Can we get a journo who doesn’t use interviews as platforms for their own cutesy quirks and clever insights?

Moreover the energy conversion can never be efficient:
The energy needs to be converted into electric power at a loss.
The electric power needs to be transported over power lines (small loss)
The electric power needs to be converted to lower power and stored into batteries: at a loss of power.
The stored power will leak away as all batteries do.
The stored power needs to drive the wheels of the car as a loss of power.

A combustion engine drives the wheels of a car directly: less loss

This seems like fabulist posturing to me…

One of Elon’s big points in the interview was they deserve the money because their company is more efficient than GM or Chrysler. Big whoop, who isn’t ?

People might be interested in the Carnegie Mellon study that found that the Chevy Volt, another all-electric car, is…

** “not cost effective in any scenario because the batteries cost and weigh too much.”

** “would also be extremely uneconomical traveling fewer miles as it hauls around battery capacity it doesn’t need.”

http://money.cn...rtune/index.htm

The business model doesn’t make any sense, they should be licensing the technology not building their own cars. The auto industry is running at less than 50% capicity the way it is.

Tesla has always said the plan was to build something at the $100K price point then the $60k then the $30K. It looks like they’ll get the second one done for less than the original price. Pretty impressive.

The loan isn’t to make the $100K cars happen. In a way, not to make the $50K cars happen (they’ll happen anyway, just slower). It’s to speed things along so we get the $30K car. And, assuming people change at night, the cost of electricity will lead to a lower TCO (I’m not expert enough at electrical cars to know how much but assume it’s 2x as efficient and gas goes back to $4… That’s several thousand $ at least…)

The money it coming from the DOE’s advanced vehicle technology program, something instituted before the bailouts. It is not a bailout.

Now, us libertarian-minded tech folks may see any gov’t loan to a private company as inappropriate, but as these things go, it is one of the less inappropriate ones: The goals of the ATVM are to lower our long-term dependence on imported oil (Defense), cut carbon emissions (cut long-term costs on the environment), and do long-term research (a public good).

A loan program that does those is much better than the auto company bailout or the financial company bailouts.

Now why we spend so much time worrying about what the legacy media thinks…

NYTimes stuck up for their own just like you’re doing now.

yes you can. just because you don’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Please. She would be respected if she didn’t play the girl card everytime she was criticized. “Wow, it’s embarassing that they’d throw me under the bus because I’m a girl. They are so sexist”, “I like to giggle when I interview, I’m a girl!”……..and on and on. Check her twitter for these.

So if anyone criticizes her, it’s automatically because she has ovaries?

Bullshit. Her reporting sucks. Plain and simple. Just LOOK at that elon musk interview for christ’s sake. “Stross is a douchebag!” and Lacy laughs her ass off. no self-respecting journalist would do that. Instead, hard core questions would be fired. That wasn’t an interview, that a was like a reunion of long lost friends.

The best part was when she said “Hey, don’t blame me. Those were his words, not mine.”

What?

She’s the one interviewing him, and didn’t have the balls to ask hard hitting questions and now she’s mad when ppl call her out on her non-existent journalism skills?

p.s. One could say that I’m conveniently glossing over the fact that The Times is equally under fire not having the balls to call her out on their own turf. But since arrington decided to make this a one-sided fight by completely overlooking Lacy’s faults, well, so did I.

I still want my Tesla!

I still like Lacy’s posts/articles.

And I still disagree with the NYT piece.

Why should taxpayer money go to a company who’s model is nowhere near proven? They’ve hardly even sold any product! Don’t forget, the energy needed to produce one Tesla car is far greater than that of a gasoline powered vehicle. Oh, and it is powered primarily by COAL (as is any plug-in vehicle). They have far from proven that they are on the right track.

The primary purpose of the bailout is not for “car technology to advance” as Calacanis puts it, or because Tesla “is actually doing something interesting” as Arrington puts it.

It’s sweet, noble even, to want to bail out an electric car company. But this, as Stross alludes to, is not necessarily in the best interest of the taxpayers.

I agree that the NYT piece is clearly an editorial. But this should not be a surprise to anyone who reads NYT Digital Domain.