If You Were Starting Up a Car Company, Would You Put Your Factory in Hawaii?

Though I don’t watch broadcast or cable television much anymore, I like the idea of the ABC’s Shark Tank. Actually, when I still had cable, I watched the original Canadian version of the show, Dragon’s Den, since Windsor, Ontario’s CBC affiliate station is generally part of Detroit area cable bundling. As a tinkerer, inventor and small business owner, the idea of a show premised on pitching your business idea to possible angels is appealing to me. However, while all of the “sharks” undoubtedly have been more successful entrepreneurs than I have been, sometimes they make investments that just don’t make sense to me.

On last Friday’s show, one of the potential investors, Robert Herjavec, pledged $5 million in funding to a startup named Zero Pollution Motors to start building cars propelled by compressed air. ZPM says that they will start building the cars in Hawaii sometime later this year.

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  • Bill Wade I think about my dealer who was clueless about uConnect updates and still can't fix station presets disappearing and the manufacturers want me to trust them and their dealers to address any self driving concerns when they can't fix a simple radio?Right.
  • FreedMike I don't think they work very well, so yeah...I'm afraid of them.
  • ChristianWimmer I have two problems with autonomous cars.One, I LOVE and ENJOY DRIVING. It’s a fun and pleasurable experience for me. I want to drive my cars, not be driven by them.Two, if autonomous cars have been engineered to a standard where they work 100% flawlessly and don’t cause accidents, then freedom-hating governments like the POS European Union or totally idiotic current German government can literally make laws which ban private car ownership in their quest to save the world from climate change bla bla bla…
  • SCE to AUX Everything in me says 'no', but the price is tempting, and it's only 2 hours from me.I guess 123k miles in 18 years does qualify as 'low miles'.
  • Dwford Will we ever actually have autonomous vehicles? Right now we have limited consumer grade systems that require constant human attention, or we have commercial grade systems that still rely on remote operators and teams of chase vehicles. Aside from Tesla's FSD, all these systems work only in certain cities or highway routes. A common problem still remains: the system's ability to see and react correctly to obstacles. Until that is solved, count me out. Yes, I could also react incorrectly, but at least the is me taking my fate into my own hands, instead of me screaming in terror as the autonomous vehicles rams me into a parked semi