But best of all is this article over at Watts Up With That? about a guy in Colorado who received $50,000 in tax credits from the federal and Colorado governments to buy his Tesla. He has a bumper sticker on his car that says:
Environmentalists took $$$ from the poor to pay me to buy this car
The loan was for ramp up to build the Model S, a sporty sedan, rather than the sports car they've been selling for several years.
ReplyDeleteThe electric vehicle loan program (which Tesla participated in) seems to be for some, a subsidy to companies to do what they were planning to do anyway; and for some other companies, lavishing money on companies without a viable future.
I'm undecided whether Tesla is viable or not (Musk has pretty deep pockets), but other companies that received loans include Ford and Nissan (clearly the first) and Fisker Automotive (probably the latter). Tesla received the smallest loan of these four mentioned--Ford's loan was almost $6 billion. Most other loans were far smaller, they went to companies manufacturing components rather than entire vehicles.