Environmentalist, Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Oops, Waste, Biden

More than two dozen electric Proterra buses first unveiled by the city of Philadelphia in 2016 are already out of operation, according to a WHYY investigation.

  The entire fleet of Proterra buses was removed from the roads by SEPTA, the city's transit authority, in February 2020 due to both structural and logistical problems—the weight of the powerful battery was cracking the vehicles' chassis, and the battery life was insufficient for the city's bus routes...

  The city paid $24 million for the 25 new Proterra buses, subsidized in part by a $2.6 million federal grant...

  Proterra, which had Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on its board of directors when Philadelphia pulled the buses off the streets last year, has been highlighted by the Biden administration as a business of the future.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Oops, Waste

Two local television stations, NBC affiliates in Richmond, Virginia and Memphis, Tennessee, are reporting the comments of a former GreenTech Automotive production line employee who says that the company's Horn City, Mississippi manufacturing plant produced only 30 electric vehicles during the year and a half he worked there. Most of the time, he says, "we wasn't doing anything."...

  According to the employee, when company executives brought potential investors through the plant on tours, "they would take everybody and put them out on the line and we would stand over the car with tools in our hand and look like we were doing something to the car, but we wasn't doing anything," he said.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Financial, Funny, Oops

The New York Post reports that the city hasn't bought a new hybrid bus in three years and is now moving to retrofit many of the ones it has with diesel engines. The MTA is reporting that it will retrofit 389 hybrid electric buses with diesel engines because the hybrid engines are too unreliable and too expensive to repair. "The electric-traction motors are burning out. They’re so expensive to replace that it’ll be cheaper to stick a diesel engine in there," a source inside the MTA told the Post.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Financial, Oops

Green car startup Coda Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Wednesday after selling just 100 of its all-electric sedans, another example of battery-powered vehicles' failure to break into the mass market.

Democrat, Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Obama, Financial, Oops, Debt

Fisker Automotive -- the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce -- is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company... Employees told the publication they were give no severance pay besides compensation for unused vacation days.

Environmentalist, Oops, Energy

Approximately 16 of the $100,000+ Fisker Karma extended-range luxury hybrids were parked in Port Newark, New Jersey last night when water from Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge apparently breached the port and submerged the vehicles. As Jalopnik has exclusively learned, the cars then caught fire and burned to the ground.

  The vehicle, despite only being in limited production, has already experienced numerous fires due to equipment failures and electrical shorts. How, exactly, they caught fire after being submerged in sea water is unclear.

Democrat, Environmentalist, Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Obama, Energy, Waste, Jobs

Workers at LG Chem, a $300 million lithium-ion battery plant heavily funded by taxpayers, tell Target 8 that they have so little work to do that they spend hours playing cards and board games, reading magazines or watching movies. "There's a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch," filling their time with card games and board games," one of those current employees said.

  That employee says some workers are doing odd jobs around the building, including cleaning and maintenance, while others hang out in the cafeteria playing video games, Texas hold-'em and Monopoly or doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles -- all on company time. The employee said some watch movies. "There's no work, no work at all. Zero work," another current employee said.

Democrat, Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Obama, Financial, Oops

President Obama touted it in 2010 as evidence "manufacturing jobs are coming back to the United States,” but two years later, a Michigan hybrid battery plant built with $150 million in taxpayer funds is putting workers on furlough before a single battery has been produced.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Funny, Brilliance, Oops

Published this week in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the "comparative environmental life cycle assessment of conventional and electric vehicles" begins by stating that "it is important to address concerns of problem-shifting". By this, the authors mean that by solving one problem, do electric cars create another? And, if so, does this environmental harm then outweigh any advantages? The study highlights in particular the "toxicity" of the electric car's manufacturing process compared to conventional petrol/diesel cars. It concludes that the "global warming potential" of the process used to make electric cars is twice that of conventional cars.

Democrat, Environmentalist, Liberal, Incompetence, Obama, Financial, Oops, Energy

Another company that got millions of federal tax dollars in clean energy economic stimulus funds and a promotional visit by President Obama appears to be in jeopardy of going out of business. Smith Electric Vehicles, a British company now based in Kansas City, canceled its scheduled September 21 initial public offering listing, and now faces an uncertain future reminiscent of the last days of the Solyndra solar energy firm before it went banktupt.

  Smith makes electric powered trucks favored by the Obama administration, yet has never turned a profit and is heavily in debt. "It is an astonishing disaster and it is likely the next step might be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing," said Eric Meltzer, a Philadelphia-based manager of distressed companies.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Oops

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.

Democrat, Liberal, Obama, Oops, Energy

With unemployment peaking above 20 percent, Elkhart, Indiana was at the white-hot center of the economic meltdown, and a natural launch point for President Obama's electric vehicle initiative. "So that's why I'm here today," the president said three years ago. "To announce $2.4 billion in highly competitive grants."

  Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels was also on board in convincing Norwegian company Think Global to open a plant in Elkhart to build Think City electric cars with a sticker price of about $42,000. As incentive, the federal government offered Think City $17 million in stimulus tax credits. But it turns out the company had a checkered track record, including three previous bankruptcies. We recently visited Think City's Indiana plant, and here's what we found: a largely empty warehouse. Everybody hoped that by this time there would be more than 400 workers inside a bustling plant. Instead, today, there are just two workers at Think City.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Oops

Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Financial, Oops, Energy, Waste

A Syracuse nonprofit got a $700,000 government grant last year to buy and install 68 electric car charging units around Central New York. But this week, Synapse Sustainability Trust ripped the last of the chargers out of a downtown Syracuse parking lot...

  The goof-up will have little impact on the public. After all, there are only 30 electric or electric hybrid cars in five counties surrounding Syracuse. There are more charging units than there are cars that can use them.

Environmentalist, Liberal, Funny, Oops

An enterprising BBC reporter -- seeking to prove the practicality of electric cars -- drove from London to Edinburgh. The journey took four days -- longer than a horse-drawn stage would have taken for the trip 150 years ago -- including nine stops of up to ten hours.

Environmentalist, Hypocrisy, Oops

An electric car with a lithium ion battery powered by electricity from an old coal power plant could emit more than 200g of carbon dioxide per km, compared with current average gasoline car of 160g of carbon dioxide per km in Europe, according to the study.

Environmentalist, Hypocrisy, Liberal, Science, Oops

Through the end of November [2011], hybrids and electric vehicles sales consumed between 4,904,820 and 6,093,355 pounds of rare earths. That’s somewhere between 2,452 and 3,047 tons. If processing one ton of rare earth elements produces approximately 75 cubic meters of acidic waste water and about one ton of radioactive waste residue, then hybrid and electric vehicles alone produce between 183,900 and 228,525 cubic meters of acidic waste water and between 2,452 and 3,047 tons of radioactive waste.