Posted on 07/18/2011 3:14:37 PM PDT by keat
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 of Salinas handed to Ryan an additional $240,000 in investment money.
Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue said he was "surprised and disappointed" by the news. City officials were equally irked that Ryan notified them through an email that his company had crashed and burned.
Salinas Redevelopment Director Jeff Weir said Green Vehicles folded because of a "lack of investors," and a $2.7 million grant from California Energy Commission that never materialized.
Donohue said he will work with the state to try to get at least $240,000 back from the now-defunct company.
Mike Ryan YouTube Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan
Last year, Salinas city officials said they were excited about Green Vehicles moving from San Jose to Salinas because they wanted to turn Salinas into a hub for alternative energy production.
City leaders wooed Green Vehicles to jump-start the sputtering local company and turn Salinas into an "electric valley." Donohue and Weir both voiced their high hopes for Green Vehicles.
The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas.
Green Vehicles was supposed to be up and running by March 2010 inside their 80,000 square-foot space at Firestone Business Park off of Abbot Street.
Ryan had lofty goals, listing his company's mission as: "To make the best clean commuter vehicles in the world; To manufacture with a radical sense of responsibility; To engage in deep transparency as an inspiration for new ways of doing business."
Green Vehicles designed two vehicles, the TRIAC 2.0 and the MOOSE, which it planned to manufacture.
On July 12, Ryan wrote a blog post announcing that his company was closing.
"The truth is that not realizing the vision for this company is a huge disappointment," Ryan wrote.
Ryan outlined three mistakes he made while steering his company into a brick wall. All three reasons boiled down failing to generate enough capital.
Don’t feel too harshly about Salinas and Green Motors. Obama fell for the same scam with our money and the Volt,only it hasn’t gone belly up yet——yet.
Would you really want to be caught dead in that thing crushed between two Caddilac Escalades.
Finally, a modern freeway commuter that knows this is the 21st century. The pure electric TRIAC proclaims to the world, "yes, I am going to give the world's progressive people a way to protect what they love; yes, I am going to run longer than the previous EVs; and yes, I am going to do it in a seriously handsome fashion." - http://www.greenvehicles.com/specs/triac_early_adopter_specs.html
I see A/C is a $2500 option and for $3800 you can get a 288v performance package.
But eco-leather seats are standard, and of course, it has an iPod docking cradle.
Any marketing that involves the word “green” or “smart”, I steer clear of!
I guess with a bowl on top it (the trike not the fellow in the pic) could be used as a bird feeder.
Someone who duped you out of that much money isn't man enough to face up to you, pal. Lesson learned?
I do also... wise move... it screams leftist.
LLS
Good luck with that, sucker.
Bookmark
Thanks for acknowledging that there ARE rules, even though violation is not enforced much. I'd like to think FReepers are smart enough to express themselves in standard English.
There are forums where that ability is clearly lacking. I don't want us to be like that.
LLS
Hype Machine: Searching for ZAP's Fleet of No-Show Green Cars
It is a very long article but well written and the illustrations are a gas (no pun intended). It was written in 2008 and gives a good overview of the electric car market, complete with con-artists and assorted dupes. It was available for reading by all the rubes who got taken in by this guy in Salinas.
This is like Twentieth Century Motors in Atlas Shrugged, except that , that company had been successful at one time
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