COMMENT ON AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
Tesla Car Shot In
Falcon Rocket Has Missed Mars
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Response to a comment
which said “the Chinese build a boatload more electric cars and solar panels
than Elon Musk ever will”:
Indeed, and China's high-quality solar panels are being
prevented from penetrating the US market by new unfair tariffs.
As to electric cars, we've had them since at least 1908.
There was a company called Woods in Chicago. They certainly
became a big name, didn't they?
When the technology for lighter, longer-lasting batteries
arrives - if it ever does - we won't need Mr. Musk to build electric cars.
Scores of firms will do it. It is not a super hi-tech project.
Musk's Tesla floats on subsidies and hype, and it is beginning
to lose the subsidies and its financial performance is in a nosedive.
Musk is of course a great promoter, but many of his ideas,
exciting at first glance, are simply going to fail in the bright light of
economic reality.
Tesla cars. Hyper loops. Storage battery-run homes.
The rockets, in case readers are unaware, have been heavily
subsidized by American military efforts along several lines. They have a
future.
But all the stuff we read about great individualistic
entrepreneur we see in columns and comments is pretty much hot air.
He is imaginative. He is an enthusiastic promoter,
especially of himself, but then so was P T Barnum or Garth Drabinsky or the
first Dutchman who speculated in tulips in the early 1630s.
