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They get paid 1 cent per click? That feels like way too much, based on the cost of internet advertising. I think about a cent or two for every 1000 clicks would be financially sustainable.
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doublejj
Member
"Conservative" critics always bring up subsidies but never mention the trillion dollar subsidy of paying for a huge military presence in the middle east. A simple analogy would be if the planet's only Lithium mine was located in an unstable country say, Somalia. Imagine if Elon asked the gov't to spend trillions for the military to secure the country and surrounding countries just so we could have EVs. Could you fathom the outrage, esp from Conservatives? But change Lithium to oil and the location to the Middle East, then its ok to spend trillions. Makes no sense.
That's a great way of putting it. In a way (a roundabout one), electric vehicles and widespread renewable energy could do as much for world peace and national security as for the environment.
Not to mention the fact that America pays for 95% of the costs protecting the Middle East but only use ~25% of the oil that gets shipped out. Basically American taxpayers subsidize the rest of the planet's use of Middle East oil. Let's see if the WSJ or Rupert Murdoch's media empire write an article on that subsidy. Hypocrisy.
Jim MacInnes
Member
MDEVP makes excellent points. I cancelled my WSJ subscription years ago because of their non-fact based reporting. Prior to that I had been a subscriber for 30 years.
thranx
Member
Take away the numbers and you have an excellent single-sentence summation of contemporary media.
But seriously, folks, can't you all accept that perhaps CR wasn't really objective?
I have a subscription to CR, but rarely find a balanced, evenly thought out article there. It's sad, given their reputation.
Even they admit that the P85D is much more expensive than any other car they've bought to review. So in that sense, they aren't even comparing comparable price-range cars. And how on Earth they were sure their ratings could only peak at 100, when it was possible to get 103, is beyond me.
I think the Model S is awesome and deserves a high rating. But that doesn't mean I take every rave without a grain of salt.
(I'm not defending Jenkins. But I will defend the WSJ: still the best source of news about the real world--oh, I mean the business world.)
I have a subscription to CR, but rarely find a balanced, evenly thought out article there. It's sad, given their reputation.
Even they admit that the P85D is much more expensive than any other car they've bought to review. So in that sense, they aren't even comparing comparable price-range cars. And how on Earth they were sure their ratings could only peak at 100, when it was possible to get 103, is beyond me.
I think the Model S is awesome and deserves a high rating. But that doesn't mean I take every rave without a grain of salt.
(I'm not defending Jenkins. But I will defend the WSJ: still the best source of news about the real world--oh, I mean the business world.)
Funny, I've always found CR's rating to be the most objective in any industry. You might disagree with their weights, but they are consistent with them.
As for the score of 103, they explained it in their talking cars segment. Essentially, a few metrics (performance, comfort, & fuel economy in particular) are mutually exclusive in traditional cars, but are scored well in the model S. Not having trade-offs is how you score above perfect.
So what would happen if the US just bailed on its Persian Gulf allies and said "hey, give us a ring when you stop the killing?" It's economic stability. I had a discussion with a distinguished financial planner recently and I asked him what would happen to the US economy if the price of gas went to $6.00 a gallon, right now. He stammered before responding. I find him very articulate, so when he eeked out "it would be bad, very bad," apart from immediately thinking of the Ghostbusters line, I believed I'd hit upon a cornerstone issue in the global economy. Transportation is almost entirely dependent upon barrels of oil. Global imports/exports would fall apart rapidly.
As an EV owner, I'm conflicted. I want us to stop using oil for environmental, political, and modernist reasons. Ehtanol is not an improvement for modernist reasons. It's also a food crop, so there's something inherently stupid about burning food for transportation when food is not abundant. I don't, however, want the Mad Max dystopia produced by a sudden and permanent shortage. The WSJ article (and so many others, politically conservative and liberal alike) that has some axe to grind with Tesla Motors may be motivated by keeping the people with power in their seats. I think it is fair to say that Consumer Reports is positively enamoured with the Model S. I think they had a very rigorous measurement of the P85D. They weren't headlining when they said that it broke their scoring system. Think about it: NHTSA couldn't flip or crush the Model S. Heck, the Model S broke the safety equipment, much less a scoring system.
If the WSJ is the voicebox of "keeping the powerful people in power," then if nothing else, we need to look at this as a clarion from that establishment that disruption by Tesla Motors is no longer intent, but widely accepted reality. If you thread this with the bit about the sketchy Audi Crossover SUV which is already obsolete before they even design it, then fundamentally, Tesla Motors has done more to dismantle that power choke-hold WSJ hopes to enforce than anyone imagined. Chevrolet is busy racing to build the unfortunately-named but optimistic Bolt. I'm excited about the Bolt. It holds promise to offer realistic competition in the auto market to make EV's everyday. Hitting that 200-mile range mark is a big deal in the USA. It means you can get to the next city over with one stop in the middle. It means you can drive around town all day on errands and not think about range.
So why is the WSJ about the establishment? Is it one author who is a Tesla-hater, or the vast R.M. media empire? It's one voice, big or small. All I hear from this smear piece is "Tesla Motors, you're more disruptive than you can possibly imagine."
Maybe it was my grade school years talking now, but if you're different and you stand apart from your peers, that non-conformity is hand-in-hand with a degree of bullying or persecution. What school kid ever got picked on for being an inarticulate C-student of average size and build, who laughs at all the jokes of the popular kids without thinking? WSJ, hear me: you are a schoolyard bully calling Consumer Reports names for saying "hey, the nerds at Tesla Motors make a disruptive machine that broke our rules for what makes a car great."
Just last month, I wrote to my local newspaper (Star Tribune) to tell them to stop sending me the "Free Trial" newspaper I didn't ask them to send, mostly because I got tired of picking it up off my driveway and pitching it. I don't read it and felt it was a waste of our natural resources. Mainstream print media is nearly dead. More and more money for fewer sheets of wood pulp. WSJ, you will be irrelevant, as the rest of the world graduates, and your fiefdom of power is wrested from you by the geekiest of scenes: young men and women wearing gowns and scholar caps.
It's even more serious than that. The US dollar is the benchmark currency for the planet. All oil is traded in dollars. When the Bush administration went on a spending spree with the credit card, it didn't cause the dollar to crash in value because the entire planet needs a somewhat strong US dollar to trade oil with. I can't think of any time in history when a country borrowed and spent like the Bush administration did for 8 years, and the country didn't suffer hyper-inflation as a result (except in times of full scale warfare and even in those cases the countries needed to really raise taxes to very high levels to pay for it later).
If the world trade in oil diminished dramatically, there would be less need for a benchmark currency, the US dollar would probably devalue, and the US would be in a serious problem financially. The US is heavily dependent on imported goods. Walmart doesn't want to have to raise their prices 100%. There are a lot of economic players beyond just the oil lobby who don't want to see the oil economy go away too quickly. A lot of players are OK with a slow move away which gives the world economies time to adjust. A fast change would be so disruptive to the world economy it would make the Great Depression look like a minor economic hiccup.
Oil and the US dollar are like a tumor wrapped around a vital organ. To remove the tumor, you have to work slowly and carefully or you will kill the patient from shock.
If you watch the CR car talk episode linked above, you will see they actually had a lot of trash to talk about the Model S. They were very critical of some ridiculous things like having to install a "gas station" in your house to fuel it and repeating the mantra that almost all Model S owners have another car for trips. They were also very critical of the price. The thing is they have a system for testing cars and the P85D ticked all the things in their test so well, it came up with a 103, the reviewers didn't sound like they were all that jazzed about the car themselves.
As far as ethanol goes, there is a documentary out there called "Pump", I think I found the whole thing on YouTube. It covers some of the logistics with changing from oil. It touches on electric cars (and Tesla), but points out there are some major infrastructure changes that need to happen before they become mainstream. The documentary goes into quite a bit of detail about how to make ethanol and methanol economically. There were some things I didn't know that actually makes ethanol a viable fuel economically. Ethanol can be made from anything you can ferment, in the US, the bulk of the corn crop is used for animal feed. The animals don't eat the whole corn kernel though, they only eat the part you would throw away if you're making ethanol from corn. So to make ethanol and feed corn, you squeeze the moisture out of the kernels, ferment the liquid, and feed the rest to animals. A win-win.
We can also make alcohols from waste biomass that are often waste products now. A study discussed in the documentary said the US produces a billion pounds of biomass a year, much of it could be used to make alcohol for fuels. If the political will was there, we could produce quite a bit of alcohol for motor fuel from stuff we throw away now.
The advantage of alcohols over electricity is most cars on the road now either can use them now, or can be modified to use them fairly easily, in many cases just turning on something in the firmware. Because Brazil mandates all cars must be able to run on either alcohol or gasoline, most car makers make the same fuel system for all cars and just disable it in the non-Brazilian cars. We also have an established distribution network to fuel all those cars and we can take our time expanding the grid to support 100 million electric cars.
There is still the economic problem of the oil economy and the symbiotic relationship with the US dollar.
The piece that started this thread was from the opinion section of the paper which is essays from people who generally aren't directly associated with the WSJ. That said, I have seen a fair number of mainstream media outlets that do poo poo Tesla to a large degree. They treat it as a fad that will run its course someday. I don't think it's all that unusual that an outsider company presenting a disruptive technology gets this kind of push back. The establishment is very invested in the way things are, that's where they made their money and that's where their money is probably still coming from. Anything that threatens that, threatens their wealth and security, so they will fight it.
Hogfighter
Professional Lurker
I love how the ultra-conservative wealthy in America seethe with anger at the EV tax credit, and yet gleefully and with pride take the mortgage interest deduction, arguably the largest federal subsidy to the rich the world has ever known.
There are many tax loopholes for the rich, such as taxing long term capital gains at a much lower rate than regular income, but I wouldn't call the mortgage interest deduction a giveaway to the rich. Yes, they get a bigger deduction on the mortgage for their $40 million mansion, but the mortgage deduction is one of the few people of lower middle class incomes ever take.
Hogfighter
Professional Lurker
Forgive me for getting too off topic. My point is that the EV credit is an incentive for people to buy EVs, and the mortgage interest deduction is an incentive to take out a big loan to buy a house. These charts clearly show who benefits the most from the mortgage interest deduction. I'm not arguing for or against subsidies or deductions, merely the hypocrisy of some who pick and choose which credits/subsidies to criticize.
Skotty
2014 S P85 | 2023 F-150L
It always boggles my mind when people who are against government taxes bad mouth the idea of the gigafactory project getting tax breaks.
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