Yuck, leadership at its worst. It's tough to shut down factories - restarts are sensitive - so it makes sense to allow a skeleton crew. That's not what's happening. This looks like obvious local corruption in the face of a public health crisis. Not thrilled to be "shelter at home-d" next to these pricks with a wife who works at an area hospital and someone elderly at home: this is quite the FU to the community that keeps bailing this government-funded company out.
I've been keeping a tally of companies and leaders who force people to come to the office or use this as a marketing opportunity (vs data4good), and Tesla is now on the shortlist for evil.
That's a myopic view of the largely tax-payer enabled Tesla/SpaceX/SolarCity conglomorate. I don't expect a company largely bootstrapped by massive US gov program awards & free passes+subsidies to give equity to the gov despite the massive capital investment, but backroom calls to circumvent public health policy is somewhere between "far below baseline expectations" and "evil".
I'm happy we have real civic-level project funding for people who get results, and private citizens reaping massive profits from them. In fact, I think the real genius of Musk & Thiel is to be self-enriching versions of FDR, and the DC prime etc. mess has forced their need. But that doesn't excuse evil - there are real lives involved,.
I -- and governments -- are for skeleton crews keeping most factories open to avoid machine breakdown, and essential businesses at whatever they can do safely.
Consumer car companies, casinos, and other special interests don't make sense to me beyond the obvious answer of "knowing corruption" and "institutionalized malignant ignorance."
The Alameda county order only allows for construction of replacement parts, which can be obviously argued is necessary. People need cars to get to work; people like doctors and nurses and grocery store clerks on the front lines of this pandemic. A shortage of replacement parts for their cars would only make it harder for them to fight this.
> Ford likes to say it “didn’t take the money” because unlike General Motors and Chrysler, it didn’t require a taxpayer bailout to survive the 2008-2009 credit crisis. But don’t forget: Ford tapped into a different pool of government money set aside for the auto industry during those desperate times. (And those low-cost funds were critical to Ford’s survival because no other funding sources were available.)
> Hoping to create “thousands of green jobs” in the U.S. and reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, the DOE under the Bush Administration established the $25 billion loan program in 2007 to encourage development of advanced technology vehicles that would burn less fuel and, importantly, be manufactured in the U.S. Congress funded the program in 2009, after President Obama took office.
> Ford applied for and received $5.9 billion in June 2009 (the same month GM filed for bankruptcy) to help pay for investments in more fuel-efficient engines, hybrids and electric cars and also to convert two truck plants to production of cars.
Ford is cancelling all their cars except trucks and the Mustang. They took a bailout that wasn’t a bailout in name only.
Those are different mechanisms with different purposes. If that’s the bar to be considered a bailout, Tesla was bailed out as well.
Whether or not they met the conditions of the loan is a different story.
And while technically true that the mustang is the remaining US car, it obfuscates the fact that the name is being more of a brand moniker than a model, and will include plans for an electric version of the “mustang”
It’s disingenuous for you to argue it was a bailout for Tesla when they have something to show for it (over a million EVs sold, 400k/year of manufacturing capacity, a Supercharger network) and Ford has zero, and Tesla paid their loan back while Ford did not.
You missed the point. I don’t consider either a bailout. They were investments to spur a particular industrial goal. If Ford doesn’t meet the intent, I just hope the government was smart enough in the way they formed the contract
If you consider them both the same kind of "investments" I propose you invest in me in the same way the government did with Ford. i.e. give me money, and I won't ever give it back.
At the same you I'll invest in you in the same way the government did with Tesla. i.e I give you money, and you pay it back 10 years early with interest.
I wholeheartedly accept this deal. Do you? Why not?
I didn’t say it was a good deal. Unfortunately, the government gets hosed all they time by poorly formed contracts. The government also plans on a certain percentage of these investments not to work out. I’m no more happy about it than you, but the original comment was merely a correction that Ford was not part of the TARP bailout.
With that being said, the link by the other poster says Ford will repay by 2022
I've been keeping a tally of companies and leaders who force people to come to the office or use this as a marketing opportunity (vs data4good), and Tesla is now on the shortlist for evil.