December 26th in Gadgets, Products by Cyrus . Leave a comment.
Eco innovation in the form of an electric car
We’ve all seen these cool little electric cars driving around. They aren’t much to look at, but beat the eco-pants off the prius. They are entirely electric powered and are charged nightly at home. No mess, no maintenance, no hassle, no extra features. Although they’re small, the normal pricetag of over $10,000 is kind of hefty.
Ecogeek reported on a program allowing Oklahoma residents to purchase one of these babies, called the COCO, for less than $900. What a deal! This is one eco-innovation we’re going to call a political-eco-innovation. Although the adjusted pricetag is clearly below MSRP, it will stimulate the economy and remove polluting cars from the road. Rock on OK.
December 27, 2009
(Please re-post)
Less than 20 car companies applied for $25 BILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer money managed by a certain smug group of people at DOE in order to get loans to make green cars for Americans’. This was not all of DOE that did bad things, just a private cadre of men.
There was enough money to help every single one of the car companies that applied. The administrators applied their interpretations of the law in order to benefit the large lobby group-related firms and avoided every one of the “unconnected” companies.
The amount of lobby and influence money spent is in direct ratio to the amount of money awarded.
The smaller companies, due to lower overhead, could have dramatically more productive results with the money than the large burdened companies yet the money was given out based on political career advantages rather technology advantages.
All of the people that reviewed the applications had political and financial connections to GM, Ford, Chrysler and the large Detroit recipients.
Each of those smaller American companies had technology and resources that presented a strong economic threat, if they got the loans, to the large politically connected companies that did receive funds.
Some of the companies that have gotten money have backed out of making the electric cars they said they would make. But they still get to keep the money.
The Section 136 Law was created by the lobbyists for GM, Ford & Chrysler when they saw that they were about to go bankrupt and wanted to tap into additional taxpayer dollars by claiming the money was going to be used for electric cars in order to win rapid support for Section 136 by tugging at heartstrings. In retrospect, the money mostly went to gasoline car projects.
Some of the companies that got the money have already wasted more money than other companies applied for as their total request.
Some of the companies that got taxpayer loan money are not even American companies and/or are doing their manufacturing offshore with non-American employees.
The decision about who would get money was made in 2008 by a private group who then pretended there was a lengthy review throughout 2009 but in fact, the money was pre-wired for a select few.
All of the things that the rejected small companies (who did not pay lobby fees) were rejected for, were the same things that the insider big companies were doing.
March 9, 2010
This seems like the next cool “gadget”, move over the iphone we want an electric car! As a consumer I’d definitely consider it at that sort of price.
March 14, 2010
I am stoked to see some of these in Florida. I was excited enough when I started seeing smart cars, but the novelty wore off.