11/14/08 - Pressure To Bailout Big Three Grows, But What About Startups? by KarenRei

[A1phaGeek]

Our own KarenRei writes @ Gas2.0:

http://gas2.org/2008/11/14/pressure-to-bailout-big-three-grows-but-what-about-startups/

"....Across this country, new companies have started up to produce a wide variety of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Vectrix makes electric motorcycles and is based in Rhode Island. Electric Motorsports makes electric motorcycles in Oakland, CA. Zero-X makes them in Santa Cruz, CA. Venture Vehicles is working on a small, tandem two seater leaning, enclosed motorcycle. Fisker Automotive makes luxury plug-in hybrid cars and is headquartered in Irvine California. Aptera makes affordable, hyper-efficient enclosed electric three-wheelers in Carlsbad and Vista, California. Tesla Motors makes electric sports cars and is headquartered in San Carlos, CA. Wrightspeed, also California-based, is building electric cars that make the Tesla Roadster look slow. Phoenix Motorcars makes fast-charging electric work trucks and SUVs and is based in California...."

[TheAeronut]

Because the startups are just noise in the marketing and lobbying graphs, that's why. Today's politicians rarely listen to, or even HEAR small companies like these because they cannot $ yell $$ loud $$ enough $$$$ to be heard or noticed over belching behemoths that essentially run our government these days.

J.P.

[aptera1213]

ha, throw 25 billion at gm and ford and you keep them alive, but they still make the same cars and have the same management....that will need bailed out again in 5 years time

throw 1 billion at aptera and you will have 10 thousand new apteras on the road in one year...
and a ramped up line that can put out more and more as needed...and a company making a profit...

[TheAeronut]

Maybe not quite that fast... I think that it would take at least a year to build up a production line that could produce those numbers. Anyway, $1B to Aptera would be a GREAT thing for all of us - not just us Aptera nuts. We can always dream, can't we?

J.P.

[garygid]

Even give $100,000,000 to each startup to produce freeway-legal green vehicles?

[garygid]

Once Aptera gets the design "bugs" out of the first 20 vehicles,
I suspect that they could ramp up production quickly.
However, I suspect that they will ramp up a bit more "slowly",
until the Aptera-Service issues are well solved.

But, if the first 50 are a great success, there could easily be a huge increase
in Reservations that might accelerate Aptera's first-year production strategy.