Tesla Note: Dealerships and Inventories

Mike Smitka One point in my critique of Tesla's flawed business strategy is that by engaging in direct sales it uses up precious cash. F...

Clearing the Smoke on Tesla Deux

Mike Smitka While Tesla the car company continues to burn through cash, Elon Musk is touting a capital-hungry vision of integration of his m...

BEVs, AVs, Mobility 2.0: Disrupters?

Michael Smitka, Professor of Economics, Washington and Lee University Judge, Automotive News supplier PACE Awards The media are enamored of ...

The FTC Opens the Hood

Ruggles December 2015 I hadn’t intended to write this as a standalone piece. And I am guilty of using the title to the post, published on t...

Electric Cars: Renault's the Leader, not Tesla!

by Mike Smitka During the GERPISA auto conference in Paris in June I stayed in a hotel with a row of electric vehicles parked out front. T...

The PACE of Automotive Innovation

Suppliers are integral to new technology in the auto industry to an extent not true since the early years of the 20th century, when ventures...

Michigan's Anti-Tesla Ban: Bloomberg is Off Base

Bloomberg has an op-ed " Detroit Fights Innovation -- Again " which in fact is not about the Detroit Three of GM, Ford and Fiat C...

The Best Car Ever

Guest post by Blake Grady, edited by the prof with comments from Econ 244 participants. Original was from May 17, 2013. This is one I had in...

People LOVE Their Car Dealer, But Hate Yours

Steve Finlay - WARDS June 2013 People carry on a love-hate relationship with car dealers. They typically love their dealer, as evidenced by ...

Maryann Keller Speech to the NADA/JD Power Conference, NYC, MArch 2013

For the over four decades I’ve been involved with the auto industry, first as an investment analyst and now as a consultant and director ser...

Tesla says Model S crash test score is best NHTSA has ever recorded

by Jonathan Ramsey of AutoBlog "We found out a couple of weeks ago that the Tesla Model S aced the crash tests administered by the Na...