It’s as though it was all prearranged;
As NLPC has documented extensively, Fisker burned through more than $1.4 billion, which included $193 million loaned from U.S. taxpayers and millions more from state and local governments. After selling the scraps of its loan to a Chinese businessman, Richard Li, DOE said the government would realize a $139 million loss. Now another Chinese-based company, Wanxiang Group, won the rights to Fisker’s assets with a $149.2 offer at the bankruptcy auction. U.S. taxpayers are none the better for it.
Wanxiang – China’s largest auto parts manufacturer – was also the company that bought electric vehicle battery maker A123 Systems, which also went bankrupt after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama green stimulus. American taxpayers were jilted in that deal, too, as Wanxiang bought the assets – including some valuable technology – on the cheap. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States allowed the transaction to go through despite vehement objections from former members of Congress and the military over giving away trade secrets and patents to a Communist foreign competitor.
h/t Kevin B
Crony capitalism works just about as well as socialism.
You can bet the perpetrators of these frauds walked home with tidy sums courtesy of the taxpayer.
I love this part of the story: Fisker Automotive is back from the brink, and its new owners intend to raise the automaker from the ashes. And throw in a non-hybrid, 640 horsepower supercharged V8 model to boot.
Bob Lutz is a former GM exec and has partnered with the new owners. “It’s certainly not for everyone,” Lutz said of the cars in an op-ed he wrote for Forbes last year. “And not just because of price: Some ‘greenies’ are already hyperventilating on blogs over the obscenity of converting an ‘earth-friendly’ electric car to gas. What they don’t realize is that their fanatical all-organic-tofu enthusiasm isn’t shared by the bulk of the luxury-car buying public.”
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/02/fisker-sold/
Poor greenies never twigged to the fact that the minimal
extra costs involved in making the proto Fisker design dual
purpose for either electric or gas engine power is simply
what SENSIBLE companies do? They try to protect their
investment and reach the largest number of potential rent
seeking or real car builders in the market.
Even the somewhat dull witted granola eating offspring from
rich families who apparently form much of the Fisker fan base
should be able to grasp that concept.
Electric cars will be like the Wankel (rotary) engine. When Mazda starting using the engine it was going to change everything – I remember those days clearly. The hype was through the roof. It was only a matter of time before the Wankel took over. Those who didn’t appreciate the brilliant technology were head-in-the-sand idiots.
No Wankel engines anymore, anywhere.
Re: Selling trade secrets: At a meeting around 1904 Lenin stated that after the revolution all the capitalists would be hung. A heckler in the crowd asked him where they would obtain all the rope necessary to do this. Lenin replied: “The capitalists will sell it to us!”
“What matters is the number of such incidents per car, and it is worth noting that gasoline car companies experience an average of five to ten times more fires per car than Tesla,”
A blatant lie from Tesla. If such were the case, I should be having a vehicle fire about twice a year, and they should be happening on a daily basis on any city street.
BC, unlike electric cars, there was nothing wrong in concept with the Wankel engine. It had one significant materials problem: in the 1970s, Mazda was unable to ensure a solid and reliable seal in the engine halves resulting in premature failure. Things have improved a lot since then, but the Wankel has never been revived, though it could be. But the fact remains that its total fuel efficiency is signficantly higher than piston driven ICEs.
Chinese debt for graft loving greenies to give back monies the Chinese gave us at debt interest.
Makes the head spin.
Besides the RX-7s and 8s, there are still quite a few Wankels hanging around racetracks. Near-constant maintinence and great thirst for oil keeps them from ever going mainstream in anything but karts.
As for Tesla’s claim about vehicle fires, I’ll bet they’re counting petrol-powered cars involved in crashes…
Coach, not really, it’s that “mechanics are like most trades ppl, not too swift, therefore the wankel concept confuses them, so ppl who own wankels have a limited field of possible maintenance outlets. H3ll, a friend of mine couldn’t even gap the solid valve drive train on his own Mercedes V8, and wankel totally confused him. And coach, there are still rotaries being built, just not for automotive use. They are excellent steady state runners, for things such as generators and pumps, they have excellent power to weight ratio.
cgh, it was the side seals for the rotor that were the larger problem, and NASA’s space program developed a good material that basically solved that problem
My recollection is that the wankel was not known for great fuel efficiency. A friend had a mazda, and wasn’t impressed. Mind you city driving…
My mechanic,(worked for Mazda for 30 years,)
rebuilt a 1987 pickup truck rotary engine and tweaked it for greater speeds.
Asked me to take a little ride with him,
he was clutching in third gear at 110 miles an hour,
and started laughing when I said OMG please don’t let him put it in 4th!
When I got out,
kissed the ground,
and refused to ever go again..
Anyone can comment about the Wankel failures,
but I have never seen that kind of power in such a small vehicle with such a small engine.
In my recollection, it was the apex seals that were the weak point in the Mazda Wankel engines, and they would hold up OK unless the red line RPM was exceeded, even briefly. Then, Whoa! Look out!
Wankels make a lot of horsepower for their package size, and the form factor makes for a lower center of gravity than most piston engines, both good attributes for a sports car power plant.
The real Achilles heel of the Wankel design is that, because the rotors open/close the ports the same way that the pistons of a two-stroke engine do, it’s all but inevitable that a large dose of unburned gases leave the exhaust port every cycle. That translates into high emissions numbers and poor fuel economy. Adoption of closed-loop EFI has helped to mitigate that to some extent, but nevertheless, some fuel is still burning as the exhaust port opens.
But the real take-away point is this: nobody forced the car-buying public to adopt the Wankel, and no government subsidies were wasted on it. Those manufacturers that used it in cars did so because it filled a market niche for a small car that could run with the V8’s, and it surely did that. Rotary powered cars are flat-out fun to drive.
If sparky cars were viable, why is it that they involve:
Bribing the company to manufacture them with tax dollars.
Bribing the buyer with tax credits to buy them.
State bribes for B.S. tax credits.
State tax bribes for the buyers home electric bill.
Why is it that all of these companies are declaring bankruptcy
after taking hundreds of millions in “Subsidies?”
Answer: That was the plan from the beginning. Everything
about green technology is an outright fraud. It has devolved
into a political patronage system, where support for a political
party is repaid with hundreds of millions in subsidies.
I lost track of all the idle windmills I saw decades ago. The
government pumped hundreds of millions into their construction,
but they are so hideously expensive to repair, that they remain
broken to this day. The reason: The bribes paid to rich campaign
contributors dried up decades ago. The same fate will fall upon
Tesla and all others stupid enough to take the money.
I once read an article in which the L.A. mass transit was studied
by an economist. The bus and light rail system was so heavily
subsidized that for every person taken off the road for the
purposes of reducing so called greenhouse gas and to reduce
congestion, each could be given a brand new Jaguar.
This is why windmills, bird-cookers and electric cars are going
to fail. The money will dry up! In my state of California,
we have not built a net new power plant in over 30 years. Tax
dollars are now being spent to bribe paper mills and other
heavy industries to shut down on high demand (hot) days. That’s
right, tens of thousands of dollars an hour were spent to shut
down the paper mill I worked for 4 or 5 hours whenever the
state ISO called the mill. All of this to appease the godess
Gaia.
In 20 years, about 2,000 curtailed or shut down entirely due to
the high cost of energy. This is just the beginning!
CGH, please consider that gasoline powered cars burst into flames
only AFTER a major collision. Sparky cars catch fire spontaneously
sitting at a curb or on a charging stand.
Ford Pinto’s and Chevy trucks were no more likely to bust into
flame than any other car. They were the product of hoaxes that
involved model rocket motor engines to ensure they caught fire!
The truth is that a 1970’s Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham or an
Abraham’s M1 tank will catch fire if hit hard enough.