% Locals bitter they did not benefit from the EV-boom they thought they had bought into> they will have long unhappy memories about EVs %
http://www.elkharttruth.com/hometown/2014/10/12/What-happened-to-the-electric-car-industry-in-Elkhart-County-after-the-Great-Recession-5-years-later-project.html What happened to the electric car industry in Elkhart County after the Great Recession? Tim Vandenack Oct. 12, 2014 [images http://www.elkharttruth.com/image/2014/09/12/0913-ElectricCar2-JTK-1.jpg Elkhart city mechanic Ted Barnes exits one of the city's two Think electric cars out of the central garage Thursday Sept. 11, 2014. Barnes thinks that electric cars are the car of the future. "My grandfather drove mules and my granddaughter will drive on of these," Barnes said. Proposals to manufacture such autos here, though, haven't fared to well. (J. Tyler Klassen / The Elkhart Truth) http://www.elkharttruth.com/image/2011/02/12/975x800/THINK-NWS-JFS-0211-jpg.jpg Elkhart Mayor Dick Moore makes a few brief comments standing in front of a Think car on Feb. 11, 2011. The city acquired the electric car amid the company's plans to build a plant here. Those plans never materialized, though the city still has the car. (By Jennifer Shephard/The Elkhart Truth) ] In 2009 and 2010, three electric car initiatives emerged — from EMC, Navistar and Think — and then fizzled. As part of the 5 years later project, here’s an explanation for why and how they failed. ELKHART — Ed Neufeldt had big dreams. The electric vehicle industry, he hoped, would shoot him to the big time, pull him from the ranks of the working class. "I really thought it was going to go,” he now says. Back in 2009, as Elkhart County wrestled with the Great Recession, a potential golden egg plopped into the community’s lap: electric vehicles. Wil Cashen, the Mishawaka-born chief executive of a blossoming electric car company, left his new home in California, and on May 14, announced a plan at a Wakarusa press conference. As then-Gov. Mitch Daniels stood at his side, he told the crowd that his company, Electric Motors Corp., or EMC, would make electric trucks and recreational vehicles, creating 1,600 jobs by 2012. Jobs? Sixteen hundred of them? In the depths of the recession, in a place where unemployment hovered around 20 percent, that was a burst of hope amid the blackness of mounting job losses. For Neufeldt, who gained a measure of fame after introducing President Barack Obama when he spoke at Concord High School Feb. 9, 2009, it was even more. Cashen offered the Wakarusa man a job as EMC’s spokesman. Neufeldt, a 32-year veteran of the recently shuttered Monaco Coach Corp. RV maker, accepted. Cashen said he’d “make me a millionaire,” Neufeldt remembered. As part of his tasks, he’d travel to Washington, D.C., promoting the green energy along the way, and meet with Obama to bolster the case for electric cars. Daniels said during the EMC announcement that the date would go down in history. "Years from now, when somebody's child says, 'Daddy, what's this big recession of 2008-09 and how did we get out of it?' those of us here today will say, 'Well, it all started on a day in May in Wakarusa,’“ Daniels said. Things didn’t exactly pan out that way. With all Elkhart County watching, the company’s grand schemes for Elkhart faded, underscoring the difficulty of what was and still is, five years later, a central goal among economic boosters: to diversify the local economy beyond such heavy reliance on the RV sector. Cashen was eventually ousted from EMC’s Elkhart projects and returned to California. Neufeldt now works four part-time jobs to get by and speaks ruefully about how things fizzled. The EMC post "started as a paid position,” Neufeldt said. But eventually the money stopped flowing, and he later became more of a maintenance man for the company’s idle buildings. “I ended up cleaning the buildings instead of being spokesman.” HARD-EARNED WISDOM Neufeldt wasn’t the only one who felt like he’d lost something he never really had. When many were down and out, the talk of electric cars bolstered the hope-starved community. John Letherman, head of the Elkhart County Council and a local economic booster, said the proposals from places like EMC gained enough traction that they were hard not to believe in. Two other splashy electric auto proposals also emerged during the depths of the recession, from companies called Think and Navistar, only to wither on the vine. Obama visited Wakarusa on Aug. 5, 2009, when he announced Navistar would get $39.2 million in federal grant funding to build electric delivery trucks, creating perhaps 700 jobs. “It gave us hope and at a time that we weren’t seeing anything,” said Dorinda Heiden-Guss, president of the Economic Development Corp. of Elkhart County, who is tasked with promoting business expansion here. “I’d say that’s the silver lining.” To read The Elkhart Truth’s coverage at the time, electric cars were going to shoot Elkhart County to the stars, maybe beyond. Given the RV manufacturing here, making electric cars wasn’t such a theoretical stretch, but it was different enough that the industry wouldn’t be subject to the same forces that make the RV sector rise and fall. Shipments for RVs, by the way, slid by 58 percent between 2006 and 2009. Gov. Daniels returned to Elkhart on Jan. 5, 2010, for the grand announcement that Think North America, a subsidiary of Norwegian electric car maker Think Global, would make electric cars at a plant on Magnum Drive. The facility, officials said at the time, would eventually employ 400 people. He echoed the same message he gave more than a year before in Wakarusa. "This is a huge positive, a huge moment for our state," Daniels said at the time. "This may well be the defining new technology in transportation." But without fanfare, the grand dreams fell flat, and Elkhart County moved on. Think was bought out by a Russian investor, and the plant here went quiet. The city of Elkhart still has two Think cars, one used by city code enforcement officials and the other by the city auto maintenance crew. During the same time, Cashen was pushed out of EMC, then the company left Elkhart County altogether and scaled back operations. Navistar scaled back its electric truck plans, putting a focus, instead, on natural gas-powered vehicles. Letherman suspects the grand proposals didn’t materialize as advertised, at least in part, because the companies were so dependent on federal money, which didn’t materialize in the desired quantities. That’s at least what he saw happen with the Think proposal. “Once we pierced through all the razzle-dazzle, they were just waiting on a check from the (U.S.) Department of Transportation too,” Letherman said. Perfecting the technology for the batteries that electric cars use also proved to be a daunting challenge, Heiden-Guss said. These days, Cashen, reached by phone in California, thinks electric cars are “still going to be a ways off.” Cashen now lives in Beverly Hills and operates the nonprofit Tesla Foundation Group, a group that promotes innovation in business. “I feel so sad that anything like this happened.” Looking back, Cashen said his intentions here were on the up-and-up, spurred by the hard economic times in Elkhart County. “I came back, and I thought I would get a whole company going,” he said. “A completely selfless move.” He ended up losing plenty of his own money and spoke bitterly of how the EMC proposal eventually floundered. Nappanee Mayor Larry Thompson, who backed the original EMC plans, takes it all in stride. No, the electric car industry didn’t take off in Elkhart County. “But what (Cashen) did do is kind of change our attitude, and he positioned us to look to the future,” Thompson said. Cashen spurred the community to dig deep, to search for fixes to escape the stranglehold of the recession. Nappanee ended up surviving, and the mayor points out that most industrial space in the city is now filled, with talk afoot of creating more given strong demand. Electric car manufacturing “hasn’t happened, but it was quite an experience,” Thompson said. “We learned some lessons and we moved on.” [© Truth] http://green.autoblog.com/2014/10/16/how-evs-changed-and-didnt-change-elkhart-in/ How EVs changed, and didn't change, Elkhart, IN By Danny King Oct 16th 2014 [images / Copyright 2014 Sebastian Blanco / AOL http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/48e06443b4ea5076e346c1228bdc23f6/200929663/think.png Think electric-vehicle factory in Elkhart, IN http://green.autoblog.com/photos/think-city-production-facility-in-elkhart-indiana/#photo-103918/ ] Two stinking electric vehicles. That's what Elkhart, IN, has to show for the trio of electric-vehicle makers that were going to create thousands of jobs in town during the past decade but ultimately went bust, the Elkhart Truth reports. Of course, the real "truth" is a little more complicated than that. Electric Motors Corp. (EMC), Navistar and Think all announced big plans to take a town whose receding RV manufacturing industry left it with a 20-percent unemployment rate and put it at the forefront of electric-vehicle manufacturing in the US. President Barack Obama even visited Elkhart in 2009 when Navistar received $39.2 million in federal grants for electric delivery truck manufacturing. And, in late 2010, the local Think factory was assembling 20 electric vehicles a day, though most of those parts were actually made in countries such as Finland and Turkey. But then came the dark times, and the companies all lacked the funds to support production once the grants ran out. By 2011, Think parent Think Global had filed for bankruptcy for a second time, while Navistar's switch over to natural-gas vehicle production didn't take, either. Now, the town, which is about 150 miles north of Indianapolis and about 110 miles east of Chicago, has little to show – except fot two Think EVs that are used by the municipal government. 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