U.S. securities regulators on Thursday sought to force Tesla Inc. TSLA -0.67% Chief Executive Elon Musk out of the company he helped get off the ground about 15 years ago, alleging he misled shareholders when he tweeted he had funding for what would have been the largest-ever corporate buyout.
The complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission came after a last-minute decision by Mr. Musk and his lawyers to fight the case rather than settle the charges.
The filing by the SEC in federal court in Manhattan threatens to deal a severe blow to the Palo Alto, Calif., electric car maker. Its brand and Mr. Musk are closely intertwined, and analysts have said the company’s roughly $50 billion market value is driven by Wall Street’s appreciation for Mr. Musk’s vision and skill as an innovator.
Tesla wasn’t named in the suit as a defendant, but the SEC is seeking to bar Mr. Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder and its top executive, from serving as an officer or director of any U.S. public company. Tesla shares, which have been under intense pressure amid questions about the firm’s financial strength and Mr. Musk’s behavior, tumbled 9.9% to $277 in after-hours trading Thursday on Nasdaq.
…
The SEC said that contrary to the statements he made in several Twitter messages on Aug. 7, Mr. Musk “knew that he had never discussed a going-private transaction at $420 per share with any potential funding source.” The agency said the statements and omissions of fact caused disruption to the market for Tesla shares—which rose more than 10% the day of the tweets—and harm to investors.
“It’s an easy case,” said Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “He said in the tweet he had financing, and apparently he didn’t. … It’s about as straightforward as you can get.”
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Is this the beginning of the collapse of “Green” equity in the same way the collapse of subprime mortgages triggered the financial crisis?
There is a bit of the Madoff’s, DeLorean’s and the dot com bubble about this. His company has relied on a lot of subsidies, investments and deposits for stuff that is taking years to arrive and isn’t the most reliable when it does. I imagine that there are loans too? There is a lot of hype and not a lot of substance to the company. If buyers start to think ‘umm, maybe I’ll wait until cars are rolling off the production lines and I don’t have to risk my deposit on a company that may fold’ then the flow of cash will dry up and it will crash very quickly.
I did wonder if his talk of moving was about securing more subsidies either from the US (‘don’t leave us’) or from a new country.
Tesla did have a huge loan which he repaid with interest of over 20mill. 2 other car company’s had their loans wiped which were about the same amount as Tesla’s, around the same time because they couldn’t repay them.
His car production has been a bit slow though. But remember it’s not about now it’s about the future.
I don’t think Tesla has much of a future. Tesla has debt of 10 billion dollars which I cannot see Tesla ever repaying.
The tax credits they received more than offset the 20 million in interest. They substituted private equity for taxpayer subsidies (and why couldn’t they go to the private equity market in the first place?), and they had to do so because they were in breach of the covenant of the original loan. DOE was getting ready to call them, although I’m sure the extra-legal Obama administration would have found a way to ignore those laws too.
And none of this addresses the billions in subsidies Musk has received. But remember, it’s not about some hypothetical future, it’s about what he has taken in the past.
Didn’t automobiles start out as electric then moved to gasoline?
Tesla isn’t the future; it is the ancient past!
“Didn’t automobiles start out as electric”
No, it was steam.
Early powered vehicles
• Steam-powered –
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is widely credited with building the first full-scale, self-propelled mechanical vehicle or car in about 1769; he created a steam-powered gun carriage.
see replica – https://youtu.be/XsEbeCrPcA8
In 1801, Richard Trevithick built a steam-driven vehicle (Puffing Devil) &
two yrs later the London Steam Carriage – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx_5hE4aGBQ
Steam-powered bus services were pioneered in England in the 1830s by Walter Hancock Sir Goldsworthy Gurney
• Internal combustion –
the granddaddy of internal combustion vehicles was a ‘de Rivaz ‘ 1807/8 Swiss four-wheel machine that ran on hydrogen and oxygen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rivaz_engine
1886 three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1,
• Electric –
first electric (tricycle )April 19, 1881 – Gustave Trouvé Paris.
1884 the first 4 wheeled production electric car in London; Thomas Parker,
“Didn’t automobiles start out as electric”
No it was steam –
Early powered vehicles
• Steam-powered –
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot is widely credited with building the first full-scale, self-propelled mechanical vehicle or car in about 1769; he created a steam-powered gun carriage.
see replica – https://youtu.be/XsEbeCrPcA8
In 1801, Richard Trevithick built a steam-driven vehicle (Puffing Devil) &
two yrs later the London Steam Carriage – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx_5hE4aGBQ
Steam-powered bus services were pioneered in England in the 1830s by Walter Hancock Sir Goldsworthy Gurney
• Internal combustion –
the granddaddy of internal combustion vehicles was a ‘de Rivaz ‘ 1807/8 Swiss four-wheel machine that ran on hydrogen and oxygen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Rivaz_engine
1886 three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1,
• Electric –
first electric (tricycle )April 19, 1881 – Gustave Trouvé Paris.
1884 the first 4 wheeled production electric car in London; Thomas Parker,
Tesla has all but bet the farm that the lithium-ion cell is the cell technology of the future, despite its alarming track record. Because the energy is stored in the electrode as lithium atoms and there is no way to ensure that lithium ions return to where the came from, while recharging, defects happen and defects grow, so lithium-ion cells are as sure to eventually fail as the filaments of quartz-halogen lamps. Poor quality control can allow a new lithium-ion cell to fail while it is being shipped.
Fires from faulty lithium-ion cells nearly moved the FAA to revoke the Boeing 787 Dreamliner type certificate (grounding ALL Boeing 787’s). The Sept. 3, 2010 crash of UPS flight 6 was caused by the spontaneous combustion of lithium-ion cells. South African Airways flight 295 was lost, on Nov. 28, 1987, to a fire that resembled the fire aboard UPS flight 6, and the cargo manifest did include laptop batteries. Faulty lithium-ion cells in e-cigarettes have cost vapers hands and lives. Top Gear’s Richard Hammond went off the road in an electric supercar and the vehicle consumed itself in an unquenchable battery fire, and a Tesla model 3 that was part of a demonstration for EU bureaucrats just erupted in flames. All of this begs the question:
Has a lithium-ion powered electric vehicle undergone crash testing with a real lithium-ion battery in the battery bay, instead of a dummy battery of the correct mass and structural characteristics?
Lithium-ion cell fires are metal fires, which are very difficult to extinguish, because they burn hot enough to dissociate both water and CO2 into oxygen plus the other element. The heat released by the internal discharge of the large energy stored in the cell, contained within the small mass of the cell raises the temperature past the point where oxygen is released from the electrolyte and the electrode will start to burn in the presence of oxygen. While the burning electrodes are hot enough to continue liberating oxygen from the electrolyte, the fire cannot be extinguished, at all.
Electric transportation will probably need to wait for a cell technology that does not store the energy in the electrodes. Vanadium redox batteries store the energy in the electrolytes, which can be stored outside the cell. Even if vanadium redox batteries had the same risk of fire of lithium-ion batteries, it is not a metal fire of so high a temperature that all water does is give the fire more oxygen. The Tesla Semi faces the difficulty of needing a battery bay that keeps out collision damage, while not presenting any hindrance to the gases evolved from a battery fire. How freely the evolved gases can exit the battery bay will determine whether a Tesla Semi battery fire more resembles the magazine fire of the HMS Khartoum (1 dead, 3 injured, out of a crew of 183 and the ship was beached to prevent its sinking) or the HMS Hood (immediately sunk with only 3 survivors).
I do not believe that lithium-ion cells have any place in a structure that allows for brief accelerations as high as 50 g (the most severe collisions that people ever walk away from).
Also what do you do with 7,000 Lithium-Ion batteries, from each car, when they become of age?
You recycle them much like the millions of lead-acid batteries currently recycled from automobiles today.
Note that Prius hybrids which have been around for 20 years used NiMH batteries until recently. NiMH is better behaved than Lion in many ways. But it has lower energy density. Toyota has switched to Lion I believe, so maybe modern Lion technology isn’t all that bad. Toyota generally doesn’t screw up their engineering.
t’s not like gasoline and CNG fueled vehicles are immune from combustion.
Richard Bell, nice summary. I’m reminded of the magazine article (Hot Rod or something) of a garage guy that built a rear-wheel-drive electric Camaro using 20 standard lead-acid batteries and a 40 or so HP, 240V DC motor. He was stating in the article, “What’s all this hub-bub about EVs? I can make one out of standard, off-the-shelf items.”
Smart people saw this coming a while back and shorted Tesla’s stock. Fat profits for them. It was always about ‘Look At Me!’ by Elon Musk. If This didn’t work then try That. Slow production on Product (electric car) delivery? Do a sidestep and go to Rockets! Man!!!
At least carney barkers didn’t charge you an arm and a leg to see the show.
It’s always a bad sign when they start blaming speculators for their troubles.
Tesla “under massive attack” from speculators says boss
http://thechargingpoint.azurewebsites.net/news/Tesla-under-massive-attack-from-speculators-says-boss.html
“Speculators” can’t attack Tesla, or any other company. All they can do is marginally influence stock prices.
California will take a hit for sure when Tesla folds. Will it ripple to the rest of the country?
I would say “no” if we can keep oil at or under $70/bbl. Arounf $80 now and that makes the Saudis worried because that plus a stronger dollar slams the rest of the world on demand and could push a global recession.
And it is high fuel prices that sucks the wind out of the US consumer confidence and buying here at home.
So its up to Permian, Baken, Eagle Ford shale producers as well as Marcellus shale gas producers to keep energy prices low so Eastern steel mills and truckers can keep their costs down.
Drill baby drill.
I’m not sure that petroleum prices are especially relevant to Tesla cars. To hybrids and mainstream electrics like the Nissan Leaf, yes. But Tesla is building electric sports cars. If you can contemplate buying one of the silly things, you probably have more money than sense anyway.
I’m told that they are pretty good for what they are, but I can’t see them as mass market vehicles unless they can deliver them at competetive prices (30K or so) and make a profit. The semi seems more viable if it can deliver the promised performance — which seems to me to be unlikely. I suspect that it competes with CNG powered semis which also pretty much require dedicated fueling facilities. That’s maybe not that big a deal for fleet operators like Walmart who will presumably run them on fixed routes.
Musk taken to Midden.
Well, another stupid mistake by Musk…let’s hope he concentrates his efforts on SpaceX instead. At least the various Falcon rocket iterations he’s developed are useful.
AIUI, the first generation Falcon, even after he got it to fly without crisping another astronaut, didn’t do what the contract said it was supposed to be able to do. I think what he delivered was worth less than half what he got paid for it. And AFAIK, nearly all the income of Space X is government (taxpayer-funded) money, just like his car company. Well, that and debt.
You’re not wrong. But SpaceX’s competitors in the space launch have a decades long history of overpromising and underdelivering. That’s the way the business works (sadly) and to a great extent, massive overruns are baked into everybody’s planning. I haven’t looked at the details as much as I should, but I think SpaceX is no worse than its competitors.
If the SEC prevails, Musk won’t be allowed to be an officer of ANY company.
No, only of any PUBLIC company—one listed on a stock exchange.
I hope not. I’m fairly convinced that the SpaceX team is operating independent of him but letting him wear the big hat and push the big, disconnected buttons on his desk.
Musk has made some severe errors of judgements recently. His ‘pedo’ comments were unfair and unpleasant.
A pity now that the model 3 has left BMW, Merc et. al. trailing in the dust
Lots of quality problems in the new Model 3.
BMW et al. would never ship so many defects.
That’s the take home message I got from watching owner videos on t’internet. Many of them freely admit they are enthusiasts but still emphasize the poor build quality.
No one builds a volume Toyota-quality car manufacturing business from scratch in a short space of time.
Can space-time be shortened?
Just askin’.
Yes, if you go fast enough.
The biggest fiction going is that Tesla “outsold” various gas powered competitors from BMW, Mercedes, etc. Only Tesla fans are dumb enough to swallow that bit of propaganda – the number “sold” was actually the number delivered to customers last month. I doubt that more than a few of those customers actually bought the cars last month – they were on a waiting list which has been around several years and which customers paid $1000 deposit. Tesla never provides any data concerning sales or much of anything else. Tesla’s biggest govt subsidies come from the $7500 Fed tax credit for buyers (now phasing out) and selling ZEV credits provided by CAlifornia and several other states (credits are losing value as other automakers produce electric cars and don’t need to buy any credits). Tesla’s performance against gas powered cars is irrelevant – electric competition is already here and will become an avalanche over the next several years – over 250 electric cars models from all of the world’s automakers
over the next several years. Already reviews of several competitors have punctured the bubble that Tesla has any kind of long term (or even short term) advantage in EV technology.
If I could find an electric hybrid that I could use to power my house during a power outage, I would buy it.
That would sound like a good value to me. Just plug my house into the automobile when needed. That would work a lot better than a small generator, which is noisy, and requires freqent refueling if the power outage is for an extended period of time.
Now that would be a great idea…
…if they can get around that self igniting issue
Picky, picky, picky.
And if you do need to refuel you don’t have to lug a trunk full of “Jerry Cans” to the gas station just drive your car there and gas up.
https://bacontime.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/would-you-pay-60000-for-a-home-generator/
Thanks for that article, Matthew W.
If I were in the market for a $60,000.00 ice/electric car and I had a choice between one that could be easily hooked up to my house to power it during a power outage or one that could not, then I would buy the one that could, all other things being equal.
Yes, it would be handy to be able to drive to the gas station to fill up the car rather than wrestling with a bunch of gas cans to fuel a generator.
Plus, have you ever had to go for an extended amount of time on a small gasoline generator? It’s not a pleasant experience and it takes a little ability and effort (the oil has to be changed grequently). Starting a car and plugging it in would be a whole lot easier..
Yeah, you’re right. Electric hybrid cars run on hot air.
How does the generator in a hybrid compare in power to your average home generator?
A poor application to a well understood issue.
A far more efficient home generator could be fitted with mufflers and sound deadening surrounds much more inexpensively than a vehicle that could suffice as an after thought. And you could run your generator on CNG without needing to fuel up on gasoline.
I could use my car to heat my house or light it up with head lights, but I don’t for the same reasons as I mentioned.
I have operated around large generators that could power several houses, AC included, for extended periods. They were so well sound-proofed you could just tell they were running. Smaller units of such quality are surprisingly cheap for what they do. They are certainly way cheaper than the cost of a hybrid capable of doing the same job. Also, a large standard propane tank would certainly run the generator for days.
I can already run my house for several hours off my rather large car battery and a 1500 watt inverter. For cooking I have a camp stove.
The longest power outage we have had was 3 days, for which I started up the petrol generator several times a day. The inverter is quiet and takes only a few minutes to plug in.
If you were sufficiently motivated, you could probably rig up a treadmill hooked to a generator that you could drive your car — however powered — onto and use to power your house in an emergency. It’d probably only take you 3 to 5 years of weekends, and cost maybe five times what a used generator would cost.
If you live somewhere where building codes are enforced, you’d probably have no small difficulty getting your wiring accepted.
But it could be done — probably.
Maybe this will get him out of the way at SpaceX. While he deserves credit for building the company his recent behavior is a distraction.
My GF’s teenaged son idolized Musk until he watched the circus act that was the moon launch announcement. Now Christos can’t figure out how Musk could have accomplished what he has.
He didn’t. The talented engineers at Space-X did.
All he brought to the party was a big bucket of $$.
Bingo.
“tumbled 9.9% to $277 in after-hours trading Thursday on Nasdaq.”
At the end of AH trading (4 hours after the regular close) it was down $33.82 (-11.00%). To follow the ongoing Tesla/Musk drama visit the Seeking Alpha Tesla page at https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/TSLA
PS: In today’s pre-market it is up a tiny bit, to $272, down 10.9% from yesterday’s close.
TSLA $264.77 -42.75 (-13.90%)
Tesla closed at Friday at $264. Down 14%.
A high tech car built by a bankrupt company will become worthless almost as quickly as the shares of the bankrupt car manufacturer become worthless.
Where do you go to fix a software problem or a sensor problem for a car that was built by a bankrupt car company?
Where does one got find parts for a bankrupt car manufacturer?
Reality is reality. Tesla shares where and still are dot.com too expensive, for dot.com like reasons with a market cap of $45 billion.
esla is a company that has never made a profit, that has an 11 billion dollar loan coming due.
General Motors ended Friday’s session with a market cap of about $47.5 billion, while Tesla’s was at $45.17 billion, according to Bloomberg data.
(Bloomberg) — The cost of protecting Tesla Inc.’s junk bonds against default reached a fresh high on Friday after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Chief Executive Elon Musk for fraud and sought to remove him from his job.
The upfront cost of insuring Tesla’s debt for five year rose 1.1 percentage point to 22.6 percentage points at 11:15 a.m. in New York, according to credit-default swaps prices from CMA. The CDS reached the highest since it began trading earlier this year. For every $10 million of bonds protected, an investor would pay $2.26 million upfront. At that level the market is effectively pricing a 47 percent chance of default.
One should note that SeekingAlpha seems to have determined that its purpose in life is to denigrate Tesla. Not that it’s reporting seems inaccurate. Just don’t expect to find any mitigating circumstances in their discussions unless they are pretty overwhelming.
By all means read their stuff, but keep in mind that you may or may not be getting the whole story.
Sad but appropriate…Tesla is a glorified battery company, I’ve never thought they had a chance to break into the car market.
Its was clear for some ttime that once those whose business was making cars , rather than making ego’s , decided to move into the market , Musk would be in trouble . That the only thing he has ever made money out off , the flame thrower , tells us a great deal about this classic case of ‘hype driving share value ‘ not product .
I saw a tesla this morning on the way to work here in adelaide (sth aust). They look so much like jaguars it’s not funny.
Billions worth of mere “appreciation” can evaporate overnight…
Maybe for punishment he’ll get the Electric Chair?
Nope. The gas chamber.
H.R., you’re worse than I am. I like it.
I vote for the Comfy Chair with extra Soft Pillows.
One of these days, Elon. One of these days! Bang! Zoom! Straight to Mars.
Tesla no longer promises to provide anything unique.
Mainstream car companies are now producing super-car accelerating electric vehicles like the top range Teslas (which aren’t actually greener than IC fossil fueled cars on full life cycle anyway).
And decent, more modest, electric cars are also widely available from mainstream car companies. All with none of the quality and production problems of Tesla.
Yet all of these electric vehicles are still too expensive and not really in demand from car buyers.
So Tesla is trying to succeed in a relatively small niche market, with a product that has quality and delivery date issues, against established car companies offering similar/better products reliably.
I don’t even agree that his rocket s are brilliant. The main selling point, the supposed re-usability? It’s obvious that the vertical descent to a pad – it’s inherently a crazy risky idea that will never work reliably.
I loved watching the successful rocket descents as much as anybody else. Then I later read that they were going to be abandoned because the extra fuel consumption decreased the maximum possible payload so much that the economics were ruined. It’s almost like a pattern is emerging.
I was just going to say this. The MAIN concern with rocket technology is payload. For every pound of payload you need about 20 pounds of fuel. All the fuel used for vertical landing is essentially payload, and you will need 20x as much fuel just to get the landing fuel up.
It takes 20 pounds of fuel to get a pound into orbit. The boosters aren’t going into orbit.
Regardless, the fuel needed for landing takes away from payload.
That’s why the shuttle was designed to do unpowered landings.
If you can refurbish a booster and put it back on the pad days later, fuel concerns aren’t so great. Launching to orbit over the long term is about saving money and making a profit, as for any business. SpaceX has the cheapest rate in the industry by far. SpaceX has spare boosters they will not re-launch because they are old models.
I’m not a great fan of Musk, but he is a visionary who has a company running ahead of the competition in his effort to put men on the Moon and Mars. Yes, most of the credit for making it happen goes to the well motivated employees. NASA is the biggest user of any company who is successfully launching payloads to orbit. SpaceX is doing more commercial launches to orbit as time goes by.
Fuel cost is an almost negligible part of the total cost of a launch. Less than $1 million per launch. The cost is all in the hardware and labor, so saving that hardware is a much bigger deal than the small reduction in payload fraction.
In reality, only in California is a Tesla actually emitting less CO2 than a conventional gasoline vehicle. California has GHG emissions of 0.75 lbs CO2 per kW-h whereas states like Colorado have emit 1.368 lbs CO2/kW-h. https://oaspub.epa.gov/powpro/ept_pack.charts
With an EV emitting only 40% less CO2 than a gasoline vehicle in CA, using power that has higher GHG emissions makes the Tesla emit more CO2 than a conventional vehicle. So claiming that these cars are GREEN is pure hype and nothing more. Why are we subsidizing this?
Greater Los Angeles has a more or less unique air pollution problem — 18 million people in a West facing basin backed by a substantial mountain range with moderate prevailing winds from the West much of the year. That’s 6% of the US population — enough to worry about. They have major air pollution problems and by far the greatest source of the air pollution is vehicle exhaust. What little public transportation existed there pretty much died out in the 1940s and 1950s, Reinstating it would be so difficult that switching much of the transport to electric actually seems a viable alternative.
That doesn’t mean that subsidizing an expensive electric sports car makes much sense.
The misbegotten Space Shuttle was reusable also. It set all sorts of records for failure to meet targets and keep performance promises. SpaceX is better than that. Way better. But that’s an extremely low bar.
I think Mush deserves credit for putting together a viable, competetive launch business from scratch. But it doesn’t seem revolutionary. And it’ll be a few years before we know how reliable it is for manned flight. After all the Space shuttle was 98.5% reliable (2 failures in 135 launches) and that was considered to be a disaster.
I really don’t care much about Elon Musk or his battery driven contraption.
What does bother me is that when the this thing hits the mud, the name of one of the greatest inventors and engineers from the end of XIX and early XX century it will be in the mind of many linked to the failure of Musk’s enterprise, rather than the inventions that revolutionised the world electric industry bringing incalculable benefits to people all around the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
Amen.
Yes, and why is an inherently DC car named after Tesla?
Took me a few seconds to catch that one, lol.
Tesla car uses 3-phase modulating inverter drivers, and the Tesla Roadster uses an AC induction motor.
It just shows that more than 100 years later Tesla’s inventions are unsurpassed !
Going public and issuing stock is tempting. The down side is that you now have thousands of interested parties plus the SEC. The SEC went after Musk. It could just as well have been PO’d investors who got the ball rolling. Both cases have the same result, you can end up in jail.
Conrad Black managed to irk some of his investors. It was they, not the SEC, who got the ball rolling but he ended up in jail anyway. link
In the end, it seems like his desire to punish short-sellers (aka “skeptics”) got the better of him. I recall articles describing his gloating tweets. Even the BBC article talking about it acknowledges that his words and actions condemned him to only one outcome. Of course, they were never so honest beforehand.
Tell the world to watch you dance, and it will be waiting for the slip.
Now with litigation, what will discovery dig up I wonder?
Climate delusion, exploding rockets, spontaneous combustion Teslas, nuke Mars, pot smoking, securities fraud. What’s next? Pedo porn?
Tesla Motors had been floating around the same market value as Ford Motor Company. Tesla has been struggling mightily to achieve an annual production rate of 60,000 vehicles per year. Ford sells close to 7 million per year. Tesla has never made a profit, last year Ford’s profit was around $8 billion. There is only one thing that can account for such a major difference: CAFE, Corporate Average Fuel Economy.
Obama era mandates require a CAFE of 54 miles per gallon by the early 2020s. That’s CA as in Corporate Average. These cars are all on the drawing boards today. There is not a car in existence which fulfill the needs of an urban family which comes even close to that. There won’t be any in the early ’20s, either. These mandates also artificially ignore the true “pollution” of electric cars, and give cars like the Tesla a calculated fuel economy of infinity (zero gallons per mile). The only way Tesla can be worth even close to it’s market cap is to merge with a real car company and thus average it’s cars of infinite miles per gallon with cars of honest miles per gallon.
This “advantage” evaporates completely as soon as Trump eliminates the 54 mpg mandate as expected. When that happens, Elon Musk becomes another Preston Tucker.
Tom: Tesla is right around 200,000 cars a year. Check it out if you don’t believe me and look for current data.
Re your claim “There is not a car in existence which fulfill the needs of an urban family which comes even close to that” Check out the new 2018 Honda hybrids – both the Accord and Civic and especially the Clarity plug in hybrid. All are over 50 mpg and on sale now.
The claimed mpg is quite different from actual mpg on hybrids. The only way to get that number is through accounting tricks (you get +5 mpg for certain A/C refrigerants) and bad assumptions that make a joke out of the whole thing.
And Tesla did reach that valuation when it was only 1% of either GE or Ford. That’s probably where Tom got the number. The conclusion doesn’t change at 4% production. It’s vastly overvalued.
I’ve owned a Prius for over 4 yrs and have no problem coming close to, meeting, or exceeding the advertised mpg ratings if I don’t drive like an absolute maniac (which I do from time-to-time).
Maniac in a Prius? Is that like Pedo in an old folks home?
Ben …. my 2008 Camry hybrid would routinely get between 48 – 52 mpg on the highway, although I admit the 52 was a 300 km trip shortly after we got the car and I was trying to get the max mpg with the cruise set at the speed limit.
The only time the hybrid takes a serious mileage hit is when our temperatures drop to the -30 C range and the gas motor runs all the time to supply heat for the cabin.
I have no idea what u are talking about re accounting tricks.
I sold the hybrid to my daughter when she graduated and it continues to run trouble free in it’s 11th year and still gets the same mileage as new. Both the hybrid battery and the lead acid battery are the original ones.
Re the Honda I found this which are real world numbers …. what the tester got while driving the Honda – ‘ “In city and suburban driving, I saw as much as 55 mpg, and had no trouble keeping the Honda above 50 mpg. My highway mileage hovered around 47 mpg, two better than the EPA rating. And I ended up with 49 mpg overall”.
From here http://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/23078/2019-honda-insight-test-drive-review-with-a-hybrid-like-this-why-would-anyone-buy-a-prius
My Fiat 500 routinely gets better than 50mph just driving around town.
Your town has 50 mph speed limits on it’s roads?
Heck my Dodge Durango gets 29 mpg on the highway and has a range of 700 miles.
Not to mention the Prius…
This is actually good news for Tesla.
He was clearly not the right guy to run a mass-production car company but the Board knew that many of their shareholders viewed Musk as some sort of magical wizard, and the stock price would see a downward adjustment if they even suggested replacing him.
Now the Board can proceed with what they need to do and Musk himself gets the blame.
Imagine being a board member having this mess dumped in your lap. Talk about trying to put lipstick on a pig!
Modified “pump and dump” scheme.
I have been referring to “Enron” Musk as a con-artist for at least 3 years.
Finally the Authorities have cottoned on.
But only because of Enron’s own stupidity.
Few visionary founders are able to transition to running the actual long term company successfully.
Musk, and his egregious and bizarre intrusion with the Thailand cave rescue. His recreational drug use. His irresponsible (criminal?) tweeting and inability to actually build the cars. Clearly Musk is not one of the few who can start and run a visionary company.
“egregious and bizarre intrusion”
Or future crazy defense in a criminal trial with defrauded customers? It isn’t my fault, I was disturbed, smoking weed, in overdrive…
“I was disturbed, smoking weed, in overdrive…”
… hence the generous SEC proposed settlement.
Now it will be necessary that he will surround hisself with those that tell him what he wants to hear. As such he can also be taken advantage of (lawyers fighting a losing fight are expensive … but the lawyers don’t mind)
What is the barrier to entra in making an electric car? The Chevrolet Bolt is the answer to that question, and so is the Leaf, the i3 etc.
The guy has lost it big time. He has been quoted as saying he picked $420 because he thought it would impress his girlfriend who was into pot!
The question I have not seen answered is whether he sold any shares after the announcement and therefore made money out of the tweets. There have been people sent to jail for deliberately spreading fake information for profit (not by the SEC – they don’t have that power). As an officer of the company, it probably doesn’t affect the SEC charges whether he made money or not, but it would affect other possible charges and leave him open to suit by shareholders who lost money.
Apparently the DOJ are also investigating:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/tesla-is-said-to-face-u-s-criminal-probe-over-musk-statements?srnd=premium
The DOJ would be able to bring criminal charges if they found Musk had defrauded anyone, but the story says that they are just information gathering at the moment.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.