Rather than being mindful of the state's weak electricity grid and sky-high electricity rates, Brown's office sent out a press release announcing the six-bill package, clearly designed to prop up the weak electric car market.

Brown called it “California’s burgeoning electric vehicle market.”

“Today, we reaffirm our commitment in California to an electric vehicle future,” Brown said as he signed the bills.

But that “burgeoning electric vehicle market” is a fairy tale. Electric cars are significantly more expensive than standard combustion engine vehicles or clean diesel vehicles. The range of less than 100 miles for most of these cars is not realistic for most drivers, and sales are low. Currently electric cars make up only 0.3 percent of U.S. sales, according to nearly every news story I find.

The great green fib

While electric car manufacturers and media portray electric cars as all-clean, “zero emissions” vehicles, the cars are still polluters and can generate the emissions of a conventional car running on gas or diesel.

“The main difference is that while a conventional car’s emissions come out of the vehicle’s exhaust pipe, those created by an electric car are generated at the power station which supplies the electricity,” British consumer watchdog Which? reported. “It’s even less clear with so called ‘emission-free’ electric cars. The electricity powering them has to be generated somewhere, and that’s more likely to use fossil fuels than renewables.”

Green is bad for business

California threatened rolling blackouts this past summer due to the tapped out electrical grid. The state's residents were told to conserve electricity, and not use clothes washers and dryers and household appliances until the evening, and limit air conditioning during the hottest days.

But now the governor is propping up the electric car market, attempting to create a demand where there is none. It will add a whole new segment of electricity users in California, which is already facing an energy crisis in the near future.

As it currently stands, even if a quarter of the state's cars were already electric, the electricity grid would crash.

Additionally, the Renewable Portfolio Mandate, one of the most stringent renewable standards in the country, was passed by the California Legislature in 2011. The RPS will require the state to acquire 33 percent renewable energy for all of the state's power by 2020. Yet as of now, California has no new power plants coming online. And the San Onofre nuclear plant has been shut down permanently. With wind and solar power unreliable and intermittent, we can anticipate a state-created and mandated energy crises in the near future.

California's “burgeoning electric car market”

The media make electric cars sound as if they are selling like the hot new iPhone 5C. “After a record-setting month in August, plug-in electric car sales moderated in September while the overall U.S. vehicle market surged,” Green Car Reports reported today. “The Chevrolet Volt, the best-selling plug-in car after almost three years, registered 1,766 deliveries — little more than half the record-setting number of 3,351 sold in August.”

Compare sales of the Chevy Volt with the popular Ford F-150 pickup truck. According to a September story in USA Today, Ford Motors, up 12 percent in overall sales, reported August sales of F-series pickups topped 70,000 for the month. If Ford maintains 70,000 F-150 sales every month, the company would top 840,000 pickups sold in one year — the amount close to what Ford sold prior to the Great Recession and high gas prices.

Meanwhile, the electric car fairy tale continues. “Sales of electric cars have more than doubled in the U.S. during the first six months of 2013,” AOL Autos reported. “Americans have purchased 41,447 plug-in electric vehicles since January.”

Automakers sold 14.5 million total vehicles in the U.S. market in 2012. Auto analysts predict auto sales will likely hit 16 million units sold by year end.

The high cost of green

The Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid only goes 38 miles on electricity before its gas-powered generator kicks in. And the base cost for the car is $35,000, recently lowered $5,000 by General Motors because the cars weren't selling. Chevy also offers the all-electric Chevy Spark subcompact which can go 82 miles on a charge, for a mere $26,685. Electric cars are eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit, and a $2,500 tax credit in California.

If your tastes are more exotic, Tesla Motors also has an all-electric model. Tesla claims the car can go up to 265 miles on a single charge, but that claim was discredited by the ultimate gear head show, Top Gear, which found the expensive electric car could only make about half of the 265 mile range claim.

So, for a 133 mile electric charge range, one can purchase a Tesla for only a starting price of $71,000. But in Sacramento, some of the cars are selling for about $98,000, out-the-door.

And the Tesla isn't as green as some say it is. “The total effective CO2 emissions of an 85 kWh Model S sedan are 547g per mile — considerably more than a large SUV, such as a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which emits 443g per mile!” reported Anthony Watts, a former meteorologist who operates a weather technology and content business, and the website Watts Up With That?

Yet, the Chevy Cruze, a standard internal combustion engine vehicle, of which 23,909 vehicles sold in August, costs only $16,569, gets 25 miles per gallon in the city, and 39 mpg on the highway.

What 'green' really looks like

Chevy also makes the Cruze Clean Turbo Diesel, which costs $17,170. The Cruze Clean Turbo Diesel can travel approximately 717 highway miles, or more than 10 hours of driving, on one tank of diesel fuel.

The Chevy Cruze Clean Diesel is proof that the electric car technology isn't ready for prime time, but clean diesel engines are.

“Experts at Which? compared the carbon dioxide created by charging electric cars with that emitted by the most efficient diesel models and concluded: 'Sometimes there’s not a great deal of difference,'” The UK Daily Mail reported. “And the gap is narrowing as 'conventional' cars up their game to cut emissions.”

The Which? report noted, “The common manufacturer claim that electric cars produce ‘zero emissions’ ignores the fact that most drivers use a conventional electricity supply to charge them, which has a carbon cost from burning fossil fuels.”

Information about the six electric car bills can be found on Gov. Jerry Brown's official website. 

By John Seiler

California’s eco-fanatics have a lot of explaining to do!

Given how green-crazy California is, you would think it would have been awarded a special utopian village dedicated to the Chevy Volt electric car, what I’m calling Voltotopia. We have AB 32! We had Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the world’s No. 1 ambassador against global warming! We have Gov. Jerry Brown!

Nope. It’s going to Austin, Tex., reports Edmunds Inside Line:

“AUSTIN, Texas — Maybe it should be renamed ‘Chevrolet Volt-ville.’ The largest concentration of Chevrolet Volts in the country will play a key role in helping Texas residents in a 700-acre planned community as they test the impact of “smart homes” and other green technology, like electronic vehicles.

“GM calls it the greatest concentration of Chevrolet Volts in the world.”

I hope they have a good fire department because Volts tend to catch fire.

“Pecan Street is funded by a $10.4 million grant from the Energy Department and more than $14 million in matching funds from project partners. Although Pecan Street oversees the consortia, it also includes researchers from the University of Texas, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Environmental Defense Fund. It’s housed in the University of Texas at Austin.”

Why Texas?

So, why did the Volt dough go to Texas, instead of to an Obama-friendly Blue State, especially California? Was it because the Volt was conceived under President George W. Bush, who hailed from Texas?

No. I checked. The federal money was doled out under President Obama, much of it from his 2009 economic stimulus that blew $700 billion but didn’t stimulate the economy. I checked the Website of the Pecan Street Project, the official name of Voltopia. It contained a Nov. 5, 2009 article from the Austin American-Statesman, which read:

“Austin’s Pecan Street Project has won $10.4 million in federal stimulus money to create a smart-grid demonstration project at the Mueller development in East Austin.

“On Tuesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced $620 million in clean-energy grants for 32 demonstration projects nationwide.

“Chu said the projects chosen — which include large-scale energy storage, smart meters, transmission system monitoring devices and a range of other smart technologies — will serve as models for the deployment of smart-grid systems on a broader scale.

“In Austin, the money will help turn Mueller — the city’s former airport, now a 700-acre community of homes, stores and businesses — into a smart-grid model community.”

Chu even is from California. He was a physics boffin at Berkeley.

I suspect that solipsistic California was just lazy. Those were the waning months of the Schwarzenegger administration, and Arnold, always slovenly about politics, long had turned over the reins of power to his wife, Maria Shriver, and his chief-of-staff, Susan Kennedy. The details are in Ian Halperin’s biography.

CARB Commissar Mary Nichols, leaders in the Democratic Legislature and others in California politics live in their own little worlds and couldn’t care less about getting a measly $10.4 million for our state for a dumb car. They’re more interested in that $3.5 billion in federal lucre for the Browndoggle.

It’s just as well. Let Texan drivers dodge flaming Volts.

By John Seiler

One reason the American economic “recovery” is so weak is that, when General Motors went bankrupt in 2009, President Obama stole the company’s assets from bondholders to give to the UAW union. Yes, he did steal them.

In long-established bankruptcy law in America, bondholders are the first in line to receive the assets of a bankrupt company. Obama changed that, putting the unions first. Bondholders got only about 5 percent on their invested dollars.

What that did was to weaken the value of all bonds in America, including bonds held by middle-class retirees, pension funds and mutual funds. Formerly one of the most secure investments, now nobody knows if the bonds might be de-vauled by Obama, or his successor in the Kremlin, just on a whim. American bonds now are as trustworthy as Venezuelan bonds or Albanian bonds.

The New GM also was supposed to pay back all of the $49.5 billion bailout money the taxpayers were forced to inject into it. But the Detroit News just reported:

“General Motors Co. stock fell 1.2 percent Wednesday, closing at $18.80, down $0.22, on worries about Europe — the first time the Detroit automaker’s stock has closed below $19 a share since its initial public offering.

“The Detroit automaker has seen its share price tumble by more than 52 percent since it reached a high closing price in January 2011 of $38.90, just after going public in November 2010. The company has shed more than $30 billion in market capitalization over the last 18 months, and now is worth about $29 billion….

“GM’s low stock price has prevented the Treasury from exiting the automaker. It still holds 500 million shares of stock in the company as part of its $49.5 billion bailout, or a 32 percent stake.

“It needs about $53 a share in order to break even on its GM bailout. At current prices, it would lose $17.25 billion on the bailout.

So we were totally ripped off!

And let’s not forget that Government Motors also perpetrated the flammable Chevy Volt car. For Obama and eco-freaks, it’s the future of electric cars. But each Volt sold costs taxpayers $250,000. That’s more than the price for a new Ferrari California!

What should have happened was that GM should not have been bailed out, and not forced to build the Volt. By now, the company long would have recovered under completely private ownership, saving tens of thousands of jobs instead of burning them.

A 2006 documentary is called, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” According to IMDB.com, it’s “A documentary that investigates the birth and death of the electric car, as well as the role of renewable energy and sustainable living in the future.” It’s narrated by leftist bigshot Martin Sheen.

In the 2011 sequel, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” according to IMDB.com, “Director Chris Paine takes his film crew behind the closed doors of Nissan, GM, and the Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors to chronicle the story of the global resurgence of electric cars.” The flick’s slogan is the unimaginative, “It’s Alive,” a takeoff on 1970s horror movies.

Except that GM’s Chevy Volt catches fire. Even though it not only enjoys a $7,500 tax credit for buyers, but $250,000 in subsidies from taxpayers. That’s part of $3 billion in taxpayer subsidies for the car.

For that $250K you could buy a brand new Rolls Royce Ghost Sedan, 6.6L V12 Twin-turbo 8-speed Automatic. And it doesn’t catch fire.

Now, another electric car seeking revenge has turned out to be a disaster: the Fisker Karma, by the Fisker company of Anaheim. It costs a cool $102,000, base price. That doesn’t include each car’s portion of the $529 million in subsidies the Obama adminstration lavished on Fisker, even though the car actually is manufactured in Finland. The Karma — pictured at right — does look nice. But….

Consumer Reports, the independent magazine, bought a Karma and tested it. It found:

“Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.

 We have owned our car for just a few days; it has less than 200 miles on its odometer. While doing speedometer calibration runs on our test track (a procedure we do for every test car before putting it in service by driving the car at a constant 65 mph between two measured points), the dashboard flashed a message and sounded a “bing“ showing a major fault. Our technician got the car off the track and put it into Park to go through the owner’s manual to interpret the warning. At that point, the transmission went into Neutral and wouldn’t engage any gear through its electronic shifter except Park and Neutral.

“We let the car sit for about an hour and restarted it. We could now engage Drive and the same error message disappeared. After moving it only a few feet the error message reappeared and when we tried to engage Reverse the transmission went straight to Park and again no motion gear could be engaged. After calling the dealer, which is about 100 miles away, they promptly sent a flatbed tow truck to haul away the disabled Fisker.

“We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process….”

The reason these cars don’t work is because battery technology has not advanced far enough. Perhaps it will some day, likely when the government gets out of the way and lets private industry figure it out. How well do you think Apple, Google and Intel would do if the government was this deeply involved in their product creation?

The only “revenge” that has happened is the usual one of the government carjacking taxpayers, throwing them to the ground, kicking them, gouging them, and lifting their wallets.

March 16, 2012

By JOSEPH PERKINS

Wouldn’t you know it: No sooner did General Motors start shipping its Chevrolet Volt toCalifornialast month before the automaker decided to halt production of the low-emission vehicle.

Californiacar buyers must be bummed. To bribe them to purchase the $40,000 (and up) sedan, the state not only offered a $1,500 taxpayer-funded rebate, but also its blessing to Volt owners to drive solo in H.O.V. lanes. And the federal government kicks in a $7,500 tax credit.

GM sure expected to sell a lot of its electric flivvers here in the GoldenState. “The Volts with the low emissions package are certain to be a strong draw for California commuters looking to travel the state’s notoriously congested freeways in the carpool lane,” Chris Perry, VP of Chevy Marketing, told the Detroit Free Press.

But then came the automaker’s announcement this past Friday that it is shutting down its Volt assembly line until April to maintain “proper inventory levels.” That follows a similar shutdown that began back in December that didn’t end until last month.

Chevrolet sold only 8,000 Volts in 2011, 20 percent below GM’s overly optimistic forecast. That was due at least in part to the bad press the EV got after two battery fires in crash tests.

Downside

But the bigger issue is that, to most of the car-buying public, the upside of owning a Volt, or most any other electric vehicle, is outweighed by the downside.

Yes, state (and federal) rebates are appealing. Yes, a sticker entitling a solo driver to use the carpool lane certainly is valuable. And, yes, there is a certain satisfaction for some Californians in doing their part to arrest climate change.

Yet, most of us do not consider those incentives, that satisfaction, sufficient to abandon our gasoline-powered cars and SUVs for electric flivvers.

We prefer the lower purchase price for our old-school cars. We like that we can fill our gas tanks in just a few minutes, whereas it takes as many as eight hours to fully charge an electric vehicle. We like that even the most-guzzling car can make a roundtrip between Sacramento and San Francisco, or Los Angeles and San Diego, with no sweat, while the average electric vehicle has driving range of less than 100 miles.

That’s why Chevy Volt sales have been so disappointing that GM has halted production of the electric vehicles twice in the last four months.

That’s why there is less than zero chance that Fisker Automotiive, the Anaheim startup, will generate annual sales of 115,000 plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2015, as it guaranteed when it was awarded a $529 million federal loan.

That’s why Tesla Motors, the nine-year-old Silicon Valley company, has manufactured little more than 2,000 of its much-hyped roadsters, the first fully electric sports car — and at a $109,000 base price that is far beyond the means of the 99 percent of us that are not Hollywood actors, professional athletes or lottery winners.

There may come a day when there is a viable market for electric cars. Not one artificially created by government subsidies (like $1,500 to buy an EV), incentives (like carpool privileges for EV owners) and mandates (like the California Air Resources Board requirement than one of seven cars sold in 2025 must be plug-in hybrids or fully-electric).

But until EV prices are comparable to gas-powered vehicles, until EVs can be fully charged in minutes rather than hours and until the driving range of fully-charged EVs is comparable to at least the most fuel inefficient gas guzzler, that day is a very long way off.