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US Government Seizes Fisker’s Cash Reserve

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13 years ago

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 Weak Fisker: On April 11 the federal government seized $21 million from the company’s cash reserves. Image: Flickr/Fisker Auto

U.S. electric car pioneer Fisker Automotive once posted a manifesto on its Web site: “New isn’t easy.” Not for them, it wasn’t. Now their site is defunct and the company is scrambling to find a funder or face bankruptcy.

An electric car company buoyed by federal dollars in 2010, Fisker has now been crippled by supply chain and other problems, and joined legions of start-ups that get dragged down by technical glitches and financial woes. The capital backing from taxpayers caused a dustup that has kept Fisker in the limelight.

The greater question now is whether Fisker’s crash will have repercussions for the electric vehicle industry, which has seen some sales successes with Tesla’s Model S in recent months but largely remains unrealized.

Rewind to just a few years ago when the future for electric vehicles looked promising. In 2010 the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt hit the road. Gas prices were rising and Pres. Barack Obama pledged to put one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. With climate change legislation on the table in Congress as well, the EV market seemed primed for an upswing.

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Enter Fisker, whose electric sports sedan Karma rolled into showrooms in 2011 amid fanfare. TIME listed it as one of the 50 best inventions of 2011. The Anaheim, Calif.–based company netted a $529 million government-backed loan to help fuel its efforts. In recent years it reportedly raised $1 billion more in private funds.

But things started to fall apart. Its lone battery supplier, A123 Systems, floundered and eventually went bankrupt—a significant blow when as much as half of electric cars’ price tag comes from that piece of technology. Karma had to halt production. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) froze Fisker’s loan at $192 million in June 2011. A flawed cooling fan was also linked to a fire in 2012, prompting recalls.  In October Hurricane Sandy destroyed several hundred Karmas waiting for shipment at Port Newark, N.J. Fisker’s founder left last month, leaving the company to contemplate its next steps. This month it laid off the majority of its employees. It is also reportedly being sued by a Web designer, an investor and some former employees.

And the hits keep on coming: On April 11 the federal government seized $21 million from the company’s cash reserves. Fisker did not respond to a request from Scientific American for comment on this story.

Republican lawmakers blasted the company at a House Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairshearing on Wednesday, accusing Fisker of profiting from close connections with the Obama administration. But lawmakers saved most of their fire for the DoE, blaming it for continuing to dole out funds when some lawmakers believe there were early indications the company was not delivering on its product. “The real issue here…is the government shouldn’t be in this business of actually trying to be a venture capitalist. The government is a very poor venture capitalist,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R–N.C.). “We lose taxpayer dollars, and when we lose taxpayer dollars it outrages the public.” Armed with private e-mail correspondence House Republicans obtained between the company, DoE and related consultants, it tried to pin down who knew what and when.

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Henrik Fisker, the company’s former chairman and founder, told House lawmakers that strategic financing at this stage could still allow the company to rebound. In any case, Fisker’s bevy of problems are unique to the company and do not reflect the electric vehicle landscape, says Alan Baum, a Michigan-based analyst specializing in the automotive industry. Start-up car companies—electric or not— often fail, he said.

The real next steps in the industry will come from the larger auto companies such as General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes, Honda, Mitsubishi and BMW. “All those automakers I mentioned have vehicles in the pipeline that will debut in then next two or three years if they have not yet,” Baum says. “Major carmakers know with electric vehicles you can’t just sit on the sidelines.”

Navigant Research predicted this month that a total of 21.9 million electric vehicles (both all-electric and plug-in hybrids) will be sold worldwide between 2012 and 2020. Its forecasts suggest a fraction—368,000—will be sold in the U.S.; and only 107,000 would be all-electric vehicles (instead of plug-ins). That means that in seven years electric vehicles are expected to comprise only a sliver of the anticipated U.S. car market in 2020—roughly 2 percent, says Dave Hurst, a principal research analyst with Navigant. It will be an uphill climb, Navigant’s researchers expect about 71,800 electric vehicles to sell in the U.S. this year, 17,300 of which would be all-electric vehicles.

One issue is cost. Even with up to $7,500 in federal tax credits, electric vehicle prices can be steep. Without the credits, Karma’s sticker price was in the six-figures. Tesla’s top-of-the-line Model S costs $95,000. The Chevy Volt sells for about $40,000 and the Ford Fusion Energi rings in at $39,000. The price for the Nissan Leaf, which recently moved its manufacturing operations to the U.S., has dropped to around $29,000.

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Finding an advanced battery that comes in the perfect package—high in energy density, small in size and lower in price—remains one of the largest hurdles to getting more electric vehicles on the road. “If we want to change things dramatically in the next 10 years we have to find a new material set—a new cathode–anode electrolyte set that will hopefully decrease the cost and increase energy density,” says Venkat Srinivasan, deputy director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR). “If we can achieve that something dramatic would happen and significantly change the penetration curve.” JCESR, an “advanced battery hub,” was established in 2012 at DoE’s Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago with the far-reaching goal of finding batteries with five times the current energy storage at one fifth the price in five years.

On the research side, federal loans from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan program (ATVM) have also supported other electric vehicle options, including Tesla, which received $465 million from DoE in 2010 and has said it expects to repay its loan five years early. Under this loan program, established under the George W. Bush administration, DoE also cut Ford a check for $5.9 billion to upgrade and modernize factories that produce vehicles including the Focus, Escape and Fusion. To Nissan, ATVM gave a loan for $1.4 billion to support the Leaf. And the Vehicle Production Group, LLC, received a $50-million loan to develop a wheelchair-accessible vehicle that will run on compressed natural gas. “To date, DoE has committed and closed five ATVM loans, totaling $8.4 billion, to auto manufacturers large and small who are adopting cutting-edge technologies and deploying them into the market,” Nicholas Whitcombe, former acting director of the ATVM program at DoE, told lawmakers Wednesday.

But the same problems continue to plague the electric vehicle industry year after year: the need for a battery that is long on power and short on cost; and a public that still feels uneasy about purchasing electric vehicles. So much of the future for electric vehicles also remains murky because it is difficult to predict gas prices. Navigant’s forecast for 2020 assumes that fuel prices continue to climb around 7 percent per year, electric vehicle costs come down and government incentives to buy electric vehicles stay in place for consumers. That’s a lot of what-ifs.

In the coming years there may be a host of experimentation with electric vehicles—inclusive of testing different products under the hood but also different types of cars with more spacious backseats and trunk space. “Every major automaker is going to be offering one or several models, and they come in at different price points and configurations,” says Genevieve Cullen, vice president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association.

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In Europe several companies have tried to lower the price of purchasing an electric vehicle by allowing consumers to buy the car but lease the battery. That has not yet caught on in the U.S. but smart USA plans to offer it to U.S customers for the first time when its smart fortwo Electric Drive is released in May. Whereas leasing batteries could lower risks and costs, consumers still might balk. “It’s like buying a car without an engine and then leasing the engine,” Navigant’s Hurst noted.

“It’s a fantastic idea in some ways,” JCESR’s Srinivasan says. “What you’re telling consumers is don’t worry about the battery and how long it will last and how much it will cost.”

Leasing batteries is just one business model approach, Cullen says. Some carmakers are also exploring how they could tap the batteries’ remaining energy once their life in the car is over, she said. “Diversity in the marketplace will be an enormous step in growing this market.”

Click here to view original web page at www.scientificamerican.com

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Tesla improves Dashcam playback with awesome addition

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4 hours ago

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June 2, 2026

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Image Credit: The Kilowatts/Twitter

Tesla has improved Dashcam playback with an awesome new addition, as the company has launched a web-based version that is potentially easier to navigate and operate.

The tool is available at dashcam.tesla.com and will be enabled as your vehicle receives the 2026.20 Software Version. Clips that are captured by your Tesla will be available on the Online Dashcam Clip Viewer once the files on your car’s storage drive are encrypted.

Not a Tesla App first noticed the new feature, and states that once your Tesla updates to 2026.20, the car will automatically protect the clips with an encryption key that is uniquely tied to your owner account.

The web-based viewer should be easier to operate for most. All you will do is head over to dashcam.tesla.com and log in using your account credentials.

Ensure your vehicle is updated to 2026.20 in order for the web-based viewer tool to fetch your vehicle’s saved dashcam clips.

Currently, only a small percentage of owners are updated to this, so it may be a couple of weeks until a majority of owners in the fleet are able to access this feature.

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Watching Dashcam clips on the Tesla smartphone app is quick and convenient, as they can also be easily downloaded and stored right on your smartphone.

However, the clips are sometimes tougher to navigate, and in order to get details like self-driving activation, speed, and turn signals, owners have to screen record the Tesla app and crop out the rest of the screen.

It could also be a massive storage saver as you’ll be able to download the Dashcam clips from the online viewer and save them to your laptop, desktop, a flash drive, or even an external hard drive. This will keep all your clips in one place.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving attempts 150-mile stress test: the good and the bad

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7 hours ago

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June 2, 2026

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Credit: TESLARATI

I recently took my Tesla Model Y running Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14.3.3 over 150 miles on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in an effort to truly put the system under a stress test. There were a lot of good moments, and some bad, but overall, Full Self-Driving impressed me.

Last Thursday, I decided it was time to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, PA. I go a few times a year, and it was a beautiful day. Others have taken some pretty lengthy drives using FSD, but I haven’t had the opportunity to really do something lengthy in quite a few months on an older version. I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try some things out.

I recorded the entire ride there on a GoPro, edited to highlight the crucial moments, and shared them on our social media accounts. If you want to watch them, I’ll share them throughout the piece, but I did not get to do a real breakdown of what I felt about its performance.

Overall Thoughts

I realize it is probably better to do a summation of its performance toward the end of the piece, but I feel like it is also reasonable to lead with this because I was overly impressed with how well it handled everything. The only moments where I felt a little bit of reason to touch the wheel, at least while traveling on the Turnpike and Rt. 30, were due to other drivers and their behaviors.

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I have taken many drives to the Memorial over the past several years, and although it’s not incredibly long, it is a tiring drive. It’s about five hours both ways, close to 300 miles, and I think most of the exhaustion comes from the toll of sitting in the car and then visiting something that is pretty heavy to take in.

This was the first time I’ve ever taken the ride and not felt like I needed to avoid my vehicle after I got home. In the past, I could not even think about driving after I finally arrived at my house, but this was simply different.

It was nice to have something else take the drive for me, while I still had the freedom to take over if I chose to. It made the entire trip more enjoyable.

Full Self-Driving Recognizes Lane-Ending Arrows on Road

After traveling in the fast lane for a little while, FSD noticed the arrows on the road indicating the lane was coming to an end ahead. The car was also in the process of making a pass on a slower vehicle in the middle lane, but aborted this maneuver and backed off to get behind the vehicle.

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I was really impressed by this because I thought that the car would absolutely try to make the pass, only to get in front of the other car, and then slow back down to 75 MPH:

Full Self-Driving Notices Veering Tractor Trailer, Adjusts Lane Positioning

My two rules of the road are never cruise in the fast lane and never drive next to a tractor-trailer. This clip is a perfect example as to why.

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FSD v14.3.3 recognized this tractor-trailer attempting to change lanes while we were still next to it. The car shifted its lane positioning to the shoulder slightly to make room for the merging semi, executed the pass safely, and on we went.

I will admit this one made me a little nervous, but more so because of the 18-wheeler, and not because of the Tesla:

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Full Self-Driving Follows the Rules of Tunnel Travel

Many people who are not familiar with Full Self-Driving and its capabilities are pretty limited in what they know about the really simple things it does well. Part of supervising FSD is being aware of things it might make mistakes with, and anticipating maneuvers it might want to make at the wrong time.

Entering the Blue Mountain Tunnel on the Turnpike, I was ready for FSD to attempt to get back into the right lane after making a pass on a tractor-trailer, but I was pleasantly surprised. Several signs outside the tunnel advise drivers to stay in the lane they’ve chosen while driving through the tunnel; this eliminates the possibility of an accident caused by lane changes, which would impede traffic on a crucial logistics route.

I was happy to see that Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3.3 did not make this mistake:

Full Self-Driving Navigates Toll Plazas with Ease

I was interested to see how FSD would handle toll plazas, including the speed at which it would travel through them, and whether it would stop on the Turnpike at these booths, which have since been transitioned to a “Toll by Plate” system, which mails you a bill.

It was flawless:

Full Self-Driving Still Struggles with Parking from Time to Time

Since I took delivery in late August, I’ve never had a single instance of my Tesla struggling to park at a Supercharger. Other spots at the mall, market, or gym are another story.

This was the first time it did such a terrible job of backing into a spot. This required me to take over and manually park at another charger:

Full Self-Driving Gets Confused After Arriving at Its Destination

This was the first time I have ever experienced FSD getting confused and just circling the lot. The navigation continued to reroute to try to resolve the issue, but after four laps, I decided it was time to overtake the car’s controls and park manually:

This was a baffling behavior that I truly couldn’t explain. Other owners communicated that they have also experienced this issue.

Final Thoughts

I am so incredibly impressed by FSD that it has really made traveling stress-free. The two issues related to parking were not ideal, but to be fair, I usually take over when arriving at parking lots. However, this shortcoming is something Tesla has to make some serious progress with, because parking has truly stumped FSD at times.

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Solving that will be a major breakthrough for autonomy, but Tesla has struggled with it for some time.

All in all, FSD v14.3.3 is unbelievably accurate and handles many of the more stressful maneuvers with ease, one of them being avoiding merging traffic on highways, which was shown above.

Some things that would be great to see improvements on are parking, Speed Profiles, which are relatively tough to adjust (I stayed in Standard for the duration of this drive), and, of course, navigation.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX’s amended S-1 is sparking a major Tesla merger conversation

A single line in SpaceX’s amended S-1 just sent Tesla stock down 5% in one day.

Published

20 hours ago

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June 1, 2026

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A single line buried in SpaceX’s amended S-1 filing is doing more to move Tesla’s stock price than anything Tesla itself has announced in months. The clause, disclosed as SpaceX prepares for what could be the largest IPO in Wall Street history, states that the company “may issue a significant amount of equity in connection with future transactions.” While this may be seen as boilerplate language in S-1 filings, the historical ties between SpaceX and Tesla, and with Elon Musk reportedly discussing a possible merger with close colleagues, investors are interpreting it as something closer to a signal.

The concern among institutional investors like Gary Black, managing director of The Future Fund, pointed directly to the amended filing on X, saying it “strongly suggests more SPCX equity will be issued,” which could potentially be used to acquire Tesla. He estimated such a deal could be 28% dilutive to Tesla shareholders since SpaceX would likely command a significantly higher valuation multiple. Black added that institutional investors he knows hate the idea of a combination because they prefer pure plays over conglomerates, which he said “nearly always gravitate to the lowest common multiple.”

The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building

The bull case runs the math differently. Tesla influencer and retail shareholder advocate AleXandra Merz pushed back on what she called a widespread misunderstanding of how merger-of-equals deals actually work. Rather than simply splitting the difference between two market caps, a merger exchange ratio is negotiated based on relative fair market values, meaning the lower valued company typically sees its stock reprice upward toward the deal value.

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Under her model, SpaceX enters at a $2.5 trillion valuation and Tesla at $1.6 trillion, producing a combined entity worth $4.1 trillion split evenly between both shareholder groups. That implies Tesla’s side of the deal would be valued at $2.05 trillion, a gain of roughly $450 billion from its current market cap. She cited Dow-DuPont and CBS-Viacom as historical examples of how markets reprice both companies toward the announced exchange ratio after a deal is unveiled.


The SpaceX S-1 amendments also revealed just how much financial infrastructure already binds the two companies together. As Teslarati has reported, SpaceX purchased $697 million in Tesla Megapacks, $131 million in Cybertrucks, and the two companies have shared supply chain resources, and semiconductor fabrication plans since well before any merger conversation became public. A retail poll by Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt is finding that 36% of respondents do not plan to buy SpaceX shares at IPO and 15.3% saying their decision depends on the valuation.


Whether the merger happens or not, the amended filing is seemingly moving markets and sharpened a debate that is no longer theoretical. SpaceX is weeks away from trading publicly, and Tesla shareholders are now watching every word of every filing for clues about what Musk plans to do next.

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