Well, its the guys who make electric cars.
Tesla Motors made a splash in 2006 with the Tesla Roadster,
an all-electric sports car that was named Best Transportation Invention
of the year by Time Magazine. The good publicity continued when the
Roadster escorted celebrities to the red carpet of the 2007 Oscars as
part of a "green limo" service that included the Toyota Prius and cars
that run on compressed natural gas.
Sexy.
But now, according to the New York Times (
them again!), Tesla Motors is suing a rival car
company for stealing their designs and trade secrets. It's so tempting to think of people working on alternative energy like this as the good guys, isn't it? But it turns out they can be just as petty, incompetent, and short-sighted as everyone else in the world. Let's recap:
The Tesla Roadster, a sexy little minx with a get-up-and-go that rivals the fastest cars in the world, is a year behind schedule.
The Tesla sedan, codename "Whitestar", is going to cost over $60K and the designer, Henrik Fisker may have botched the job on purpose to sabotage it.
Fisker then took his Tesla earnings and used it to design his own car with the same series electric-gas drive train as Whitestar uses, and called it the Fisker Karma.
Now Fisker and Tesla are in a bitch-slapping match over the designs the Karma. Or, as one of Tesla's lawyers put it,
"I think it's ironic that Fisker chose to name his car the Karma, when what he's done is very bad karma."
Oh snap! Although the lawyer does have a point, naming a car the Fisker I'm A Car Design Stealing Douche doesn't quite have the same ring to it as the Karma, does it.
