Green Weenie of the Week: Fisker

When even the New York Times calls you “the Solyndra of the electric car industry,” you know you’ve had it.  Fisker, another Obamanation that cost taxpayers over $500 million in subsidies and props, was losing more than $500,000 per vehicle.  (But I’m sure they made up for it in volume.)  I especially like this droll bit of narrative in the Times’ story: “Fisker, with its technical problems, management turmoil and mounting losses, offers a cautionary tale in the fiercely competitive arena of alternative-fuel vehicles and of government subsidies for start-up businesses.”

A cautionary tale?  This almost begs for a new contest in cluelessness, along the lines of “Islam may have played secondary role in terrorist bombing.”  How about: “The attack on Pearl Harbor offers a cautionary tale in neglecting intelligence and the intentions of your enemy.”  “Electing Obama is a cautionary tale in neglecting to notice that he’s an inexperienced radical loon.”

But I digress.  The Wall Street Journal’s story about Fisker goes beyond just the ridiculous costs to explain how the Fisker . . . basically sucked pondwater:

For a few months in 2012, Bruce Simon, the chief executive of gourmet food retailer Omaha Steaks International Inc., drove a $100,000 plug-in hybrid electric car known as the Fisker Karma. No longer.

Mr. Simon says his car broke down four times over the span of a few months. Each time, Fisker Automotive Inc. picked it up and sent it by trailer from his home in Omaha, Neb., to a dealer in Minneapolis.

The Karma was “so vulnerable to software errors, and the parts used were of such poor quality that eventually I insisted they take the car back and return my purchase price, which they did,” he says. “It’s a real shame, the car itself was beautiful.”

The fact that the Fisker flagship model was called the “Karma” is beyond the worst cliché of a bad satirist, since it clearly didn’t have any but the bad kind.  That it was manufactured in Finland (silly us–we thought Obama’s green energy subsidies were for American jobs) makes the farce even greater.

Here’s a suggestion for bankrupt Fisker: since Power Line’s coveted Green Weenie Award is a soybean-based product, take yours and squeeze the soy oils out of it, refine it into diesel, and drop some in your tank.  It’ll show that our dogma can outrun your Karma.

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