Economy is trouble for Tesla motors.

FluffyMcDeath

FluffyMcDeath

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Electric vehicle company, Tesla Motors has reduced headcount considerably in Detroit to consolidate in San Jose. Unfortunately they forgot to actually tell their employees.

Hopefully Tesla will prevail (though it truly sucks for the employees) because they have some nice powerplant technology and I'd love to see a few more of these types of vehicle on the road.
 
REALLY? A $100k electric car failed in the market? It must be a right wing conspiracy of big oil, I tell ya!
 
ilwrath said:
REALLY? A $100k electric car failed in the market? It must be a right wing conspiracy of big oil, I tell ya!
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What a strange thing to say.
 
Well, it is late... So I'm a bit punchy...

But what I was getting at is that Tesla was the electric car everyone was supposedly waiting for. Finally, the big greedy automakers would be shown how the electric car is our savior.

It couldn't be that the Big 3 were leery of electric vehicles simply because electric cars have been tried many times throughout history and have lost out to the conventional gasoline internal combustion engine every time...

Another failed electric car? It's gotta be another conspiracy! Really, this should have surprised no one.
 
ilwrath said:
It couldn't be that the Big 3 were leery of electric vehicles simply because electric cars have been tried many times throughout history and have lost out to the conventional gasoline internal combustion engine every time...
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Ah, well if you'd said that 5 years ago, you would have had a point. Here in Britain, the electric car is actually having something of a Renaissance.

Well, specifically this electric car.

When I was in London a couple of weeks ago I saw no end of these things running around. The infrastructure is there, they get prefered parking, with free charging, are not subject to congestion charging and are perfectly usable within a big city.

So to say that they have lost out every time is, I'm sorry to say, not correct. :wink:
 
ilwrath said:
Well, it is late... So I'm a bit punchy...
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Yes, that must be it.

The point of the article as I saw it was that the workers were laid off two days before they found out about it in a blog posting. Now THAT's class.

As to whether the Telsa was the car that was going to make the electric car mainstream, no, not really in its current configuration and it wasn't the point of the vehicle. It was a luxury car with a 200 kW powerplant, which is about 240HP and that might not sound like much except thats 240HP pretty much flat across all RPM. So, at 0 RPM, standing start, that's what's going to the road.

As a high performance vehicle, $100,000 isn't too out of the range and it is a specialty item.

On that front, Tesla isn't the only auto company facing problems. Ferrari sales are way down, too.

But that's not all. The big three are also basket cases that are massively in debt and no-one wants their stuff. Tesla is probably in better financial shape than the big three!!

So, rather than - conspiracy, death to the electric, it's more like: another start-up auto company hits hard times.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
ilwrath said:
Well, it is late... So I'm a bit punchy...
Click to expand...
So, rather than - conspiracy, death to the electric, it's more like: another start-up auto company hits hard times.
Click to expand...
Early 80s all over again when the USA saw the death in the market of Triumph, IH, MG, FIAT, American Motors,
 
The point of the article as I saw it was that the workers were laid off two days before they found out about it in a blog posting. Now THAT's class.
Click to expand...

Yeah, fired by blog is pretty bad. Not the worst corporate gaff I've heard of, by any means... But it does suck for those people.

Especially considering they are in Detroit. That's the worst part. I can attest first hand we've got nil for jobs around here as it is.

Both my wife and I are in the supposedly "in demand" fields, and while we're still employed, we're one of the few families I know of in the area that hasn't had someone laid off in the past 2 years. :/
 
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