Fisker Karma! What Do You Get When You Cross a Chevy Volt with Solyndra?

A lot has been written this week about how the latest “Green Shiny Object,” the Fisker Karma (cost $109K) manufactured at Valmet Automotive in Finland, couldn’t even make it through the Consumer Reports check-in process let alone make it to testing but most of the liberal organs like MSNBC and even Wikipedia fail to fill in the context or how much of your Taxpayer money the Obama-Biden Team has “donated” to Fisker to support another “Green Fiasco” a la Solyndra and the Chevy Volt!

Seems Consumer Reports buys about 80 cars a year and this is the first time anyone can remember a car that was undriveable before it had finished being “checked-in.” Seems CR had owned the car for just a few days so had less than 200 miles on it and was doing speedometer calibration runs on their test track when the car ceased to function. CR contacted the dealer who promptly sent a flatbed truck to haul the piece of junk away! Talk about "Bad Karma!"

A little background, the Fisker Karma was first revealed at the 2008 North American International Auto Show and was supposed to launch sales the next year. After missing its initial late 2009 launch, the launch was re-scheduled several times before the first deliveries took place in the U.S. in late July 2011, and deliveries to retail customers began in November 2011 (top model goes for ~$116K). Within a month in December 2011, the recalls began with the first 239 Karmas built recalled due to battery fires caused by coolant leak. Car fires can certainly affect sales!

Despite the Obama-Biden crowd giving Fisker $529 million in federal government loan guarantee, they began assembling the cars in Finland saying they “could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.“ Vice President Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company “as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs” but now two years after the loan was announced, the company’s manufacturing jobs are ALL still limited to assembling cars in Finland.

As a façade, Fisker did acquire a former GM plant in Biden’s home state of Delaware but laid off 26 workers there because it ran out of government loan money. Because Fisker failed to meet production and sales milestones it had promised in the loan agreement with the Department of Energy, loan cash was shut off last May and Fisker went on a cash diet while it negotiated a new timetable with DOE. The cash shortage forced the 26 person Delaware layoff of the crew fixing up the former GM plant as well as the layoff of about 45 engineers at their Anaheim, California headquarters although those engineering jobs were always intended to vanish once the cars went into production; the DOE money cutoff might have accelerated those layoffs.

Now neither DOE nor Fisker are willing to forecast how long it will take to agree on a new business plan so the Obama-Biden Crowd can resume shoveling DOE Taxpayer money out the door to this Finish company again but you can bet DOE Political Appointees are “hard at work” working on getting our money flowing again!

…And now you know the “inconvenient truth” that the liberal media never seems to include when it may reflect poorly on the Obama-Biden Crowd!