Mitt Romney: Tesla Motors is a ‘Loser’

Mashable - US and World ^ | October 4, 2012 | Anita Li

[Spaulding]

"It’s obvious that Elon Musk is about to sell Tesla Motors to Toyota, since Toyota could use the technology to develop more advanced plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV’s) and eventually long-range battery electric vehicles (BEV’s). Musk will now concentrate on SpaceX, which is a venture with a much higher financial payoff in the long run."

Do you think there is enough there, politically or in IP (Intellectual property upon which patents are often filed) to justify a Toyota investment? Obama tried to twist Toyota's arm to keep NUMI around so its 2000 union employees wouldn't be laid off. Toyota wouldn't buckle, even after being threatened with tariffs on pickup trucks. The scam is clever, but produces nothing for the nation and nothing for real investors. Look what Obama did to Calpers' investors when he bought GM and divested millions of retired public employees of their investment in GM and gave ownership to the unions. Even the prime bond holders had their investments stolen. Investors in Solyndra and Tesla have government guarantees to minimize the risk that that private sector investors take all the time.

Toyota has been supporting battery research in a number of Universities, including UC Berkeley, for decades. My distant recollection is that Tesla was founded by a gadfly Stanford “green” professor, who likes sports cars. I knew some of those. Most of them weren't good enough to get the research grants awarded by private corporations.

The Tesla is a rather ordinary electric sports car with sexy bodywork that would drive around thirty miles if you drove it like it looked. One of the less obvious clues is when the always empty Tesla sales office is located across the El Camino from the very 'tony', Stanford Shopping Center, in one of the nation's wealthiest communities, Menlo Park, its parking lot filled with unsold automobiles. Musk had money to burn after 'cashing out'. Tesla is a toy for engineers who have figured how to play politics. Some engineers have a talent for selling half-baked ideas to naive business school guys, knowing they can "bail" long before commercially viable prototypes must be delivered. Tesla was perfect because it looks great, and few government people or cfo types have a clue about what is under that pretty skin. The government types have no responsibility to deliver anything, and will probably have a new boss in less than four years anyway.

There used to be body kits that an industrious DIY could put on a souped up Chevy. Tesla is a body kit on an a powerful electric motor with a lot of batteries in the trunk.

I wonder if Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren, Stanford grad, who has never done any science, but learned his game from Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, who wrote imbecilic books that were wrong on every prediction, but loved by bourgeois Marxists, drives a Tesla? He must have endorsed the Tesla and Solyndra investments, and may have a fiduciary interest in either or both start-ups. Tesla's founder has a position related to what Holdren held at Berkeley, but he builds things and did some engineering with a conservation theme. He must have a good block of founder's stock, and will do fine when reality catches up with Tesla. More power to him.

Ehrlich and Holdren preach zero population growth, global cooling, then global warming, and predicted world starvation by the 1980s, and draw awards and big speaking fees for preaching nonsense. Holdren, former Berkeley Energy and Environment professor, whose best writing was for Ramparts, now holds the Theresa Kerry chair at the Kennedy School at Harvard, when not advising Obama, and will return to Cape Cod after Obama takes the dive and moves to Hawaii on Penny Pritzger's dime. Some eyebrows might arch if a good Marxist is seen driving a car that looks like a Ferrari, even if it only goes thirty miles on a charge. These people are world-class polemicists and 'snow job' artists, who excuse their incompetence as real scientists and developers by preaching revolution.

If an idea has merit, we have developed a remarkable institution, venture capital, where successful former developers direct the savings of those willing and able to take the risk by funding the long range dreams embodied in 'start-ups'. If the ideas were good, the start-up is usually offered a buyout, which involves many risks to the buyer. Private investors take the risk, and have a strong incentive to realistically assess the competence of the developers, and usually, to hold them to milestones, since most start-ups come back for a second or third round of investment. Get the government out because its investments are almost always politically motivated, and the entrepreneurs in government are risking our money, without asking our opinions. That is what governments do, and why they must be constrained as our framers intended, and so specified in our Constitution.