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Tag: Tesla

The Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car is unveiled at CES International Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2016, in Las Vegas.

Requiem For the Electric Car: Titanic Subsidies, Miniscule Sales

We are all forced, at gunpoint, to lavishly subsidize the manufacture and sale of electric cars, which tend to be a boutique product for very rich people. Every step of production and sale is juiced with subsidies. No one is selling electric cars for their actual market price, and even with all that subsidy sugar to help the medicine go down, hardly anyone is interested in buying them. It’s one of the biggest forced transfers of wealth from middle-income taxpayers to rich people ever conceived.

EV Station (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty)

CA EV Charging Station Network Imploding

Tesla claims it will sell a half million vehicles a year when its $35,000 Model 3 is introduced in 2017. However, the network of charging stations in California is already imploding with just 160,000 registered electric vehicles on the roads.

Tesla being towed to dealer.

Tesla Crashes in Consumer Reports–and at DMV

Tesla stock plunged -10 percent on Tuesday in a double whammy of bad news as Consumer Reports pulled its “best car ever” designation, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said the company is illegally “bird dogging” to hype sales.

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Silicon Valley Is Headed for Disaster, and No One Can Save It

As much as global financial concerns are going to hit tech companies harder than other sorts of enterprise, so too will their own lack of ambition. The ugly truth is that Silicon Valley has largely given up trying to fix big problems and has retreated into photo-sharing apps and productivity tools.

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Tesla Receives 30% of Cal Tax Credits for Promising 4500 Jobs

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is reporting that “Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors is on track to win $15 million in new tax breaks as part of the final round of this year’s California Competes tax credit.” According to Governor Brown’s GO-Biz website, tax credits are awarded to businesses that come or stay and grow in California. With much of his $13.3 billion net worth coming from tax subsidies, Musk may celebrate his latest gift of “government cheese” from Reno, where Tesla’s highly-subsidized $5 billion giga-factory is being built.

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Tesla’s New Battery Not yet Viable to Back up Solar

When Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk unveiled a line of home and commercial battery packs a week ago, he said Tesla was “trying to change the fundamental energy infrastructure of the world.” Although the system Musk announced was better than the competition, the cost was assumed to be too expensive except for home solar systems. But now it turns out that Tesla’s new batteries do not even make economic sense to back-up rooftop solar systems–at least not yet.

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New Tell-all about Elon Musk Appears Factually Challenged

A new, unauthorized, supposedly “tell-all” biography just released by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance claims that serial entrepreneur and Tesla (TSLA-NASDAQ) CEO Elon Musk hid from investors and customers that the electric car company was down to two weeks of cash in early 2013 and had to beg for Google to consider buying the company.

AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

Tesla’s Energy Battery Back-Up System Finally Unveiled

Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk unveiled a line of home and industrial battery packs at an event late Thursday afternoon. Musk said that Tesla is “trying to change the fundamental energy infrastructure of the world.” Although the system announced appears favorable compared to the numerous competitor’s battery solutions currently offered, Tesla’s high reliability stand-by power is much more expensive than generators and has a commercially unfavorable investment recapture period of eight to ten years.

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Government-Protected Auto Dealers Feeling Uber Heat

Taxi unions are not the only government protected industry that ride-sharing companies are overhauling. Auto dealerships are indirectly feeling the heat, as American teens skip getting their driver’s license. Once an established past-time in American culture, in the last 30 years, the number of 16-year-olds with driver’s licenses has plummeted 40%, according to a 2012 article published in the journal of Traffic Injury Prevention.