One of the things I hate the most on internet forums is people dismissing a design as stupid because it's not the $400 off the shelf solution. I have a tendency to do stuff like this from time to time and I always run the numbers using all that knowledge I picked up in my professional engineering career and education, and then some 17 year old dingleberry calls me a retard because it's not an anodized billet aluminum spacer from Jegs.
Just because it looks retarded doesn't mean it doesn't work.
/devil's advocate
They could start selling the car two months early and have 10,000 by the end of the year, with all 5 star crash ratings and the fastest sedan Nurburgring time, and I'd bet money we'd just see more "Yea but..." reporting.
I will stop now.
It does matter if they make cars in July, because that will lead to profits which will justify the loan's goal of getting electric vehicles on the road by helping private companies become sustainably profitable. If you don't like governments giving out loans, go bitch to the Bush administration for starting that program, and if you don't like companies failing and losing that money, wait two years and then go bitch at Fisker, but Tesla is still on schedule, still on track, still hiring new employees, and in a few months will still be making cars.
I'm not sure if i should be intrigued or just skeptical of the diligence of Car and Driver's reporting.
My god, you were such a piece of shit.
-Matt
And the "bailout" was a DOE loan, the same loan program which gave Nissan 3x as much money to build the Leaf and Ford 12 times as much money. In fact, GM applied for 14 billion dollars in loans from the same program to ramp up Volt production before pulling the application after not getting a response for a year. GM, of course, got an actual bailout from the government of, what 25 billion dollars?
I realize it's easy to look at Tesla and be all pointy finger, look at the rich people making toys on my taxpayer money, but I would expect a car blog and car people to do more research and be a bit more optimistic about an american car company employing a few thousand people and trying to get us out of the Prius / Leaf / CODA / boring eco-car future.
I also live in California. A lot of people like to hate on Cali and assume the state is super anti gun without any actual knowledge of our gun laws. Anyone who thinks we're all anti gun hippies has never been to Bakersfield. Most guns are legal here with the exception of some esoteric assault rifle stipulations, and if someone breaks into your house and you shoot them, your lawyer will have about 1000 precedents to point at. It's not Oklahoma where they give you a medal and elect you mayor for shooting someone who was standing too close to your mailbox, but it's reasonable.