without having to hold their hands out for a bailout as GM and Chrysler had to do.

As it is tax time, I did some more back of the envelope calculations about subsidies in general. The total US budget last year was 3.6 trillion, which works out to $32,000 per household. If a household is earning less than $175k, then that household is being subsidized by someone making more than $175k (and paying more than $32k per year).

Maybe that author is in the top 5% of income earning households that pays more than 32k this year in taxes... but if not, there is a measure of self-righteousness that should be reined in, as the author may be subsidized by some of the Karma owners. (ok, that is a little catty, but I wish I could take away the haters DOE subsidy for the rich BS).

And, now, back to reviewing my tax bill, and wondering how much it will subsidize Jalopnik.
 
#26 ·
For KPT2 and the 2nd Gen powertrain (Surf, Atlantic, Sunset, SUV etc) I believe the electric motor(s) will be mounted transversly instead of longitudinally. The battery itself will be shorter (height) and the enclosure will be smaller. The 12v battery will be relocated to behind the subframe instead of its current location (passenger side fender). A lot more information mainly the things have become smaller (the generator is half its current size). The cooling system has also been improved (more compact intercooler/HV battery cooling). PM me for more info and I will fill you in with specifics.
 
#27 ·
And just like that, David Stockman appears on 'Real Time With Bill Maher' this evening to plug his book "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America" (referenced in this thread by Nin Ja). As if on cue, he says that Fisker Automotive took (*took*!!!) $500 million from the U.S. government and is now declaring bankruptcy. He can't even get a simple fact correct.

What. A. Hack.
 
#29 ·
Frankly he sounds like a Stalinist central planner not a capitalist with the talk about excess factory capacity around the world. What does that have to do with electric car startups? Should apple have not invented the iPhone because there was already sufficient flip phone factory capacity around the world?
 
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