Elon Musk, UAW spar over Tesla plant conditions

The United Auto Workers signaled Friday that it’s gathering support to unionize Tesla’s assembly plant after someone claiming to be an employee of the automaker publicly criticized the company over factory conditions.

The UAW confirmed Friday that Tesla workers “have approached the UAW, and we welcome them with open arms.”

The union said those workers included Jose Moran, who published a blog post Thursday on a site called Medium alleging that “preventable injuries happen often,” workers are forced into “excessive mandatory overtime,” dissent is stifled and compensation is inadequate.

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Tesla Aims to Cut Crashes (And Misses)

Musk was expanding on a report published last week by the U.S. National Highway Safety Administration that not only exonerated AutoPilot of having a role in a fatal crash in Florida last summer but added that airbag deployments indicated that the crash rate had fallen nearly 40 percent, to 0.8 per million miles driven, down from 1.3 per million miles before the original version of AutoPilot was installed.

The fatal crash had cast a pall over Tesla’s system, prompting some critics to say that the company had overpromised simply by choosing the name AutoPilot. Tesla acknowledges that AutoPilot is not—yet—a truly autonomous system but rather a package of driver-assistance features, such as emergency collision avoidance, lane keeping, and active cruise control.

On Saturday Musk warned customers who were about to have access to the newly downloaded software package that there might be a need to adjust the hardware—specifically the angle of the cameras.

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The Elon Musk Myth Looks To Contaminate Texas

One of Musk’s fake companies getting billions in real government money is Tesla Motors.  Tesla produces massively-subsidized electric cars which – even with the federal coin – cost way too much and aren’t purchased by anyone outside of uber-wealthy preening elites:

“(Tesla’s) first model, the Roadster, costing over $100,000 per vehicle, sold only 2,400 actual cars in 31 countries from 2006 until production ended in 2012, despite extensive federal subsidies for electric car purchases.  Its new model, a full-size luxury sedan named the Model S, is doing better, costing about half as much as the Roadster. Tesla sold about 25,000 of these worldwide in 2013….The products are heavily subsidized, by both federal and state tax credits of up to $20,000+ to consumers, and zero emissions credits totaling tens of millions of dollars to the company.”

So much government coin – for so little in sales.  And now the Musk contagion is looking to infest Texas.  Musk wants to insert his Tesla Faux-Motors into the Lone Star State’s retail dealership market.  And is demanding even more cronyism to do it.

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Elon Musk’s Grand Ambition Is Boring

Master Plans, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, solar roofs, hyperloops, and space rockets that land on ships…is there anything Elon Musk won’t attempt? Apparently not: it’s time to add tunnel boring to the list.

No, I’m not joking. Saturday morning Musk sent out a series of tweets describing his intent to create a tunnel boring company because “Traffic is driving me nuts.” He then added the following to his Twitter bio: “Tunnels (yes, tunnels).”

There are only two explanations: either A) Musk is joking, or B) Musk is serious. Both scenarios should unsettle Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) investors and Musk supporters.

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Business ‘Savant’ Andrew Ross Sorkin Gets Elon Musk Very, Very Wrong

Actually, Elon Musk isn’t the Tony Stark of anything.  And the only person behind Tesla and Solar City is a government bureaucrat – writing Musk yet another government check.

So far, Musk has received FIVE BILLION DOLLARS in government money – mostly for his “green energy” business fallacies.  He is arguably the world’s largest welfare recipient.

And Musk’s ridiculous solar panel and electric car companies only serve as just two more totally unnecessary reminders that “green energy” is actually neither green nor energy.

Solar panels cost a ton of (government) money – and produce almost no energy for that money.  You’ll never get back the up-front coin in lifetime energy savings.  And the panels, once spent, have to be disposed of as if they are nuclear waste.

Electric cars also cost a ton of (government) money – and also cost way more up front than you’ll ever make up in energy savings over the life of the car.  Unless you drive the car roughly two thousand years.  And the energy it burns – is electricity.  Which is produced mostly by…coal – an energy source from which the Green Machine is supposedly trying to escape.

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Tesla Hunting For Spare Change In The Supercharger Sofa Cushions

It came out in the news that not only will Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) be charging people in the future to use their superchargers, but now you could be incurring fees for leaving your car parked on a supercharger for five minutes longer than it is supposed to. How did we get here from “free supercharger field trips across the nation”?

Like so many things with the Tesla story, one more too good to be true aspect seems to be coming to an end. We have long been skeptics of Tesla and we have long argued that when reality sets in, the stock and Tesla shareholders will be in for a bit of a reality check of their own. We happen to think that Tesla’s share price in and of itself is a little bit of a too good to be true story, and perhaps the supercharger fallacy coming to an end does well to signify what the future may hold for Tesla shareholders.

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Tesla’s Subsidy Shuffle: Big Public Costs With No Public Benefit

In mid-November, the stockholders of Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) and SolarCity approved a plan to merge SolarCity into Tesla, thereby creating “the world’s first vertically integrated, end-to-end sustainable energy company.” It was almost enough to warm the cockles of this skeptic’s heart. Then I started compiling a list of the Federal and State subsidies and interventions the merged companies will enjoy as they pursue a sustainable future. It was a fascinating exercise.

Before digging into the surprisingly large subsidy numbers, I’ll start by describing the model integrated sustainable energy system I’ve use for this article, a system that combines rooftop solar, energy storage and an EV. To keep the analysis simple, my model system only has enough power generation and storage to support an EV. The numbers will be significantly higher if a consumer wants to serve part of his non-transport energy needs with a Tesla solution.

For a recent article, I calculated that the 170,000 Teslas on the road worldwide have averaged 33.4 miles per vehicle day. While the battery-to-wheels power consumption of a Model S is 3.5 miles per kWh, there’s about a 10% round-trip efficiency loss between total charge energy and total discharge energy. So if a consumer plans to collect energy from a solar panel, store it in a Powerwall and subsequently use it to charge an EV, the total round-trip efficiency loss will be about 19%. To get 33.4 miles of range out of an EV, he will need to start by storing about 12 kWh in a Powerwall.

While I’ve rounded some numbers to keep the analysis simple, 2 kW of rooftop solar panels should be able to provide an average of 12 kWh per day under optimal conditions. Likewise, a 14 kWh Powerwall should provide adequate storage capacity for the first couple years. That being said, a second Powerwall will probably be needed as the storage capacity of the first one degrades. I can’t accurately predict the capacity degradation of a “Powerwall 2,” but Tesla’s January 22, 2016, Powerwall Manufacturer s Warranty Certificate (Germany) used the following graph to summarize the expected capacity degradation for a “Powerwall 1” used in a daily cycling regime.

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Cut off Elon Musk’s Government Subsidy Gravy Train

Wednesday, Leonardo DiCaprio made a visit to Trump Tower. The reason? Selling the incoming administration on the creation of “millions of green jobs.” He wants the government to put its thumb on the scale to favor his pet industries. This nonsense must stop, and President Trump’s first one hundred day agenda would benefit from a plan for ending the out-of-control crony capitalism that has made this kind of activity commonplace.

DiCaprio is easy to criticize: a movie star who addresses the UN. He hectors the government to spend money on things that voters do not prioritize as highly as he does…because, you know, he knows best. But this does more than just infuriate voters. It is regulatory capture but on a grand, political scale. It warps capital markets, warps entire sectors of our economy and diverts entrepreneurs from market-driven pursuits.

It is not a theoretical point. Take the case of Elon Musk, who has become one of the more successful entrepreneurs chasing government dollars. In a sense, Musk is a tragic story of how one of the world’s most talented entrepreneurs has become sidetracked by crony capitalism.

We are all aware of President Obama’s obsession with electric vehicles (EVs), for example. In 2011, he pledged that the United States would have one million new generation electric cars on the road by 2015 and pledged billions to do it. He and a bipartisan consensus in Congress wasted gobs of money and warped markets to miss that absurd goal by a yawning margin. Likewise, he threw billions at solar energy with direct and indirect subsidies. Solar power is still not cost competitive.

From that, Musk made billions.

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NYT reporter swoons over Elon Musk

Moreover, Mr. Musk caused a net loss of manufacturing jobs. Suppose the $4.9 billion he wrested from the government had instead been distributed to the private business community through lower taxes. The annual average cost of a manufacturing job in the United States, including pay and benefits, approximates $81,300. That means private businesses would have created approximately 60,000 manufacturing jobs if they had received the same financial support government showered on Mr. Musk. His three lavishly subsidized businesses have thus caused a net loss of 25,000 manufacturing jobs. Sorkin’s effusive praise of Musk as “a prime example of everything we want our business leaders to be” is nonsense on stilts.

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