As another potential tax payer-funded Obama debacle, battery-maker A123, threatens to go bust, suddenly the company has come up with “a new technology” to save it. Now, new sorely needed private investors are supposed to simply forget that A123’s core product faced a disastrous recall costing jobs and possibly leaving taxpayers on the hook to cover another failed Obama initiative. It seems fair to question the timing of this new development.
“(T)he company stumbled when it was forced to recall potentially defective batteries planned for use in the Fisker vehicle. And with the future market for electric cars in question, A123 might not survive solely on batteries for those models. Instead, A123 is now hoping that the new technology it is unveiling Tuesday, called Nanophosphate EXT, will help it enter new markets”.
The company was intended to be a “centerpiece” of Obama’s $2 billion effort to force the birthing of a serious electronic car market, as opposed to allowing the private sector to develop one over time on its own due to market demand. Even if A123 produced a battery that didn’t get bogged down in an expensive recall, the reality is there is no large market for their product, and predictions by Obama that it would exist by 2015 are now deemed “unattainable”.
“Instead, the company, which makes lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, has stumbled along with the rest of the nascent industry and now threatens to give more ammunition to critics of the president’s heavy spending on new energy technologies.
A $249 million government grant has done little to avoid the delayed completion of a factory, job cuts, and a company that “might not be able to stay in business” according to MSNBC.
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