IBD Editorials Green Energy's Bad Karma Posted 10/21/2011 07:00 PM ET Boondoggles: With the administration's approval, the recipient of another half-billion-dollar loan to build electric cars is outsourcing the work and any jobs that might be created or saved to Finland. The Fisker Karma electric car, heralded two years ago by Vice President Joe Biden as the future of the American auto industry, may prove to be another administration "bad bet," just as President Obama called Solyndra, heralded by Biden as the future of American energy. "Folks, we're making a bet," Biden said Oct. 27, 2009, using a familiar administration metaphor. "We're making a bet on the future, we're making a bet on the American people, we're making a bet on the market, we're making a bet on innovation." We've lost this bet too, it seems, since Fisker will be creating jobs in Finland paid for with American tax dollars. The plan was for Fisker Automotive, backed by California venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, the jolly green profiteer, to build electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. Instead, it'll be built using a $529 million taxpayer loan by 500 workers at a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive. The excuse given for the move was that Fisker Karma didn't want to be another Solyndra, though the car it builds may wind up being another Chevy Volt, an overpriced and overhyped vehicle built not to satisfy consumer demands, but rather government mandates. "If you just start doing like what Solyndra did, making a factory in a place where it was too expensive to manufacture ... (you) obviously fail," said Henrik Fisker, CEO of the namesake company he founded. "There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," Fisker has told ABC News. "They don't exist here." Forbes automotive writer Warren Meyer, using metrics developed by the Energy Department during the Clinton administration, calculates that the Karma gets the equivalent of 19 miles per gallon, less than the city rating of the Ford Explorer SUV. Fisker, a year behind in its production schedule , has produced 40 of the $97,000 Karmas and delivered two, one to "Titanic" star Leonardo DiCaprio. Not exactly a car designed for the masses, but rather for those the Occupy Wall Street mobs have targeted. Solyndra became a poster child for crony capitalism, but Fisker Automotive may give it a run for its, er, our money. http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/589005/201110211900/Green-Energys-Bad-Karma.htm
Anything for Obama donors and Al Gore. ...Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. And Tesla Motors, whose prime backers include PayPal mogul Elon Musk and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, says it will do the same in a massive facility tooling up in Silicon Valley. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-cars-finland/story?id=14770875