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Is Elon Musk a welfare king?

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Elon Musk is a darling of libertarians and free-market advocates because he is proposing to change the way Americans drive their cars through purely private effort. But he is now coming under fire for accepting gobs of government assistance in the process.

Critics charge that he has already accepted $4.9 billion in federal and state assistance and is angling for more. One article even asks if Musk has not become a “welfare king.”

Well, let’s take a look at the charges and see how they stack up:

The original article appeared in Mother Jones and was not entirely unfavorable. Staff reporter Josh Harkinson thinks the Tesla is a marvelous car and quotes all the accolades from Consumer Reports and Motor Trend. He even thinks Musk may be the next Steve Jobs and quotes New York Times blogger Jim Motavalli to that effect: “Individuals come along very rarely that are both as creative and driven as that. Musk is not going to settle for a product that is good enough for the marketplace. He wants something that is insanely great.”

What Harkinson objects to is simply that Musk hasn’t given the government enough credit for helping him on his way. He quotes Fred Turner, a Stanford professor and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, as saying: “It is not quite self-delusion, but there is a habit of thinking of oneself as a free-standing, independent agent, and of not acknowledging the subsidies that one received. And this goes on all the time in the Valley (i.e., Silicon Valley).”

It’s important to note that Harkinson is not just talking about Tesla. Musk’s other enterprise, SolarCity, which is installing rooftop panels on private homes, actually gets more federal and state subsidies than Tesla. And SpaceX, Musk’s venture into space travel, has a $4.2 billion contract with NASA to build a launching pad in Texas, which does not count as a subsidy but still comes from the government.

As far as Tesla is concerned, here’s what Harkinson counts as government assistance:

• Everyone who buys a Tesla gets a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government. Buyers in California get an additional $2,500 tax credit. Tesla buyers have an average income of $320,000. The federal tax credit will go to the first 200,000 customers. So far, Tesla has sold only one-quarter of that.

• The state of Nevada gave Tesla $1.2 billion in tax benefits to build its Gigafactory outside Reno. The offer came as Nevada was in competition with seven other states for the siting. The factory is expected to produce 6,000 jobs.

• Tesla’s principal source of income in recent years has come from selling Zero Emission Vehicles credits to other manufacturers in a program particular to the state of California. All auto manufacturers are required to produce ZEVs. When they can’t meet their quota, they can buy credits from other manufacturers. Tesla has pocketed $517 million in recent years. Harkinson counts this as a government subsidy, although Musk points out that the money comes from other car companies, not the government.

Musk has been quick to fire back: “If I cared about subsidies, I would have entered the oil and gas industry,” he told the media after The Los Angeles Times ran a story repeating the Mother Jones charges.

He points out that the$1.2 billion from Nevada will be spaced out over a period of two decades. It will also be contingent on the factory having an output of $5 billion every year for the 20-year period. He notes that hiring and other aspects of the Gigafactory will make it a profitable venture for the state of Nevada. And of course he notes that the fossil-fuel industry has received huge subsidies over the decades.

It really isn’t fair to say that Musk is “living off welfare.” His original entrepreneurial success, PayPal, rose to a valuation of $1.5 billion without the slightest assistance from the government. Tesla did receive a $465 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy under the same program that funded the ill-fated Solyndra. But Musk made a grand gesture by paying back the loan ahead of time.

The fact is, it’s almost impossible to start a business these days without becoming involved at some level with the government. If Nevada hadn’t offered tax abatements, some other state would have – and did in fact. Many other factors were involved in the selection of Nevada, and states obviously benefit from such facilities.

Musk is a unique visionary whose reach extends far beyond making money. His ambition is to completely remake America’s automobile system and end the dominance of fossil fuels. He also wants to see America succeed at space travel. He plans to build a colony on Mars and has said he hopes to die on the Red Planet.

“Just not on impact, he added.

(Photo credit: J.D. Lasica, posted to Flickr)

Arctic Leaf

Audi tries synthesizing fuel

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Tesla is trying to convert the world to the electric car. The Japanese are pushing hydrogen. But Audi, the German carmaker, has a different idea. It’s trying to synthesize fuel from the simplest of elements – water, carbon dioxide and solar energy.

Audi’s research facility in Dresden has produced what the company calls an e-diesel – a net-zero-carbon-footprint fuel made from carbon dioxide and water. The company announced the project to great fanfare on April 21. In May, it unveiled another advance – e-benzine, a fuel that acts just like gasoline.

The two are the latest of a suite of six fuels developed by Audi that behave just like traditional gasoline or diesel, but burn without releasing any sulfur or aromatic hydrocarbons, the stuff that produce air pollution. The fuels also can be labeled as carbon-neutral, since the carbon dioxide they’re removing from the atmosphere perfectly matches the CO2 they put back in when they burn. E-benzine currently derives its carbon from organic material – biofuels made from rapeseed, sunflower oil or corn. But Audi officials say they soon hope to switch to atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“To me, this is a historic moment,” said Marc Delcourt, CEO of Global Bioenergies, the French company that is partnering with Audi on the e-benzine project. “It is the first time that we have produced real gasoline from plants.”

The e-diesel process works like this: Audi begins by splitting water by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity is provided by wind or solar energy, which makes it completely fossil-fuel free. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Audi filters carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The C02 is stripped down to carbon monoxide, and the CO and hydrogen are then mixed together under high pressure to produce a long-chained hydrocarbon that Audi calls “blue crude.” It has all the properties of crude oil and can be refined down to commercial fuels like e-diesel. “We’re thinking we’re bringing green-ness to a field that desperately needs green-ness,” said Rick Bockrath, vice president for chemical engineering at Global Bioenergies. “It’s basically how we’re moving away from an oil-based economy towards something that has a renewable, sustainable future to it.”

Johanna Wanka, Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, attended the ceremony at which the first batch of Audi e-diesel, five liters’ worth, was put into her official car, an Audi A8 3.0 TDI clean diesel Quattro (that’s her in the photo above). “This synthetic diesel, made using CO2, is a huge success for our sustainability research,” she said. “If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources, and put the fundamentals of the ‘green economy’ in place.”

The product has a 100 octane rating and can be used either as an additive or as a stand-alone fuel. Audi says cars run much smoother on the product because of the lack of aromatic compounds, sulfur and other impurities. It also converts to energy at 70 percent efficiency, which is much better than regular diesels.

Audi’s pilot project in Dresden is currently producing 160 liters of e-diesel per day. Obviously, that isn’t enough to shake the world. But the long-term plan is to scale up to a level that will make the product available to the public. The estimated price will be 1 to 1.5 euros per liter, which comes to about $3.75 per gallon. This would not offer any price advantage in the United States, where diesel is selling at $2.88 per gallon, but it would be competitive in Europe, where diesel currently sells for about 1.4 euros per liter.

The problem with all such inventions, of course, is whether they can scale up at a price that remains competitive. Robert Rapier, the highly respected energy analyst, is skeptical. In a lengthy piece in GreentechMedia, Rapier did a step-by-step analysis, including all the chemical reactions. He concluded that the price is going to be $3.76 per gallon, which would put it above the current price of diesel in the United States, but perhaps not in Europe. But that doesn’t include any price increases that may come with scaling up the process. In addition, several critics have wondered whether solar and wind electricity will be available on a scale capable of supporting such a commercial operation.

“To sum up, can Audi produce fuel from thin air? Sure. There is no question about technical viability,” Rapier wrote. But “The question boils down to economic viability, which appears to be challenging given what has been released about the process.”

All this doesn’t mean Audi shouldn’t continue experimenting. There’s always room for improvement, and there may be other breakthroughs down the road. A carbon tax would also benefit the process, particularly if Audi could be given credit for the carbon it takes out of the atmosphere. There is also the possibility of combining the procedure with a carbon-capture and storage operation at a fossil-fuel plant, where carbon dioxide is currently regarded as a noxious waste material.

A system that would manufacture automotive fuel out of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be like the philosopher’s stone of the transport sector. Audi should keep trying.

(Photo credit: Audi)

Landon Hall

Is your car a flex-fuel vehicle? Use this tool to find out

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You’ve seen the badges on the rear ends of cars, trucks and SUVs, likely while you’re stuck in traffic. They say “FlexFuel” or, more descriptively, “FlexFuel … E85 Ethanol.” Almost 20 million vehicles in the United States come off the assembly line as flex-fuel, meaning they can run perfectly well on any mixture of gasoline and ethanol, up to E85 (which is actually 51 percent to 83 percent ethanol, the rest gasoline).

But not all of them have that shiny badge declaring them flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs). Sometimes a yellow gas cap is the dead giveaway, but those caps only started appearing on model-year 2008 vehicles (2006 for General Motors). Buried deep inside the owner’s manual, too, is a notice about which fuels are approved to run in your vehicle.

Now, there’s an easy tool that will tell you whether you’re one of those lucky 20 million whose vehicle can take E85. Fuel Freedom Foundation has just unveiled the Check Your Car tool. You can enter in your vehicle’s make, model, year and engine size, and it’ll tell you whether you’re driving an FFV.

This tool is long overdue, because ever since the first FFV rolled out of the factory — the 1996 Ford Taurus, which actually could run on gasoline, ethanol and methanol — FFV owners have consistently not taken advantage of all these engines can do. Less than 10 percent of such drivers use E85. Part of the reason likely is that only a small percentage of the nation’s fueling stations offer it. But that proportion is rising: E15, which has twice as much ethanol as regular gasoline (which contains up to 10 percent ethanol already), is spreading around the country, and more stations are offering E85 as well.

Using higher ethanol blends, and less gasoline, has multiple benefits:

  • It’s cheaper for consumers. The Renewable Fuels Association says blending ethanol into the nation’s gasoline supply saves the average American family about $1,200 a year.
  • It’s a natural octane enhancer, which makes engines perform better.
  • Since ethanol burns more efficiently, it results in fewer tailpipe emissions being released into the air, which is better for air quality.
  • It’s an American-made fuel, requiring American-based jobs. The U.S. only produces less than 10 million barrels of crude a day but consumes some 19 million. The difference must be imported.

Check Your Car is part of our Fuels 101 initiative, which will soon include other features such as an education page about the various fuel types; how to find a station that sells alternative fuels (for the time being, use the Alternative Fuels Data Center’s locator); and how to find a kit that could convert your gasoline-only engine to run on ethanol.

So check back soon. In the meantime, kick the tires and take Check Your Car for a test drive.

Arctic Leaf

Is this golf cart more ‘disruptive’ than Teslas?

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In the May issue of the Harvard Business Review, Clayton Christensen and Tom Bartman tackle the question, “Is the Tesla a truly disruptive innovation?” The answer they come up with is “no,” but they have some interesting things to say in the process.

Christensen is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, one of the most highly regarded business books in recent memory. It originated as an article in the HBR exactly twenty years ago, and was published as a book in 1997. Christensen pointed out that established companies were often beaten at their own game by cheaper imitations that performed the same service at a much better price. He cited steel mini-mills and personal computers as examples of innovations that created whole new markets and ended up displacing previous technologies. The “innovator’s dilemma” is that established companies cannot compete at first without undercutting their own products. By the time they make the shift, however, they might be left behind.

An investor challenged Christensen as to whether Tesla was truly disruptive. (“Game-changer” is another popular term for the electric-car company.) Christensen has been feeling defensive about his work recently after a critical 2014 article in The New Yorker, and so he decided to take up the challenge. He assigned the task to Bartman, one of his assistants.

Bartman posed five questions: 1) Does the product target overserved customers by offering lower service at a lower price? 2) Does it create “asymmetric motivation” in that existing competitors aren’t motivated to initiate change? 3) Can it improve performance fast enough to keep pace with customers’ expectations? 4) Does it create new value networks, including sale channels? And 5) Does it disrupt all incumbents, or can an existing player exploit the opportunity?

“As Bartman worked through the questions,” says the article on HBR’s website, “it became clear that Tesla is not a disrupter. It’s a classic ‘sustaining innovation’—a product that, according to Christensen’s definition, offers incrementally better performance at a higher price. There’s nothing rudimentary about Teslas, which compete on price against cars by BMW and Mercedes.”

Truly disruptive technologies, so Christensen’s theory goes, start from the bottom up. They offer a cheap substitute, then grab a market and gradually improve until they have become a full competitor to the existing players. At that point, it might be too late for established companies to adopt the innovations.

Tesla is doing the opposite: It is starting at the high end of the market, competing only with luxury cars, and working its way down. The Model X, a family SUV scheduled to sell for $60,000, is due out this year; and the Model 3, which has a target price of $35,000 is scheduled to be showcased next year for 2018 sale.

It makes a big difference. “If Tesla is following a disruptive innovation strategy, theory predicts that it will continue to see no strong competitive response,” Bartman told HBR. “However, because it’s a sustaining innovation, theory predicts that competitors will emerge. Our analysis concludes that a competitive response won’t happen until Tesla expands outside its current niche of people who prefer electric vehicles to gas-powered cars—but if it expands by creating more variety (such as SUVs) and more-affordable vehicles, competition will be fierce.”

This seems like a pretty good assessment. Right now, Tesla is welcoming competitors. Musk even invited Apple to join him in the automobile business last week. There have been persistent rumors of Apple and Tesla joining forces in automobile manufacture, although Apple seems content to stick with personal electronic devices. But if Tesla succeeds in selling a $35,000 electric vehicle, it is certain it will face competition from GM, Nissan, BMW Volkswagen and the entire established industry.

So is there a vehicle out there that would be truly disruptive to the auto industry? In fact, there is. Bateman and Christensen identify it as the “neighborhood electric vehicle” – the NEV – and say there are already signs of it bubbling up from the bottom.

“In 2011, Polaris, the Minnesota-based manufacturer of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, bought Global Electric Motorcars, a small division of Chrysler that makes battery-powered neighborhood electric vehicles,” writes the HBR. “Although NEVs cannot exceed 35 miles per hour and lack many features of cars, they could eventually steal enough market share to disrupt the automobile industry.”

Polaris CEO Scott Wine told HBR that his company has tightened up the braking system and added heaters and stereos in an attempt to upgrade toward regular automobiles. But the modified golf carts remain extraordinarily cheap –$2,000 to $12,000 — and are now being used in retirement communities. Bateman also points out that 200,000 of these vehicles are being sold in China each year. “When we launch our new model, in the not-too-distant future, it will be an opportunity to do exactly what Clay Christensen’s work says,” Wine says. “It’s going to be a significant disruption.”

So will the modified electric golf cart turn out to be the truly disruptive innovation that upends the internal combustion engine? We’ll soon see.

(Photo credit: Polaris.com)