Volkswagen grabbed headlines with its diesel fakery but the German auto giant is not the only car company that deserves attention these days. As Breitbart notes, Tesla Motors “issued a voluntary worldwide recall to inspect every one of the 90,000 Model S cars the company has ever built.” This is the vehicle that, as…
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Santa may still be en route but the elves at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) have already made their list and checked it twice. CARB bosses want to help low-income people by buying them cars. CARB now hands out $1,000-$1,500 for motorists to get rid of older vehicles. Under the new plan the…
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Fisker Automotive has laid off most of its employees, a sign of impending doom for a company some called Solyndra on wheels, with good reason. Fisker got a federal Advanced Vehicle Technology Loan of $529 million, about the same amount Solyndra received before laying off its employees and going bankrupt. The $529 million came…
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The federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing minimum sound requirements for electric cars, hybrids and other vehicles in order to warn pedestrians, cyclists and the sight-impaired. The rule is based on a 2009 NHTSA study of state-level accident data finding that 77 of 8,387 hybrid vehicles (.9 percent) were involved in…
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Millions of Americans are bracing for fiscal cliff fallout, looking for jobs, postponing purchases and cutting back on spending. Not so Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Mr. Musk just plunked down $17 million for a 20,248-square-foot Bel-Air mansion with a gym, seven bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, tennis court,…
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Among her many devastations, Hurricane Sandy swamped the port of Newark and managed to submerge 16 Fisker Karma electric hybrid automobiles, which then caught fire and exploded. Fisker could not explain the sudden combustion, not the first problem for the company touted by President Obama, and which received federal loan guarantees of $529 million…
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Christopher Jensen reports in the New York Times on yet another disaster from the massive U.S. corporate-welfare (i.e., pork) for “green” cars, this time luxury vehicles for the uber-rich: Fisker Automotive is recalling all 239 of its 2012 Karma luxury plug-in hybrid cars because of a fire hazard, according to a report filed with the…
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In “For Obama’s green-car revolution, fits and starts” in the Washington Post, Carol Leonig and Joe Stephens report that the highly-touted, taxpayer subsidized, “green” car bonanza is failing, as production lines and sales expectations have been dramatically scaled back in recent months. In reality, this federal program is nothing but a corporate-welfare system for…
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