by Agence France-Presse
The Tesla Model SNEW YORK—U.S. electric carmaker Tesla Motors is firing
on all cylinders and gearing up for greater things after partnering with top
carmaker Toyota.
On Thursday,
Toyota announced that it’s taking a $50 million stake in Tesla. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Tesla has a few
hundred employees and is expected to go public at some point down the road.
“The
announcement is path-breaking and historic,” said University of
California-Berkley professor Harley Shaiken. “It gives Tesla considerable
credibility.”
“Toyota is
very conservative,” he added, so the announcement is good “for
investors and Tesla—they can take that to the bank.”
Toyota’s
investment in Tesla follows German luxury carmaker Daimler’s stake a year ago
of “more than 5 percent” in the electric carmaker, a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, and
a $31 million tax break from the state of California.
Flush with cash,
Tesla on Thursday announced it bought a closed factory near San Francisco that
up until last month had housed a joint venture between Toyota and General
Motors that was churning out Toyota Corolla and Tacoma vehicles, with a
production potential of 500,000 units per year.
If Tesla can
hire the plant’s 4,500 former workers, it would “get their experience, and
their trouble-shooting capabilities,” in addition to Toyota’s knowhow in
large volume sales, said Shaiken. The Toyota stake and plant acquisition make
Tesla’s initial public offering “more likely and significantly more
valuable,” he added.
However,
Edmunds.com auto industry analyst Michelle Krebs warned that Tesla’s eventual
move to an IPO is still uncertain, especially in such an unpredictable stock
market that has been falling since the start of the month.
“They need
to time [to get the IPO] right with the market,” Krebs said, noting that
Tesla is not alone in wanting to go public: General Motors and Chrysler came
back from bankruptcy last year and also intend to sell more of their shares on
the market.
According to
U.S. press reports, Tesla would be the first auto company to go public since
Ford did so in 1956.
Founded in 2003
by South African Elon Musk, a cofounder of online payments giant PayPal, Tesla
already manufactures the Tesla Roadster, a high-performance sports car that
sells for more than $100,000 and gets nearly 250 miles on a single charge.
The company also
plans to unveil in 2012 a “Model S” five-passenger sedan powered by
lithium-ion battery packs capable of between 160 and 300 miles per charge, with
an anticipated base price of around $50,000.
With Toyota,
Tesla plans to develop other electric models, hoping to break out of the luxury
car trade and into mass production.
In the long
term, auto industry experts said, the Tesla-Toyota partnership could rival
other carmakers.
General Motors
plans to launch the hybrid Volt, which runs on batteries but also has a
gasoline motor in case the batteries lose their charge.
Nissan next year
hopes to market the all-electric Leaf.
After
pioneering hybrid vehicles with the Prius but falling behind in fully electric
cars, Toyota will now have access to Tesla’s “control system, the
electronics that control, cool, and manage the battery, and the electric flow
between the battery and the powertrain,” said Edmunds.com “green
car” expert John O’Dell. And that’s something Daimler already was after,
he noted.
Related Links:
In wake of Gulf spill, should this be the summer of energy reform?
U.N. study calls for economic changes to save biodiversity
10 ways to kick the offshore-oil habit
