New Fisker Owner Lu Guangiu vows to take on Tesla

Even if a transmission were available for a direct drive diesel locomotive, it would defeat to advantages of the electric diesel over steam. Being cheaper to make and operate.

Batteries are in some locomotives now, and more will likely get them in order to capture braking energy.

No serial hybrid has the battery in the path of the energy flow. For one thing a battery can't charge and discharge at the same time. The battery is a buffer off to the side. The generator, or fuel cell, supplies electricity directly to the motor. At lower speeds which could lead to the generator to run at inefficient points, it produces excess power that charges the battery. The battery can then release that power during periods of high demand.

 

thanks you work with very different slang than I do. From the articles the chapter 11 seems to have wiped out all of those conditions.

I suppose that if they enforced the loan covanents that might have been true, that they may have gotten less money from a liquidation, but when they sold the loan, the covenants went with them, so we are talking about the likelyhood of a sale to a foreign entity like A123 and chrysler. In which case it seemed kind of incompetant to sell out to an auction bidder instead of waiting around. That guaranteed a large loss. The US government simply doesn't have competance in these matters.

Since the bulk of the loans went to over $5B corporations like Ford and Nissan, ofcourse there was going to be a low risk of default. We should look at the risk of default when the DOE was acting as venture capitalist, and in those cases the other venture capitalist in solyndra and fisker Kleiner Perkins would have gotten to keep the profits if the company suceeded, as the US government really was just subsidizing their bet.
Solyndra 2.0 - The Daily Beast
Gore-Backed Car Firm Gets Large U.S. Loan - WSJ

From the article about the loan, or as it really was taxpayer funded venture money -

Now as history would show the epa figures said 33 mile range then 20 mpg. That might be around 60 mpg averaged over the year if you don't count the electricity. The car wasn't nearly ready in december of 2009. Any decent dilligence should have shown that numbers were impossible to meet with the design they had at the time of the loans.

I don't fault it for not being as good as the tesla. I fault the "investment" and I use the term loosly, was based on number that should easily been known to be wrong at the time of the loans. Even if Fisker had paid them back, there was not going to be a big payout to the american people in terms of energy efficient cars.

 

Tesla! H*ll, it is not as good as a Volt!

Bob Wilson

 

If the loans were denied to Fisker because "the car is not energy efficient" than the loans would have been denied to Tesla too. The Model S is not very efficient as measured either by the EPA or Greenercars.org (38% score). Tesla setout to create a sporty car, not the most efficient car (which comes later).

 

Apples and oranges. The Fisker was flawed in that when fuel efficiency was measured by: miles per gallon of fuel consumption, it scored very badly, on account of the drive-train not being directly coupled to the gasoline engine. Huge losses are incurred when the kinetic energy is converted into electricity and back to kinetic energy again. Include the battery in the cycle and its even worse.

The Tesla on the other hand, burns no fuel at all. It runs on pure electricity obtained from plugging in, therefore fuel efficiency is a moot point.

 

Agreed that the Tesla is not the most efficient EV, however, the Fisker is just silly.
650Wh/mile on electricity (unless it is winter with 4 inches of fresh snow over a two mile trip while warming up is silly).
The Tesla is rated at 38kWh/100 miles.
The Leaf is rated at 30kWh/100 miles.
The Fisker (on electricity) is rated at 62kWh/100 miles.

All-Electric Vehicles: Compare Side-by-Side

 

My point is the Obama administrators, if given the power to say "no your Fisker hybrid eats too much gasoline", then they might deny other companies too. I can easily envision some bureaucrat saying to Tesla: "Sorry I see no reason to build a sportscar EV or luxury EV..... loan denied."

 

The DOE, which is the organization that administered the loan program, does not go by greenercars.org. You may disagree with DOE methodology, but at least it is transparent. Number #1 on the list is using less oil, which means electricity and natural gas only count 15% as much. Even the EPA has the tesla much more efficient.

Tesla S gets 89 mpge in the 85kwh model which seems very efficient to me
The fisker if we say 1/3 of the miles are gasoline the fisker gets 54mpge charge deplete, 20 mpg charge sustain. or 34 mpge combined.

Add in that doe multiplier and we get 593 mpge for the tesla S, and 54 mpge for the fisker.

I really can't understand who would think the tesla S was not green, but OK.

Well if we go by doe standards as above, then of course both cars save oil, but the fisker uses almost as much as a prius, then uses a great deal of electricity on top of that. SO if the idea is to use less oil then they could have just written toyota a check, and we could pretend that helped support more prii. The tesla, well yes that doesn't use any oil at all, and what almost 40% of owners charge with renewables.

But there is a big problem with the dilligence. When the company says the car is ready in 3 months and will get 50 mile range on electricity, and it only gets 33, and the car was no where close to really shipping
Compare Side-by-Side
That means the money was at great risk, because the DOE didn't properly execute its due diligence. Bad due diligence on fisker also put the a123 loan at risk, as they used cash much faster than they should have, with the promise of cars that were produced much later or not at all. With Fisker the DOE just pissed money down the toilet, but bad analysis really hurt a123 and delivered some valuable patents to the chinese. Congress is also at fault here.

Tesla could have raised its money with or without the DOE loan. They paid it back early to get rid of the fisker and solyndra taint. The S would have taken longer to get to volume production, but I don't think Tesla really needed the program. Fisker and solyndra on the other hand was extremely dependent on the loan to green light much of their work.

 

A regular banker denies a loan when they think there's an unacceptable risk that they won't get their money back, plus interest. When governments get into banking, it's usually because banks would refuse to make such loans. And the governments' reasons for doing that are usually political.

 

The environmentalist group ACEEE at greenercars.org rates it a few % dirtier than a Jetta diesel (when considering overall pollution from manufacturing to recycling).

Perhaps..... but if DOE did its job to deny Fisker, then they'd deny Tesla too, because they promised "upto 350 miles" and if you use the EPA's "side-by-side" comparison the actual car is nowhere near that.

My overall point is this: By saying the government should have denied a loan to Fisker because its car was a luxury car & didn't meet promised efficiency, then almost-certainly Tesla would have been denied too (if held to the same strict standards). In the process of saying "no" to the bad company, you also would have hurt the good company.

 

There is no "green" or "not-green." There's only "more-green" and "less-green."

Great strides have been made over the last 30 years, and there's a lot more to come.

 

Your arguments might be more convincing if you used facts rather than incorrect facts.

 

Before I posted my last message, I googled and found a 2012 article where Elon Musk said the new Model S sedan was predicted to get "upto 350 mile range". So YES that was an actual fact I posted. I'm sorry you find it an "inconvenient truth" but I cannot change the words Elon utters.

 

But by what standard?
Of course, it didn't reach that on the window sticker, but the S met the 300mile range for California ZEV credits. So CARB has their own measurement. Then the numbers used to determine a company's CAFE rating use the test results before they are adjusted for the window sticker. The CAFE and CARB numbers may be one and the same, but I'm not sure.

 

What standard indeed. If you required a laundry detergent to guarantee a certain shade of white, or a toothpaste to guarantee mating success, you would have endless customer claims demanding their money back. I'm quite comfortable with a claim of "up to 350 mile range" and I'm sure Musk's lawyers are also.

 

Well then the same standard should be applied to Fisker's predictions of their future car, rather than trying to tear them apart as a dishonest company. Musk's predictions were 24% erroneous compared to the actual EPA score... not much different from Fisker's predictions.

 

Thanks for the details, although a link would be considerate.
Here is an article I found which you may have been referring to: Tesla releases revised Model S range stats: up to 350 miles at 55 mph | The Verge

However, perhaps not, as no where in it was Musk quoted mentioning 350 miles, the reported stated that.
The speed vs. Range graph shown (provided by Tesla), does indeed show a speed at which the range is 350 miles. That is right around 47mph.



Of course, the article also explains how this graph shows driving range vs speed when driven on perfectly flat terrain with no stopping needed, at constant speeds with no wind and no HVAC.

You may as well say Musk promises 450 mile range (which the graph shows at about 20mph under perfect driving conditions).

No where does it indicate Tesla is expecting the EPA range, nor the real world experience to be 350 miles.

Or perhaps that is why you didn't link to it as you didn't want people to read the actual article and see how you twisted it?

 

How hard can it be?

We make our own charts because the vendors don't. We make our own because the EPA numbers are imprecise in application and apparently subject to significant human error (thanks Ford, Hyundai, and VW.) We make our own because with one we can make accurate predictions about the vehicle range on any arbitrary trip.

Bob Wilson

 

I agree, a simple chart like this gives such a richer picture.
No manufacturer or sales rep can tell each individual exactly what their efficiency will be.
Tesla though provides a wealth of information and tools so a person can get a good idea of how their own driving behavior affects their efficiency/range.

I would love to see this type of data from other manufacturers.

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