[Cool Guy]

The Feds got their loan paid in full 9 years ahead of schedule.

Solyndra was a failure. You call the best car ever tested by consumer reports magazine as failure? Here is something to help you understand the magnitude of their achievement. This is a small company with little history in the car business. The first car they produced from ground up is being considered by various industry experts as the best car ever build. If they continue to operate anywhere close to this going forward, they will beat their competition hands down

[Cyber Liberty]

It could be the best car ever made in the whole wide world, but if it’s priced out of the market it will still fail, with all flags flying, even if tons of taxpayer dollars are poured into the enterprise. Adam Smith’s dead hand is still stronger than the US government.

[RFEngineer]

“If they continue to operate anywhere close to this going forward, they will beat their competition hands down “

They can’t. It’s simply physics impossibility. They will never beat their competition in creating a means of transportation that is cheap, convenient, flexible, and accessible. Never. It simply is not possible.

Now, if you put a load of batteries on hard plastic tires and see how far you can go, yeah, you can, under certain conditions get the range that they suggest.

They have less than two gallons of gas worth of energy on board. They cannot possibly compete - head-to-head on a full spectrum of real-world automobile uses with even the cheapest of internal combustion engine powered vehicles.

They can’t. They never will. They’ve created a curiosity, marketed it brilliantly, milked subsidies, gotten priority placement of charging stations and all of this - all of this is impressive, by the way, but in the end, they have a product that will never live up to the performance of a subcompact car.

Never.

“various industry experts” have no idea how to compare the energy budget of a “traditional car” and a Tesla. If they did, they’d give an honest assessment. They are simply convenient ignoramuses - again, kudos to Musk for recognizing this and capitalizing on it. Still, it won’t make a Tesla somehow become a reasonable substitute for an actual car for the overwhelming majority of it’s customers.

Physics and Thermodynamics will not be overcome by PR, subsidies, marketing, and social engineering.

They’ll be putting internal combustion engines on these things before it’s over.