Free Republic

A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any cars could run off the assembly line. The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company. All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan. The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009 after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant. When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city...

ELECTRIC cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found. An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes. The British study, which is the first analysis of the full...