Archive for April 15th, 2014

Banana republicans watch: April 15, 2014.

Tuesday, April 15th, 2014

I have written before about the California city of Cudahy: election fraud, marijuana dispensary bribes, the bimbo and the badge, payoffs in the Denny’s

Latest developments:

City leaders in one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities used city-issued credit cards for excessive travel, meals and entertainment, mismanaged state funds and had virtually no internal controls to prevent the misuse of taxpayer dollars, the state controller concluded in a scathing audit released Tuesday.

The city has been ordered to repay $22.7 million in “redevelopment funds”.

On a totally unrelated note, here because I just love typing the name, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow has pled not guilty to the charges against him.

Who holds back the electric car?

Tuesday, April 15th, 2014

By way of the Y Combinator Twitter, I found this rather interesting Fast Company article about “Better Place”.

Better Place was born to be revolutionary, the epitome of the kind of world-changing ambition that routinely gets celebrated. Founder Shai Agassi, a serial entrepreneur turned rising star at German software giant SAP, conceived Better Place “on a Davos afternoon” in 2005 when he asked himself, “How would you run a whole country without oil?” Four years later, onstage at the TED conference, Agassi, a proud Israeli with a bit of a Steve Jobs complex, wore a black turtleneck and promised, with the confidence of a man who has known the future for some time but has only recently decided to share his findings, that he would sell millions of electric vehicles in his home country and around the world. He implied that converting to electric cars was the moral equivalent of the abolition of human slavery and that it would usher in a new Industrial Revolution.

Shai Agassi was on FC‘s “2009 Most Creative People in Business” list. He was on the cover of Wired. Better Place raised almost a billion dollars.

And if being on the cover of Wired wasn’t a dead giveaway for you, they collapsed.

Agassi had assumed that the car would cost roughly half the price of a typical gasoline car and would have a range of at least 100 miles. Instead, batteries were delivered with a range of closer to 80 miles, and the terms with ­Renault meant he was selling an unsexy family car for about the same price as a nice sedan like the Mazda3 or the Toyota Corolla. (Not to mention that customers were asked to spend an additional $3,000 or so a year to rent the battery and pay for the use of charging and swap stations.)

I have been, and continue to be, somewhat critical of Tesla. But I think one thing they’re doing right is positioning their vehicles as a premium product that’s worth the asking price.