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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...

(Excerpt) President Obama has put $5 billion in taxpayer money behind his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. The Republican presidential ticket says it's money wasted on "losers." Whether the technology itself is a loser or consumers are merely slow to adapt to new things, car buyers so far haven't embraced electric vehicles in numbers close to Obama's goal. Electric-vehicle sales since 2011 totaled fewer than 50,000 through September, just 5 percent of the president's target. "The reality is - that business model isn't there yet," said Brett Smith, co-director of manufacturing, engineering and...

Another day, yet another example of what happens when the government tries to “create” jobs based on its own ideological-political ambitions rather than allowing the free market to function based on efficiency and consumer choice.This latest government-sponsored (read: taxpayer-sponsored) green-energy bust comes in the form of A123 Systems, a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. The company received almost $250 million in grants (which pretty much means the feds cut the battery-maker a check, and if the company does indeed go bankrupt, that cash is gone) from President Obama’s stimulus in 2009, not to mention over $140 million from...

Mitt Romney labelled electric carmaker Tesla Motors a “loser” during Wednesday night’s U.S. presidential debate. The Republican candidate took a jab at Tesla while discussing tax breaks to energy companies. He criticized U.S. President Barack Obama for providing “$90 billion in breaks to the green energy world.” “Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives,” Romney said. “You put $90 billion — like 50 years’ worth of breaks — into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said,...

A couple of weeks ago, Fox Business anchor Liz Claman made her annual visit to Silicon Valley to interview local CEOs. One of the exclusives she scored was an interview with Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. In listening to that interview, it would be easy to conclude that everything at Tesla was hunky dory. In fact, better than that. Musk said they were doubling production from 40 to 80 cars per week. That they were hiring like crazy. And he even discussed the growing short position on Tesla and its stock, insisting: “It’s doing pretty well actually given that we’re such...

Industrial Policy: This week, the world's largest carmaker said electric cars are a joke, and a congressional report said federal subsidies are a waste. You'd think that would shock President Obama out of his electric car fantasy . Back in March 2009, Obama announced plans to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the development of electric cars in the form of grants, federal loans and tax credits. "This investment will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it will put Americans back to work," Obama promised. "It positions American manufacturers on the cutting edge of innovation and solving our...

Tesla Motors Inc., the electric-car maker led by Elon Musk, fell the most in two months after cutting its revenue outlook for the third quarter because of supplier shortcomings and other delays in the production of its Model S sedan. Tesla slid nearly 10 percent to $27.64 Tuesday after the company said in a regulatory filing that it expects to generate $44 million to $46 million in third-quarter sales, compared with analyst estimates of $83.1 million. ..........Already the company's largest shareholder, Musk may buy 33,311 more shares, the company said in the filing. Tesla, whose investors include Toyota Motor Corp....

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...

After the second of two mysterious fires in a Karma sedan, the government-backed electric car-maker Fisker has initiated a voluntary recall of its luxury vehicles. In a statement, Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said that Fisker engineers and an independent fire expert had "identified the root cause" of a fire that swept through a Karma parked outside a Woodside, California grocery store on August 10. "The investigation located the ignition source to the left front of the Karma, forward of the wheel, where the low-temperature cooling fan is located," said the statement. "The final conclusion was that this sealed component had...

Home / Nissan Leaf Range Loss Issues Persist In Arizona Published July 23, 2012 By Jeff Cobb 2012_nissan_leaf_06 Owners of the Nissan Leaf in Arizona have been chronicling complaints with Nissan whose representatives were initially said to be explaining away substantial range degradation, but now it appears Nissan is responding further to the heat. And perhaps that is appropriate as the heat of Arizona was what presumably created issues that have prompted a thread now 169 pages long on the MyNissanLEAF.com forum. As you can see in the video report, some owners have reported unacceptably significant degrees of range loss...

ou’ll probably never read a road test review by me of the Nissan Leaf, or the Chevy Spark, or the Toyota RAV4 electric. And that may tell you every thing you need to know about these vehicles.I can’t review them because they can’t make it down here for me to review. “Down here” being about 220 miles and five hours’ driving time from the hubs where the car companies keep their fleets of new cars, which ordinarily get sent out for hundreds of miles in every direction to guys like me for week-long evaluations.

President Barack Obama says he wants to buy a Chevy Volt when he’s out of office in five years. If getting into a General Motors electric automobile means so much to him, he’d better hope he loses in November. What the president dubbed the “car of the future” in a visit to a Volt plant may not make it to January 2017. The partially government-owned General Motors has suspended production of its government-approved miracle car and temporarily laid off 1,300 workers at a Detroit plant. The halt is the result of a piddling detail lost in the gushers of praise...

The Fisker Karma is a plug-in hybrid car that seems to have everything the rich and famous — and environmentally correct — look for in a set of wheels. Sleek silhouette? Check. Green cred? Check. Six-figure price tag? Check. Reliable battery? Not so fast. In a test conducted Wednesday by Consumer Reports magazine, the niche-market $107,850 sports car conked out completely, after a short ride at 65 miles per hour on a Connecticut test track. “Our Fisker Karma … is super sleek, high-tech — and now it’s broken,” Consumer Reports wrote on its website late Thursday. “We have owned our...

Electric cars, which wouldn’t even be an option if taxpayers’ money wasn’t propping them up, don’t ultimately save money or cut down pollution. They aren’t reliable to get from here to there. But they can look nice, like the Fisker Karma. Speaking of which, we have this shall we say not entirely unexpected news, courtesy Reuters:...

A $100,000-plus Fisker Automotive luxury sports car died during Consumer Reports speed testing this week for reasons that are still unknown, leaving the struggling electric car startup with another blow to its image. "It is a little disconcerting that you pay that amount of money for a car and it lasts basically 180 miles before going wrong," David Champion, senior director for the magazine's automotive test center, told Reuters, on Thursday. In a statement, Fisker said it was assessing the source of the problem that caused its Karma plug-in hybrid to fail. Fisker dispatched two engineers Wednesday night to...

GM has just announced it will be idling the plant (and the 1,300 workers at that plant) where the "game changing" Chevy Volt electric car is -- uh, was -- built. GM says it's only temporary -- until they figure out how to "align production with demand." It could be a long wait for those workers. GM projected production of 45,000 Volts this year. That may have been just a little bright-sided. Last year, 7,621 of them found buyers (about 2,400 fewer than the 10,000 GM had hoped for). This past month, just over 1,000 of the $40,000 sort-of electric...

We’ve noted many times how those costly electric cars (even after factoring in taxpayer subsidies for manufacturers, sellers and buyers) are hugely reliant on cheap fossil fuel. How else do you think they get the electricity they run on? Windmills? And this cartoon pretty much sums up the absurdity of that predicament: . . .

Proof electric cars DO cause more pollution than normal ones: Study shows impact is worse than petrol-powered vehicles Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2100936/Study-shows-impact-electric-cars-worse-petrol-powered-vehicles.html#ixzz1mNkAhlSk

On a winter day of pounding rain, quite uncharacteristic for Israel, a convoy of 80 completely electric, battery-powered cars drove from Rosh Ha’ayin on Israel’s eastern border through Tel Aviv. On the outside, the autos are perfectly normal Renault sedans built in Turkey. Yet they don’t require a drop of gasoline pumped by countries that hate the Jewish state. The cars run on an air-cooled 230 kilogram (500 pound) lithium ion battery, an electric motor, and a sophisticated electronic control system. Where Israeli ingenuity comes in: these “Better Place” cars differ from electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt or Nissan...

For the first time in a few years, electric cars are mostly an afterthought at the auto show in Detroit. To be sure, electric cars and hybrid electric models are on the show floor and still being promoted at various intensity levels by Detroit's automakers as well as Japanese companies and upstarts building — but not selling many — high-priced, electric sports cars. But the niche vehicles are not as prominent this year as in past years. That's a good thing. Electric vehicles aren't the answer to curbing America's dependence on foreign oil or putting a dent in climate change....