Proterra Unveils Electric Bus with 1,100-Mile Range on a Single Charge

[DonRocks]

"Proterra Counters Tesla's 'Beast' of a Semi with 1,100-Mile-Range Electric Bus" by Alan Ohnsman on forbes.com

Many of you won't know Proterra, but they're well-known within the small family of electric vehicles, specializing in electric buses.

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This is as good a time as any (given that I've also written this thread about Volvo) to disclose that I've been invested in the electric-motor industry for over twenty years (never in Proterra) - and have lost my ass in the process. Let this be proof-positive that "timing" is just as important as "concept" - I *knew* that the world would be changing over to electric vehicles (not to mention other things, such as lawnmowers) since the mid-1990s, just as "I *knew*" that the housing market would crash in the mid 2000s (I swore up-and-down that, whatever the peak prices would be, they would decline by 30%, and I was right).

Yeah, I was right, on both of these issues. Makes me sound really smart, doesn't it? But because I had absolutely no idea *when* these things would happen:

1) I made absolutely no money from the housing market, and more painfully:
2) I've lost my ass in the electric-motor market because I jumped the gun by two decades.

Young investors: Learn from my mistakes - just because you're "sure" of something doesn't mean you know when it will happen, and also doesn't mean you know which companies will make it happen. Hell, I invested heavily in cell phones in the late 1980s - great idea, right? The company went bankrupt (if you're confident in a general concept, but have no specific company knowledge, go with an industry-based mutual fund).