Startup Automaker V-Vehicle Hits Roadblock After Government Rejects $321M Loan Request

Plans by the famed Kleiner Perkins VC firm, Google, T. Boone Pickens, and other investors to launch a new automaker are now hanging by a thread.

The Department of Energy has rebuffed San Diego-based V-Vehicle’s request for more than $321 million in loans—throwing into jeopardy the automaker’s ambitious plans to build an “environmentally friendly” car. When V-Vehicle’s founders and investors announced the company’s plans last June in Monroe, LA, Louisiana economic development officials proclaimed in a press release “New American Car Company Will Make History in Louisiana.”

The Associated Press and other news outlets are reporting the DOE turned aside a $241.2 million loan request to revamp an idle headlight plant in northeastern Louisiana and a related $79.9 million loan to coordinate engineering with V-Vehicle’s suppliers. Today, state and federal officials say they’re trying to find out why.

In a statement released yesterday, V-Vehicle says work began last year in Monroe, LA, under $133 million of state tax credits and incentives, where were targeted for completion in the fall of next year.  The company says its first production prototype of the V Car is in testing, and national sales were projected to begin late next in 2011.

In its statement yesterday, V-Vehicle also revealed more than it previously has about why its vehicle would be “environmentally friendly,” saying, “The V Car’s miles-per-gallon would be among the best of all four-passenger gasoline-powered vehicles sold in

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.