Tesla sells 5K cars....in one quarter

[Perfectlap]

Originally Posted by southernstar

2. BMW is releasing its own electric vehicle, which will likely cut into their sales.

I would sooner invite a daily kick to the groin than to even contemplate buying an experimental car from BMW. Ditto for Merc.

Originally Posted by stephen wilson

The Tesla is cool, but electric only vehicles are still only practical for short commutes. The range is only 200 miles at a constant Hwy..

Which is precisely where the meat of the market is. Long range battery technology is an unecessarily expensive cost for the market that Tesla is apparently wiping the floor clean with. Elon Musk is a genius. I could care less about the 'green issue'. I'm more concerned with the 'greenback' issue. Consumers like the idea of paying $6 a gallon as much as they'd like to switch to energizer batteries for their rechargeable phones, tablets and laptops. A huge waste of money! And precisely what we do every time we fill up our tanks and make the oil lobby happy. These are billions, trillions of dollars that could be spent to come up with new ways of making electricity (ie Bloom). Dirty coal and insanely expensive nuclear plants can not continue to be the only way. It's economic Liliputianism. There is a fortune to be made in cars and new forms of energy production. We have to stop doing the same old same old even if it takes 40 years to flip the whole U.S. fleet.

[stephen wilson]

Well yeah, the genius part was doing it on the taxpayer's Dollar ! (mostly) Large subsidies continue to make it viable. Granted, big oil receives huge subsidies, adding to an already very profitable business.

[Perfectlap]

Originally Posted by stephen wilson

Well yeah, the genius part was doing it on the taxpayer's Dollar ! (mostly) Large subsidies continue to make it viable..

If you ever need to compete with China, then you're going to have to deal with concept of public funding to break new industrial ground that carry huge capital expenses and burn rates from hell. The new Asian economies have no issue with throwing trillions into new industries thereby articificially lowering prices that our private industries must compete with. Few investors are going to jump into that shark tank solo. So communist economies like China's stuff their pockets deep, employ tens of thousands, open up factory after factory and grow their economies with our missed oppourtunities because U.S. private equity only wants 'sure bet' investments that pay off in 12 to 18 months so that they can sell prospective investors on how good they are at beating the S&P. It's all short term while our competitors overseas focus on the big picture.
China has plans to FORCE hundreds of millions of their citizens to relocate from the countryside into their urban sectors just to fill up the assembly lines and to get at raw material.

Dismissing public funding could be understandable when the global economy consisted of only the U.S. This is a whole new game now.
Sovereign wealth funds and direct monetary injection by Asian central banks into their manufacturing sectors need to be factored in.