The Detroit News writes that Detroit & Telsa recipients used the money to pay bonuses to staff and other uses, have parties and other uses not intended for the funds. How the *H* did a Japanese company get U.S. taxpayer dollars from the DOE?

The DOE ATVM And Loan Gaurantee programs were conducted by criminals in order to commit crimes. The “Car Czar” Steve Rattner (Now a proven criminal by the State of NY), Lachland Seward, Matt Rogers and his partner Steve Spinner and most of Tesla’s friends at McKinsey Consulting from Silicon Valley (Who used Tax payer jets to fly back and forth to Silicon Valley to go bike riding), Steve Westley and a group who now left DOE, and some who are still there are criminals. They stole your tax money and put in in their friends pockets. Federal investigations have already shown that Detroit embezzeled and misspent the first monies distributed. Every company that has so far gotten money has misspent it, did not have what they said they had at the time they applied, were tied to campaign contributions and rated lowest on the comparison reviews. If you google: “Unprofessional behavior plagues SRS” to read about the death threats, you can see the depths to which some of these people will sink. See the recent mass exodus from DOE of key staff in the last 9 months: They took the money and ran.

The few applicants that did get money spent tens of millions of dollars on bribes and lobby “incentives” equal in ratio to the money they got. Now the White House says that $17B of the taxpayer money that Detroit got is a write-off and is lost forever. In other words Detroit has already embezzeled more money than all of the other applicants applied for put together.

Google Tesla’s Siry on “DOE stifles innovation” to read what one of the highest level staff at one of the car companies said.

The GAO, a federal crime busting agency, just released public reports saying that the DOE Loan programs were corrupt. All of the people under Seward were “connected” or “made men” in the Detroit cadre. Seward changed the section 136 first-come-first serve rule (Which appears to be illegal) in order to provide advantages to his friends in Detroit who didnt bother to apply in time and to cut out the smaller players who were already ahead in the application proces

Subpeonas of Detroit and DOE Loan Departments will prove crime, corruption, favoritism and rigged contracts were the rule and not the exception. BTW: Revenge of the Electric car is a paid product placement film. It is not a real documentary.

Three percent is enough for now. Both Nissan and GM are reporting more demand than they can meet for their EVs. As EVs come off the assembly line they will be snapped up and put on the road.

As early adopters get some months of driving experience on their EVs people around them will take notice and start to understand whether today’s EV will or will not work for them.

Price aside, the 100 mile range Leaf EV should work well for about one third of all American drivers. The electric/gas hybrid GM Volt should work for almost all others.

Some people really do need 4WD, some really do need minivan interior space, some really do need to tow heavy trailers. Those needs are not met by the current generation of electric vehicles. I’m guessing that no more than 20% of all American drivers fall into this category, probably much less.

We should move quickly from 3% to double digits. Especially if gas prices stay high.

olmo

EVs such as the Leaf can be pre-heated (or cooled) using grid power when plugged in. And the heater/AC can be controlled by cell phone or PC. People living in really cold parts of the country will need to plug in at night, even if they don’t really need to charge.

No big deal. If you’ve lived in a cold climate you are probably already familiar with block heaters (or sticking a drop cord with light bulb under your hood).

EV batteries give off heat as they discharge so the only need for additional heat is when the car is started cold.

Volvo has added an ethanol heater to their EV. It can be used to pre-heat the batteries and warm the passenger compartment.

There are solutions.

The hydrogen economy. It’s long shot….

It’s not clear that we can generate hydrogen efficiently enough from renewables or engineered organisms. Remember, right now we use natural gas, and that would be a dumb thing to continue. Better just to stick the NG in the tank.

Storage, there have been developments in the lab, but I’ve not seen any proved in the field. Hydrogen is a tricky little devil to keep in the can.

Distribution. We’d have to build an entire new generation/distribution system. The electric grid is already in place, under utilized at night, and dual purpose.

Conversion to motion. Interesting development in using materials other than platinum for fuel cells, but there’s no working model yet as far as I know.

Hydrogen might have a role in energy storage. If some of the inefficiencies can be solved. But I think it will be way too late to the transportation dance.

Few drive more than 50 miles a day. A busy day of driving around town or to the next town isn’t going to exceed 100 miles.

With a 200 mile range and rapid charging a 500 mile driving day becomes practical. Drive 200, stop ten minutes for an 80% ‘top up’, drive 160, stop ten, drive 160. Now you’ve driven 500 miles with only two ‘pee stops’.

And driving an EV is financially like driving a 30MPG ICEV on $1/gallon gas.

We could have those affordable 200 mile EVs hitting our shores this year when the BYD e6 arrives. The charging stations are being installed….