Free Republic

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia and former owner of an electric car company now under federal investigation, once paid a visit with three other advisers to the same White House “green energy” official who helped secure more than $500 million in guaranteed loans for Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer backed by a prominent Barack Obama fundraiser. White House visitor records reviewed by Watchdog.org indicate that McAuliffe met with Greg Nelson, the former associate director for energy, environment and technology, at the White House on October 13, 2010. While the substance of the meeting is unknown,...

DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Co (GM) said on Tuesday it is slashing the price of its Chevrolet Volt electric car by $5,000 to help boost demand for the plug-in hybrid in a segment still struggling to gain a foothold in the U.S. auto market. The price cut for the 2014 model will lower the price to $34,995, including delivery fees before federal tax credits. Pricing could fall as low as $27,495 with the tax credit. "We have made great strides in reducing costs as we gain experience with electric vehicles and their components," Don Johnson, U.S. vice president for...

A California company was given more than $100 million in taxpayer funds by the federal government – with few strings attached – to establish a network of electric car charging stations that is fraught with problems, according to a government audit. All this, despite weak demand by the American public for electric cars. While President Obama has pledged to get 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015, a new report by the Department of Energy’s inspector general found that Americans’ aversion to electric vehicles and loose department supervision led to stalling the charging network – which cost taxpayers...

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

On Monday, BMW announced that the U.S. base price for its all-electric i3 will be $41,350, not including any federal or state incentives. For General Motors' Chevy Volt, and possibly Tesla Motor's Model S, BMW's move spells major trouble. Here's why. Bad news, GM With a starting MSRP of $39,145 in 2012, the Volt was the best-selling EV, and it's not hard to see why. Really more of an electric hybrid than a straight EV, the Volt combines a 9.3-gallon fuel tank with a lithium-ion battery. This combination allows the Volt can go an estimated 38 miles on pure battery...

Former Electric-car Engineer: Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas The New American 12 July 2013 Is the only "green" aspect of electric cars the money some companies make off them? If former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner (shown) is correct, this is exactly the case. Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas. And, he writes in a recent article entitled "Unclean at Any Speed," he was convinced cars such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence." But he now...

Conservatives have long argued that the pursuit of electric vehicles through government grants and credits is a bad idea, mainly from a public-policy and economic standpoint. But what if electric vehicles are a bad idea from an environmental standpoint, too? An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI): The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built...

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) — Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life...

Can Tesla Motors really make it in the automotive mass market? It's the question that haunts (or that should be haunting) current and potential Tesla investors. Tesla has already achieved big things, designing and building a great electric luxury sedan in the Model S, pictured above. It has also proven that it can sell enough of them to turn a profit. It's true that so far the profit has been tiny, and the economic conditions in the U.S. quite favorable, but still: That's an enormous achievement. But it's another big leap from there to becoming a mass-market carmaker - but...

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world. Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand. By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We...

General Motors has announced a $4,000 rebate (or $3,000 and a four year, zero interest loan from government-owned Ally Financial) on the slow-selling Chevy Volt. The company had a choice regarding how to deal with an excess supply of Volts that is growing faster than demand. GM could have, once again, temporarily halted production until inventory (currently at about a 6 month supply) came down to reasonable levels. It instead chooses to lose more millions of dollars by spending on incentives designed to manufacture demand that otherwise is practically nonexistent. The much-hyped Chevy Volt was originally presented by GM...

Electric car sales hummed along in May amid a solid month for the auto industry. But the surprise story this year was May's strong full-size pickup truck sales – not exactly a sign an endorsement of efficiency and alternative fuels. Nissan sold 2,138 Leafs in May, up 319 percent over last year. In March, the company sold a record 2,236 units of its all-electric vehicle. General Motors sold 1,607 Volts in May, down 4.3 percent from a year ago. In the first five months of 2013, the company sold only 100 more Volts than during the same period last year.

A lot of thought is put into how much energy we use to drive from point A to B. But what if the road itself could generate energy? Julie and Scott Brusaw, a married couple from Sandpoint, Idaho, have taken on just such a concept, which they hope will make the auto transport of the future cleaner and safer. The idea is as simple as it is ingenious. Wherever roads are laid, solar panels could go instead. They would generate electricity, which would in turn be fed into the grid. Thus, oil is conserved twice: Electric cars could be charged...

Steady Voltage Chevy Volt sales have been consistent lately, with no wild ups and downs as experienced by the Nissan LEAF during the production changeover. Sales of the Volt had hit a 12-month low of 1,140 units in January 2013, but rebounded to 1,620 units in February. For March 2013, Volt sales check in at 1,478 units.

When you buy a car, there are various ratings outfits in the business of calculating the true cost of owning that particular vehicle, inc. insurance, depreciation, maintenance, cost of repairs, etc. Such a comprehensive model is surely more realistic than just looking at the monthly payment or sticker price, and the customer knows if they're actually making a cost-effective, bottom-line decision. But even if you buy-into the now imploding globaloney scam, wouldn't it make sense to apply similar logic to calculate the entire environmental impact of electric vs. internal combustion cars over the full service life... esp since the actual...

When the Congress failed to pass cap and trade legislation during his first term Barack Obama famously quipped that there was “more than one way to skin a cat,” and we all know what he meant by that; he was going to use the EPA to bypass the Congress and subvert the constitution through the regulatory process.This was a proclamation that he reaffirmed during his State of the Union address when he stated, “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” Well, the EPA has already started making moves to implement cap and trade and at...

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of "zero emissions," and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars' limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it's truly green, right? Not really. For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their...

O'Brien Mitsubishi, based in Normal, IL, is offering something way outside the norm: an absurdly low lease price – the cheapest we've ever seen – for on an electric vehicle. AutoblogGreen reader Josh K. could hardly believe what he saw when driving by a rotating banner advertising the a Mitsubishi i-MiEV recently: $69 a month for 24 months. That compares with the official Mitsubishi lease program from last fall, which was $249 a month for three years. Yes, it sounds too good to be true. So we called the dealership and had the lease offering confirmed. Salesman Scott Lovett explained...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The plural of anecdote is statistics. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. So take what I am about to say for whatever it is worth. Maybe nothing. I own some Tesla (TSLA) stock, after all, just so I can go to the annual shareholder meeting, get a free coffee and be my usual pest. You could argue that what I am about to present is the equivalent of saying, "I've never seen a non-Apple (AAPL) tablet out in the wild, so therefore..." -- and you would be right. But people are still justifying this kind...