Good day all, Back during the dark days of incompetence of the Obama Regime, one of the things the socialists and communists did was try to pick winners and losers. One of the major losers was a car maker called Fisker. Obama sunk hundreds of millions of tax dollars into a Tesla wannabe. Like everything Obama touched, it failed miserably.
Now we have Obama’s assassination insurance as President*, and we are seeing a doubling down on stupid ideas, like backing an electric car company, or in this case an electric bus company. Here are the details from the Washington Free Beacon:
Biden Said EV Maker Proterra Was ‘Getting Us in the Game.’ It Just Declared Bankruptcy.
President Joe Biden promoted the company. Its top executive landed a spot on a White House board. And Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm held hundreds of thousands of shares in it.
Granholm held shares in the company. Two things come to mind. One is the potential conflicts of interest considering her position. The second thing that comes to mind is, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
But that wasn’t enough to save Proterra—the electric vehicle maker whose buses routinely failed to stay on the road—from declaring bankruptcy. Proterra cited “various market and macroeconomic headwinds” in a Chapter 11 filing on Monday, which came after the California-based firm cut hundreds of jobs earlier this year and restructured hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding debt.
The problem with electric busses is the same as electric cars. Range and Recharge time. Buses should, theoretically, be perfect for a city bus route. The problem they have are the batteries. Those things are heavy and with thousands of pounds of passengers, the range drops significantly. Finally, the costs of operating an EV bus, or any EV vehicle are higher then a standard gas or diesel powered vehicle.
The declaration marks a stunning downfall for Biden’s favorite green energy company.
Biden took part in a virtual tour of a Proterra facility in April 2021 to promote his $1.9 trillion infrastructure plan, which included billions to boost the electric bus industry. Biden said during the event that Proterra was “getting us in the game” and predicted that Proterra and other electric vehicle companies would “end up owning the future.”
And, as usual, Dementia Joe was dead wrong.
He went on to praise Proterra in a March 2022 speech, and less than one year later, in February, the Democrat appointed Proterra CEO Gareth Joyce to serve on the President’s Export Council, which provides advice on international trade.
Any ideas that this was yet another quid pro quo are just the paranoid delusions of a Deplorable Ultra MAGA Trump supporting patriotic taxpaying American. (We have no information on how many Hoovernose Original finger paintings were purchased by Joyce prior to being selected to serve on the council)
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, meanwhile, held 240,000 shares in the company at the start of her tenure, prompting ethics concerns.
There is no need to concern yourselves over Granholm’s ethics. She has none.
While Proterra shares tumbled more than 60 percent in after-hours trading Monday, Granholm will not have to worry about losing her investment. Granholm, who served on Proterra’s board of directors, sold the shares for $1.6 million in May 2021, weeks after Biden publicly touted the company. Granholm’s shares would be valued at just $340,000 based on Proterra’s current share price.
Ahh, your standard “Pump and Dump.” Pity about all the small shareholders just got shafted.
“President Biden’s decision to heavily promote a business where his energy secretary holds a multimillion-dollar stake has all the potential to be even worse than Solyndra,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) told the Washington Free Beacon after Biden’s virtual tour of the company. “President Biden and Secretary Granholm should immediately remove themselves from their glaring conflict of interest.”
They won’t, or should I say didn’t. Now that the company has basically gone toes up, watch those two deny ever hearing about Proterra.
Many Proterra customers had negative experiences with the company’s buses. A Michigan school district that spent big on buses with Proterra batteries and drivetrain technology, for example, said during an April presentation that the buses had “a lot of downtime and performance issues” and weren’t “fully on the road.”
In other words, these pieces of junk are nothing more than very large, very expensive paperweights.
“I have a number of colleagues in different states who are facing similar challenges,” a district official said during the presentation. “For the school bus market, it’s been challenging for us.”
This is what happens when you don’t go with what works and go with something shiny and new, as well as not very well tested. In any other reality, the people who ordered these things would have bought one or two, or gotten the company to supply a couple and then done some serious stress testing. In Michigan, one major issue is cold weather. Electric vehicles do not perform well when it’s really cold out. It gets cold in Michigan.
Now that reality has hit the company in the face, Proterra joins a long list of failed progressive companies that were touted by the Progressive Liberal worshippers of the Church of Global Warming and Climate Change. Since this is a religion, look for them to start dumping huge amounts of taxpayer money on the next shiny EV company to come up with their hand out.
The one thing you can always count on with regards to Joe Biden and his minions is that they will always be 100 percent wrong 100 percent of the time. The sad part is, everyone else will suffer because of their religious beliefs. It’s time to rip the guts out of this phony religion and the best way to do that is to drag them out into the sunshine…and sue the bejesus out of then where applicable.
Thatisall
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