Free Republic

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. . .

Incentives: Doubling down on industrial policy failure, the administration decides to bump up the taxpayer subsidy for Government Motors' touted electric car. Who said its range wasn't enough to drive us to the poor house? Tucked away in the recesses of President Obama's 2013 budget, a budget that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he will not bring to the Senate floor, is a nugget that speaks volumes about the troubles we're in: While delaying the Keystone XL pipeline, the administration plans to increase the subsidy for the Chevy Volt and other "new technology" vehicles to $10,000 per car. "We...

Won’t those tax-subsidized electric cars solve heaps of problems? Not exactly. There are two examples that run against the politically correct grain: . . .

Here’s a mind-boggling explanation of how the state government, setting out to manipulate private manufacturers into making electric cars, gets so tangled up in its special treatment for special constituents that its bureaucratic web ends up working against itself. The California Air Resources Board, second only to the federal EPA in government heavy-handedness, adopted rules ostensibly to cut down on smog and, of course, global warming. Tucked into the folds of this bureaucratic diktat is a provision that some call “a loophole.” Yes, we’re as shocked as you to find that the dictatorial among us would allow for exceptions to...

You may remember Fisker Automotive as the Goracle-connected company given a huge taxpayer loan to build its cars in Finland. (Politico) — In another setback for President Obama’s clean energy loan programs, the recipient of more than a half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees is laying off workers at their Delaware and California operations. Delaware’s News Journal reports that Fisker Automotive, a California-based electric car start-up company, is laying off an undisclosed number of staff to try to reserve enough capital in order to qualify for more federal help from the Department of Energy, according to a Delaware state development official....

Call it global warming schizophrenia. It's the disconnect between what really is happening and what global warming alarmists demand must happen. For example, many government officials and government-paid scientists insist the world risks being incinerated because humans generate a little more carbon dioxide than they used to. But they completely ignore the reality that CO2 hasn't proved to be a threat, let alone the horrific danger they make it out to be. Why must they pretend this fiction to be true? Because so much rides on it.

Green Politics: Golden State regulators have passed sweeping emission standards requiring one in seven new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. What can go wrong? Plenty, for if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that industrial policy and telling consumers what they need and must have vs. what they want and find useful doesn't work. Only the marketplace can accurately pick winners and losers. The government, having no competition, usually picks losers. We have also learned that climate change is an overhyped fantasy based on ideology rather than science. Yet the...

Have you purchased your new, all electric car yet? Me neither. Of course, I can’t decide whether it’s because I hate the environment, hate America, or a result of my severe allergy to burning to death in a fiery roadside inferno. But we shouldn’t feel too alone. It seems that drivers have been rather cool on the idea all over the country. This is producing a significant impact on Indiana in particular. Reporting from Elkhart, Ind.— For politicians betting on electric vehicles to drive job growth, the view from inside Think City’s plant here is their worst nightmare: 100 unfinished...

With NHTSA's closure of the investigation into the Chevy Volt, General Motors is now trying to rebuild the plug-in hybrid's image . But a new stumbling block has appeared on the road to higher sales — dealers turning down Volts from GM. General Motors sold only 7,671 Volts in the United States in 2011, well short of its 10,000-unit target for the first year. GM spokespeople have attributed weakness in demand to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's investigation into the risk of fires in the car's battery pack. But I'm not entirely certain that can all be blamed...

DeLorean Motor Co., Inc. has unveiled the DeLorean EV, an electric car that marries the legendary Back to the Future DeLorean automobile of the 1980s with a lithium-ion-based, DC-powered, electric drivetrain of today. "It turns out the DeLorean is a perfect platform for electrification," noted Chris Anthony, CEO of Flux Power, Inc. and Epic Electric Vehicles, both of which worked with DeLorean Motors to develop the powertrain for the new vehicle. "It's well designed, it's lightweight, it never rusts, and it has a design aesthetic that's meant to blow you away." DeLorean's "new" EV maintains the look of the legendary...