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Exactly two years ago, in November 2010, the Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn assured reporters that his auto alliance would sell half a million electric vehicles a year by the end of 2013. In 2011, it sold just short of 10,000 electrics, but in April 2012 Ghosn still claimed that the 2012 sales would double to 20,000. On November 15, he had to give up and admit that, after selling less than 7,000 vehicles, the 2012 target cannot be reached. That is just the latest in a less than electrifying saga of modern electric vehicles (this qualification is needed because...

DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors is giving its Chevrolet Spark a jolt of electricity. An all-electric version of the mini-car will debut this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show. It goes on sale this summer in California, Oregon, Canada and South Korea, where it's made. Other markets will follow. Unlike the Chevrolet Volt sedan, which can run in all-electric mode but also has a backup gas engine, the Spark EV is a pure electric. GM won't say how far the car will go on a charge, but says it will be a top performer among the small number of...

Imagine that. Weeks to go before the election and the Department of Energy has restructured its $465 million loan to the electric-car company to make sure it didn’t run out of cash. The New York Times reports:(Emphasis mine)"As it ramps up sales of its sleek electric sedan, Tesla doesn’t appear to be much of a loser right now. But a closer look at company’s cash flows suggests it is hardly out of the woods.For young companies like Tesla, calibrating cash flows is critical. Customer demand may be high for a company’s product,but mistimed spending can lead to a cash crunch....

Electric cars might cause as much or more pollution than conventional gas vehicles, according to researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. According to a study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, “the production phase of electric vehicles proved substantially more environmentally intensive” than the production process for traditional gas-powered cars. Specifically, the study found that electric car factories can emit more toxic waste than gas-burning car factories. And greenhouse gas emissions rise exponentially if coal is used to produce the electricity necessary to charge “green” vehicles, according to the study. The researchers compared the overall life-cycle...

Solar panel installer SolarCity Corp filed with U.S. regulators to raise up to $201 million in an initial public offering that could help rekindle investor appetite for cleantech stocks. ....Companies including Google Inc and U.S. Bancorp have provided funds to finance SolarCity's projects. Those investors are able to collect a 30 percent federal tax credit for solar energy systems...... ...SolarCity was founded in 2006 by brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive along with their cousin, PayPal co-founder and Tesla Motors Chief Executive Elon Musk.... SolarCity hopes it can buck the lackluster trend among recent cleantech IPOs.... ....[SolorCity's] total revenue was $46.6...

DETROIT: The fledgling electric car business is in turmoil as predictions about potential sales have proven to be wildly optimistic despite volatile fuel prices and plenty of media hype. Weak consumer demand is hitting both the big automakers like General Motors and Nissan -- which have failed to meet sales targets on the plug-in Volt and all-electric Leaf -- and smaller start-up firms trying to carve out a piece of a very small niche. "Electric vehicles don't make any more sense today than they did in 1912," says Sean McAlinden, an analyst with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann...

Toyota has scrapped plans for widespread manufacturing and sale of a new mini-car that was to be powered as electric only. Reuters reports that Toyota stated they “had misread the market and the ability of still emerging battery technology to meet consumer demands.” We would all be a lot better off, if Only Barack Obama and Harry Reid had the same amount of guts as Toyota to admit to making gross errors in judgment. Takeshi Uchiyamada, the engineer who oversees vehicle development as Vice Chairman of Toyota, was frank in stating, “two years later, there are many difficulties.” Takeshi is...

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts. Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.

One electric-car owner got so angry about internal combustion engine (ICE) cars taking car-charging parking spots, he made a video. If you drive an electric car, it's nice to know that if you're making a trip to the mall or a regular spot that you can charge up your car while you're running errands. Well, it's nice until you get there to find that some ignorant soul has parked their gas-guzzler in the space, preventing you from charging. Unfortunately, it's a trend noticed all too frequently by Santa Monica-based reader Kelly Olsen, who shot the video below to demonstrate just...

The Obama administration invested $2.4 billion as part of its goal of putting one million electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2015. But that effort has, in part, stalled. Nothing is more emblematic of the industry's troubles than the Fisker Karma. In 2010, Fisker got a $529-million taxpayer loan to build a luxury electric sports car. But the government cut off the loan to Fisker after $193 million when Fisker failed to meet its ambitious sales and production goals. Then, a Consumer Reports test dealt the Karma another blow. "It is low. It is sleek. It is...

Photo shows the remains of 2012 Fisker Karma after a fire engulfed the vehicle last week. A $100,000 electric car is suspected in sparking a fire at a Sugar Land home last week, according to media reports. Fort Bend County chief fire investigator Robert Baker told AutoWeek that a newly purchased Fisker Karma sparked a fire that quickly spread to the rest of the home. “The Karma was the origin of the fire, but what exactly caused that we don’t know at this time,” Baker told the news outlet. According to his lawyers, Jeremy Gutierrez said his two-week old Karma...

Jobs: The same president who used stimulus dollars to build electric cars in Finland and sought to be Brazil's best oil customer now complains the GOP nominee built his career outsourcing jobs. At least he created some. President Obama's re-election campaign released an ad Tuesday saying Mitt Romney "shipped American jobs to places like Mexico and China" when he led the investment firm Bain Capital. The $780,000 ad buy in the key swing states of Ohio, Iowa and Virginia was in response to an ad by the free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) noting the administration's penchant for wasting taxpayer...

Green Energy: Another day and another set of layoffs at a Department of Energy-backed solar company and an electric-car maker funded with stimulus dollars. Yet the President wants to double down on green energy. First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced Monday it will lay off 2,000 workers worldwide. In December, First Solar laid off 100 employees at a Santa Clara , Calif., plant. The DOE has committed the loan to a project in Riverside County, Calif., expected to create a whopping 15 permanent jobs and 550 construction...

While the choice of fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles for sale in the U.S. continues to grow, more buyers than not are deciding against the technology when they go to buy another car. Only 35% of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when they returned to the market in 2011, according to auto information company R.L. Polk & Co.

Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) gave anti-Energy Secretary Steven Chu an earful yesterday during a hearing on oil prices. McHenry ripped Che for the administration’s policies that have prevented access to domestic oil and gas. “You’re telling me my constituents need to buy a Nissan Leaf?” "My time is short, you've listed a long list of things that this administration has done. I have not yet heard that there are trying to increase the supply of American oil or our refining capacity or limit the regulations in the diversity of blends that are required. I have heard nothing from you today...

Industrial Policy: A leading consumer product testing firm takes one of the administration's dream green cars for a spin and had to call a gasoline-powered flatbed truck to tow the lemon away. At least it can go from zero to $529 million in stimulus dollars in nothing flat. When the testers at Consumer Reports took it for a test drive, not only was the $107,850 dream car unable to complete the evaluation, but also it had to be towed away, a visible metaphor for the Obama administration's green energy failures. In a test conducted last Wednesday by Consumer Reports magazine,...

President Obama boasted at a United Auto Workers conference last week that General Motors was back in business, producing cutting-edge vehicles like the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. He even promised to buy one when his time in office ends “five years from now.” Whoops! Just three days later, GM announced that it would suspend Volt production for five weeks this spring, idling 1,300 workers at a Hamtramck, Mich., factory. Alas, Obama’s endorsements notwithstanding, there’s not much of a market for this little bitty car, at least not at the price of almost $32,000 — after a $7,500 federal tax rebate....

When GE announced at the end of February that it would be bailing out General Motor’s green car strategy by ordering 12,000 electric-gasoline powered Chevy Volts for their fleet, it was more than just Government Electric doing a solid for Government Motors doing a solid for the Government Owners in the Obama administration. Rather it was an admission of failure by the monetization arm of the Green Conspiracy to control market behavior. While GM bet that Volt would be “a magnet around everything we are trying to do to showcase our brand,” so far it’s been a millstone for the...

There is currently a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of a Chevy Volt automobile. It also applies to some other electric car purchases, but it’s clear this particular tax credit was aimed at the Chevy Volt. President Obama is proposing to raise this tax credit to $10,000. The only legitimate use of the tax system is to raise revenue for the operation of the government. This tax credit does not meet that standard. It redistributes money from one set of taxpayers to another. This doesn’t raise any revenue for the government. In fact, it reduces government revenues, and thus...

Is gasoline getting too costly for you? Are you already cutting back on your trips to the store, to the theater, to grandma’s? What did you expect? Remember President Barack Obama’s energy secretary Steven Chu saying he wanted much higher gas prices – because it’s good for you? “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Chu said in 2008. . .