US electric cars to be built at old GM gas guzzler plant

Oct 27, 2009, 19:32 GMT

Washington - A fledgling US electric car maker Tuesday said it is converting an abandoned General Motors plant in the north-east state of Delaware to build two lines of plug-in hybrid cars.

Fisker Automotive, which has another production line in California for its much-anticipated electric sports car Karma, paid 18 million dollars for the former GM plant and plans to spend another 175 million dollars refurbishing and retooling it.

The production goal is up to 100,000 hybrids annually by 2014 from the Newport, Delaware plant, which offers close access to shipping transport with its East Coast location.

The Boxwood Road plant, as it is called, was closed in July soon after GM emerged from its painful bankruptcy process, putting more than 400 employees out of work.

Delaware 'is perfect for high-quality, low-volume production and will soon be the proud builder of world-class, fuel-efficient Fisker plug-in hybrids,' chief executive Henrik Fisker said in a statement.

He has financial backing from both the US government and a venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, that employs former vice president Al Gore.

The 528.7 million dollars from the US government is part of US President Barack Obama's 11-billion-dollar plan to have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015.

That figure seems overly ambitious to some. The Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research for example projects that US sales of plug-in cars could only reach 518,000 by 2015.

Fisker's Karma is to debut in 2010 from the California plant. Fisker, who is Danish-born, is a former BMW and Aston Martin designer.

Ford and Nissan are among the other companies approved for Energy Department loans to build environmental-friendly vehicles.

Car makers worldwide are expected to introduce 42 plug-in and electric models from 2009 to 2012, according to an estimate from PricewaterhouseCoopers quoted by Bloomberg financial news agency.