Ray Lane Leaves Fisker

Ray Lane who is Al Jazeera Gore’s partner at Kleiner Perkins (KP) resigned his board seat at Fisker.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/us-autos-fisker-raylane-idUSBRE94R0V420130528

The Green Machine has oft blogged that Lane, Gore, and Doerr had old Chu Chu eating out of the palms of their hands and the whole story of crony capitalism was rife in the department of entropy.  I also blogged that KP and Alfonso the Great were going to throw Ray to the wolves as the sacrificial lamb in the Fisker Fiasco.  Poor Poor Ray.  First he quits being Chairman of Hewlett Packard.  Then he "retires" from KP.  And now booted off the Fisker board.  Ray you poor guy from now on we will call you Ray Lamb not Ray Lane.

I actually think Congressman Jordan will still call Lane and Doerr to a hearing and try get the truth out of them how they used political connection through their Partner Al Jazeera Gore and Strategist Colin Powell to influence public policy.  Lamb and Show me the Door know how to count to five and may be playing the fifth Sym Phony when they appear.

I do hope that Rep Jordan pulls the two medium size fish of Lane and Doerr into a hearing and then we hear how Gore, Powell, and others pulled the strings on the puppet Chu and his boss. 

This is wonderful news and will make exciting TV watching for me.    The real finale for me will be when the FTC investigates KP’s other wunderkind Bloom Energy for sheer greenwashing on a grand scale and they are forced to pay back hundreds of millions of investment tax credits they took from the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board on their inefficient, toxic, high carbon emission, and overly expensive Box they claimed was over 60% efficient.  The Four Star General, Mr. Powell, sits on the board of Bloom on behalf of KP and it may well be time for him to pull a Ray Lane stunt and resign.  Ray sure knows how to write board resignation letters.

My informants tell me that Al Gore is “green” with envy of Elon Musk and wishes that Fisker had never split from Tesla.  Yeah Mr. Fisker helped Tesla with car design in the early days and then moved on to form Fisker.  Tesla sued Fisker five years ago.  Tesla setttled the suit in the end by paying Fisker the sum of $1,144,385.03 for Lawyers Fees and costs.

http://wot.motortrend.com/tesla-vs-fisker-the-epilogue-or-why-tesla-owes-fisker-11-million-3052.html#axzz2Udczt8Yd

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/technology/15tesla.html?_r=0

The whole country would have been far better off if Dr. Chu only had one crony company to fund and then Al Gore could have made some of Elon’s green.  Is it my imagination or is it true that Albert has been very quiet of late?  Maybe breathing air with 400 parts per million of CO2 actually has the effect of shutting him up.

Tesla at $105 Make that $110

Wow the stock traded at $105 today.  Update it hit $110.  I also remember when Apple traded at $705.  When will reality set in?  Gravity was discovered by a falling apple, maybe anti-gravity will be discovered by a rising teslacle?

The Wall Street Journal pegs the government subsidy of Tesla at $45,000 a car.

http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/very-negative-wsj-opinion-article-today

 I peg the real MPGs at 22.  The EPA has a fake number of 89 MPG. 

OK so the tax payers invested $485 million in Tesla and got back an extra $20 million.  Elon and Goldman Sachs invested a few hundred million each and got back billions.

It is interesting that the DOE had some covenants that prevented Elon from selling most of his shares or merging the company.  Now that the DOE is paid back Elon does not have those restrictions.

He still claims he will deliver a people’s EV in three to four years.  Hey, that was the basis for the DOE loan four years ago so I guess that promise has slipped by four years. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-23/tesla-pays-back-u-s-early-as-musk-aims-for-affordability.html

Isn’t life great?  A gangrene vehicle painted green by government and given incubation tax dollars and massive subsidy makes billions for some and the market places a value of $105 a share.   I have to give it to Elon he may well suck Lake Mead dry.   His job is half done as the drought and high draw on water has Lake Mead half empty already.

http://www.arachnoid.com/NaturalResources/index.html

Ask me if the lake is half full or half empty?

Can Elon Suck Lake Mead Dry?

Elon Musk the wunderkind of “Green” Tech has pushed his stock to an all-time high of over $90 a share.  The New York Times claims that Tesla “has had success”, while discussing the failure of other EV companies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/business/global/israeli-electric-car-company-files-for-liquidation.html?_r=0

Yes Elon has had success and paid off the loan based on a high valuation of his stock.  Stock analysts have stated that to support the present stock price Tesla must grow unit sales by at least 90% a year and reach a sales volume of over 500,000 vehicles a year.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1462731-tesla-at-97-how-many-cars-does-it-need-to-sell?source=email_rt_article_title

If Elon does achieve this level of sales and each vehicle has an 85 kwh battery pack then Elon will use all the power generated by the Hoover Dam to simply produce the battery packs.  Elon is a smart guy and may just have the capacity to suck Lake Mead dry.    Elon did spend a few years living in Ontario and he did drink Canada Dry so emptying Lake Mead is not “impossible” for the “Green Wunderkind.”

Ok enough nonsense.  I saw some really promising technology from a young man I know who is heading a small company called LinkDrive.   He blogged on his website that their device to train truck drivers to be more efficient drivers is beginning to yield positive results.  I suggest you all read his blog.

http://www.linkedrive.com/better-fuel-economy-drivers-hold-the-key/

LinkDrive is just trying to save a few pennies per mile on large trucks.  But LinkDrive is really green as it did not need all the energy from the Hoover Dam to get to the point of success.  It just took brains, hard work, a little angel money without government loans and Goldman Sachs hyping a stock.  I salute the bright young men from LinkDrive.

Plug Pulled On Better Place

The Project called Project Better Place that I called Project Out Of Space in many of my blogs going back three years has had its plug pulled.

Finally Idan Ofer the chairman of Israel Corp the major investor in Better Place has pulled the plug on the hair brain idea not so Shai Agassi brought forth.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57586236-76/electric-car-startup-better-place-liquidating-after-$850-million-investment/

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000846590

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/05/ev-battery-swap-company-better-place-files-for-liquidation.html

Charlie Rose and Thomas Friedman two of America’s “greatest” minds loved the idea and touted how brilliant Shai Agassi was.  Even TED had Shai talk his thermodynamic nonsense.  The Green Machine saw right through the junk science and called it a dog from the very start.

http://www.greenexplored.com/2012/10/better-place-is-lost-in-space-dumb-gets.html

http://www.greenexplored.com/2012/12/thomas-friedmans-battery-is-flat.html

So the Musketeer is the last man standing and his Teslacle has not yet dropped.  He paid off the DOE loans and his stock still defies gravity and logic.  Let’s all watch how well the 22 MPGe Model S sells if Tommy Friedman and Charlie the Wilted Rose start telling the truth about how gangrene plug in vehicles really are.  As for Israel Corp they should stick to plain old phosphate mining in the Dead Sea as lithium phosphate batteries certainly short circuited for them and the batteries are Dead as A Door Nail.  

This is another nail in the coffin of plugin vehicles for the masses and Obama’s grand plan for a million of these vehicles on the road by 2015.   Here is the department of entropy’s announcement of Obama’s grand plan back in February 2011.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/1_million_electric_vehicles_rpt.pdf

Poor Obama he has four scandals to deal with and his attempt to make the US a Better Place is in reverse gear.

Tesla Model S Gets 21 MPG

I have built a spreadsheet that calculates the real equivalent miles per gallon of plug in cars.  I do the analysis by “charging” gasoline an equivalent 25 pounds of CO2 emissions per gallon.  This is 19 pounds for the actual combustion of a gallon of gasoline plus 6 pounds for the extraction, transportation, and refining of a gallon of gasoline.

The lithium ion batteries are “charged” with 472 kwh of primary energy per kwh of battery capacity as well as the AC energy from the grid to charge up the batteries.  Grid emissions (average US) were estimated at 1.3 pounds of CO2 per kwh.    My analysis goes through a tedious calculation but is honest and fair.  The one variable affecting the outcome is the number of miles driven over the life of the battery pack.  For the Tesla model S, I used 8,000 miles per year (their user blog states the average is about 7,500 miles per year) and 10 years of battery life, allowing the energy in the production of the battery pack to be amortized over 80,000 miles in total.

With these real calculations the Tesla model S with an 85 kwh battery pack actually achieves 20.87 MPG equivalent.   This is way lower than the 89 MPGe the US EPA has given the car.  More sadly approximately a dozen states have certified or will certify the Model S as a ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) and this has already given Tesla many millions of dollars of cash from ZEV credits sold to other auto manufacturers.   See the link below from CNN.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/21/news/companies/tesla-windfall/index.html?source=yahoo_quote

Why should some working stiff who buys a Honda Civic with a gasoline engine subsidize a rich person buying a Model S with a huge battery pack?   This makes no sense except that the state governments had representatives and senators that simply believed the US EPA about the greenness of EVs and did not understand the first thing about thermodynamics.

The standard gasoline Honda Civic is a much greener car than the Tesla Model S, yet Honda and its customers have to subsidize Tesla to the tune of approximately $13,800 for each model S sold.   Now you know how Goldman Sachs made money out of Tesla’s stock and how Tesla paid back the DOE loan early and in full. 

The Obama Administration will hold out Tesla as the shining star in their loan program as the money got paid back and got paid back early.  I hold out Tesla as a car that gets less than 21 MPGe and is a plaything that is not a truly green car.  I am elated Tesla paid back the loan.  I am sickened how Tesla showed a profit.

FYI while Elon was returning our half billion dollars to the treasury, Ira Ehrenpreis, a Tesla director pocketed over $70 million in the sale of his shares in Tesla for his VC firm Technology Partners.  Ira, who should not be confused with the average IRA of a working stiff, sold 793,290 shares of TSLA stock for $72,117,816.  Ira had a fiduciary duty to maximize the value of the shares his VC firm held in Tesla and he sure sold the shares fast and furious.

Al Gore and John Doerr must be very jealous of Ira a fellow VC who bet on Tesla not Fisker.  Those of you who bought a Honda Civic in the last few months helped Ira and Technology Partners do well.  The state legislatures and the EPA just spread the “wealth” of the poor around while the air gets more CO2 from the 4,900 gangrene model Ss sold last quarter each with $13,800 of pretend ZEV credits we all paid for.  The Tesla actually emits 0.8 pounds of CO2 per mile on the basis of its 20.87 MPGe.  I guess someone who was not good at math at the EPA rounded 0.8 to Zero.

Tesla Beats The Shorts For Now

I have to hand it Elon Musk he took my sage advice and applied it to beat the folks who are shorting his stock.

Remember I said Tesla should increase the price of its cars, never make the 40 kwh people’s car, and raise equity and pay off the DOE loans so the company is not shackled with the government telling them to produce cheap EVs.  Tesla is the Electric Ferrari and should price itself like an electric Bugatti. 

Each car should now be priced at $130,000 and they will still sell 20,000 cars worldwide.  The car is gangrene and not green due to the massive amount of primary electricity needed to produce the battery pack that needs to be very large to give the car any real range.  At 22 MPG equivalent based on real thermodynamic analysis and not the poppy cock from the US EPA the Model S has similar fuel inefficiency to the Porsche  Panamera that it directly competes with.

The diesel Panamera is greener than the model S but who really cares when one spends over $100k for a performance car that is for the 1%.   The pretend green guys who buy a Tesla really want that zero to sixty acceleration in under 4 seconds.

The DOE will likely get their money back from Tesla before the end of the month when Tesla does it latest stock and bond offering of almost a billion dollars.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-boosts-stock-note-offering-145133101.html

The DOE will claim success in having launched Tesla and say they helped America lead the world in EVs.  Little will they say the car is gangrene, inefficient, expensive, and simply for the 1%.   Elon will continue to claim he is green and that the Tesla saves carbon emissions when we all know that it does not.  Elon can claim he beat out the equally greedy shorts and that he won in keeping his Teslacle from falling by pulling off a “profit” in the first quarter in order to raise the $1 billion to keep the company afloat.

The new investors who buy into Tesla are true believers in Elon and the profitable future of the EV company.   I believe Tesla will never deliver a car for less than $50,000 that will go into a mass market unless of course Tesla starts selling cars with internal combustion engines that are in fact greener than the Model S.  Who knows maybe Tesla will get another $500 million from the DOE sometime in the future by fessing up that the EV is gangrene and they have a better alternative for a propulsion system

I have to applaud the Musketeer for having beat off the greedy shorts who took it in their shorts.  Round one to Elon but making cars is a ten round prize fight.