It was only a few weeks ago that the joint manufacturing venture between GM and Toyota ended, and both parties pulled out of the Fremont, CA NUMMI plant. When GM announced their pull-out, the public was a bit sympathetic due to the sad state of affairs going on at GM at the time. However, when Toyota made their announcement a few weeks later, there was a little more than grumbling of displeasure.
Just in the last couple of weeks, there was a rumor flying around that Tesla and Toyota might be joining in a manufacturing venture. Most people assumed that it was going to be in Southern California – Downey, CA. After all, Tesla already have come to an agreement with local government officials in Downey, CA to build a plant there.
At 5pm, May 20th, 2010, in Palo Alto, CA there stood Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla), Akio Toyoda (CEO of Toyota), and the Governator Arnold Schwartzenegger, in front of a podium making a big announcement. Tesla and Toyota will be manufacturing and researching EV vehicles together at the recently closed NUMMI plant in Fremont.
The main terms of the deal are as follows:
- Toyota will take up private stakes in Tesla, worth $50 million,
- State of California will allow tax abatement for Tesla to tool up the NUMMI plant, worth up to $20 million
- Toyota and Tesla will develop and manufacture Electric Vehicles at the NUMMI plant
- Tesla’s Model S EV Sedan will be manufactured at the NUMMI plant
This in turn will bring in over 1,000 new jobs (or recycled jobs) to Fremont’s NUMMI plant and other anxillary suppliers and the such. With this much assistance (hand-out) from the Federal and State government, private investors, venture capital, Daimler (they pitched in $10 million, back in 2008), and now Toyota it would be an extreme shame if Tesla could not deliver on their promises.
The press conference video is below:
-KF
Despite hybrid vehicles being the standard of green vehicles today, the debate rages on. The big debate in the future of automobiles comes down to these two major technologies – electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.
If you happened to catch the latest Top Gear episode on BBC or BBC America, the UK boys bashed the Tesla Motors’ Roadster for being irrelevant and unreliable. We know now that the unreliability was staged, and the ‘being irrelevant’ is just the Top Gear boys’ opinion. I loved it especially, when they traced the power source of the household power plug all the way to a heavy polluting power plant. It is very, very suggestive and misleading. Mr. May and Mr. Clarkson also suggested that hydrogen fuel cells are the wave of the future and introduced the Honda’s new FCX Clarity. Maybe, Top Gear is drinking Honda flavored Kool-Aid.
In a ideal world, we would have two types of vehicles in our garages… or two types of mobility. One should be a electric personal mobile, commuter, or errand-runner. Much like the Segway, you plug it in to recharge at night then you take it to do errands or go to work in it. A fine example of this would be the Toyota iReal (see left). The other mode of transportation should only be used when you need space for more than one person and/or need long cruising distances. That could be either gas, electric, or hybrid drivetrain. But realistically, most people can or will have one vehicle. If that’s the case, make it electric. As the battery technology improve, so will the performance of the electric vehicles. With hydrogen fuel cells, you might have to replace the whole entire fuel cell or the vehicle, itself, for the same improvement of upgraded batteries on pure electric vehicles.
