On Friday, Fisker fired most of its rank-and-file employees, 160 out of a total 210, and promptly got into hot water for doing so.  The law firm Outten & Golden filed a class-action lawsuit for not giving employees a 60-day notice under California’s WARN act. Read More >

Detroit Electric is a startup electric car maker that revives the brand of another startup electric car maker by the name of Detroit Electric. As chronicled by Ronnie Schreiber, Detroit Electric cars were produced by the Anderson Carriage company from 1907 to 1939. They sold thousands of them until they were displaced by a better idea, the internal combustion engine. Yesterday, the new Detroit Electric unveiled its first model, a $135,000, battery-powered sports car.

As reported by Reuters, the Detroit Electric SP:01 is “the world’s fastest pure-electric sports car,” with  a range of  ”just under 190 miles” between charges.
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Yesterday’s Tesla “lease offer”, (which turned out to be Elon Musk’s “big announcement”) was a classic display of Tesla’s penchant for theatrics. On the surface, the move is a smart one; most customers in the large luxury sedan segment tend to lease their cars, so Tesla’s move is nothing out of the ordinary.

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Fisker did put its entire workforce, all 200 of them, on furlough, “while it continues to search for a strategic partner,” Reuters says. That search is not going so well. And quite possibly, the workforce will never come back. Read More >

Until the modern day revival of electric vehicles like the Teslas, Nissan’s Leaf or the Chevy Volt, the best selling electric car ever was the Detroit Electric, produced by the Anderson Carriage company from 1907 to 1939. They sold thousands of them (1914 was the high water mark with ~4,500 produced). Among the people who drove Detroit Electrics were electricity pioneers Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz and the wives of automotive industrialists  Henry Ford and Henry Joy (he ran Packard). Interestingly, John D. Rockefeller, who made his enormous fortune from petroleum products like gasoline, owned a pair of Detroit Electric Model 46 Roadsters. Now, not only has the electric car industry been revived, but also the Detroit Electric company, which says it will start producing battery electric sports cars in a Michigan facility by the end of this summer. Following Tesla’s example, their first car will be based on a Lotus, in this case an Exige coupe, and the company promises two other “high performance” models in 2014. Read More >

When Henrik Fisker left last week, all we knew was that he “disagreed on business strategy” with the management, code for “board-room brawl, founder leaves in a huff.” Now we know where the disagreement was. It was whether to ask Uncle Sam or Auntie Zhang for money. Read More >

Pau hana means quitting time. Better Place is leaving the island state. Officially, it’s to “focus on its core markets in Israel and Denmark,” as the Star Advertiser says. Unofficially, it’s a retreat. Read More >

The Chevrolet Volt is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle, followed by Toyota’s plug-in Prius and Nissan’s Leaf, Bloomberg says. Read More >

The Geneva Auto Salon is a small show in a small city of a small country. The show is big because it is an annual confab of automakers where shoulders are rubbed, mergers are planned, policies are set. The cars are mostly decoration. A top topic in Geneva was how to meet rigid EU emission limits. “There is a growing awareness that conventional hybrids and slow-selling battery cars simply won’t be enough,” Reuters reports from Geneva. Read More >

While other carmakers, including electric pioneer Nissan,  are downgrading their EV euphoria, GM’s CEO Dan Akerson suddenly sounds uncharacteristically gung-ho on the issue. At an industry conference, he says GM is working on developing an electric car that has a range of as much as 200 miles. Read More >

A U.K. court dismissed a libel lawsuit from Tesla against the BBC show “Top Gear,” Bloomberg reports.

The case had been thrown out  before. Tesla appealed. Read More >

GM is planning to build up to 36,000 Chevrolet Volts and other plug-in hybrids for worldwide delivery this year, 20 percent more than in 2012, “two people familiar with the effort” told Bloomberg. Read More >

Tesla announced plans to pay down their $465 million dollar Department of Energy loan in 5 years or less, as Tesla seeks to achieve profitability.

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If Elon Musk is still smarting about how much damage the New York Times has done to Tesla, the fledgling automaker can take comfort in the fact that the positive reviews are still pouring in.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk found the perfect scapegoat for lost Tesla sales and a 13 percent drop of the company’s stock: John Broder of the New York Times. Musk told Reuters that “Tesla has lost about $100 million in sales and canceled orders due to the Times story, which said the sedan ran out of battery power sooner than promised during a chilly winter test drive from Washington D.C. to Boston.”  Musk should look in the mirror if he needs a scape goat. Read More >