Yes. Done. Apologies to all involved for getting it wrong. Although I take NOTHING Musk says at face value.

Such may be the financial fallout from the Tesla.

True!

I laughed when he admitted on 60 Minutes that the roadster’s development cost was double what he expected. He only admitted to double, but it will easily cost five to ten times what he expected before Tesla turns a profit. If they survive that long.

Sorry, Musk, the car industry is not like Silicon Valley where you get all you money back (and more) at the IPO.

And even fewer people realize that the copper mined from Michigan’s upper peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was worth more than all the gold dug out of California. Most of the money from all that copper went to investors in the east. William A. Paine, of Paine Webber & Co. managed the Copper Range Company, and there’s a 19th century Paine Webber office on main street in Calumet.

There are all sorts of financial connections in the industrial history of America that get short shrift in history books more eager to tell us about all the sins of white males (they’re already putting sections on Obama into social studies texts even before the elections) than in teaching actual history.

Thomas Edison? His first successful invention was a dedicated telegraph machine we know as a “stock ticker”. He was successful marketing his invention to the financial industry and subsequently had access to capital investors. If you have to pick an industry to service, the financial industry is not a bad choice if you hope to find future investors.

Henry Ford? Before he started the first Ford car company that failed Henry was the chief operating engineer of the then young Detroit Edison Company. Ford was actually much more interested in power generation than in automobiles and you can see that interest in the collection of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which has replicas of James Watts’ first steam engine, the coal fired power plants from the dismantled Highland Park factory, and other generating systems. No doubt the financial connections Ford made while working for Edison helped in finding investors in his enterprises.

Call it the price/reward/punishment of being an early adopter.

Lose money on an ultra-high priced car that required minimal chassis engineering and a compromised transmission.

Then while you’re losing money on that product, produce another product that has all the complications of the original, plus design the chassis and body, but all the while making it half the price.

I think Tesla got multiplication confused with addition, because a negative number plus a negative number is always a negative number.

But the better example to date – Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque. Founded by Vern Raburn in the late 1990s, the company promised to deliver an economic small jet run by sophisticated software. Give Vern credit, he did bring a jet into production, after running through at least a billion or more dollars of investor and local/state government money. But he couldn’t get it built at the price point he promised, the software still doesn’t work completely, and production rates are way below the rate claimed. Vern got kicked out of his company, customers are demanding deposit refunds, and the possibility of a bankruptcy is real.

The Tesla will join the DeLorean, Bricklin, and Tucker as cars that never really got off the ground.

Thanks, Rob.

Tesla really should try to generate a viable cashflow from sales of the Roadster rather than hyping a new model that will obviously never happen the way Tesla is going.

Maybe it’s a tat early for a eulogy but I think that despite it’s flaws Tesla may have contributed significantly to changing the image of EV’s to the point that almost every mainstream car OEM has become aware at this point that EV technology can no longer be ignored because it is in fact the future.
GM’s feeble and half hearted 70% ICE /70% EV /200% price Volt attempt indicates that even they seem to realise that the days of crushing EV’s are gone and probably won’t return. We’re currently watching Carwars episode V: the EV strikes back. Bob’s praying every night though for episode VI: the return of the SUV. Not gonna happen Bob!