Rumors of Smith’s impending bankruptcy flitted about the pages, websites, and TV sets of certain media outlets, where slightly sloppy comparisons of Smith to Solyndra hardly concealed the hackneyed attempts to associate struggling clean tech companies with a failure for the Obama administration, whose Department of Energy had supported them. Rumors of Smith’s impending bankruptcy flitted about the pages, websites, and TV sets of certain media outlets, where slightly sloppy comparisons of Smith to Solyndra hardly concealed the hackneyed attempts to associate struggling clean tech companies with a failure for the Obama administration, whose Department of Energy had supported them. It was the same old story we’ve heard at various stages
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about Tesla, Fisker, A123, the Chevy Volt, and others. The clean tech sector and EV industry in particular was being used as a backdrop to paint the DOE’s stimulus grants and guaranteed loans for such companies as a failure of government meddling with free enterprise. Could this unrelenting correlation, whether deserved or not, actually do more harm to the EV industry than the administration’s supportive policies
could help? Meanwhile, the seemingly eternal election campaign mercifully ended, and Smith had moved on to the important work of scaling up its business to attain profitability. By late November, it was making headlines again, this time for its announcement of a new factory in Chicago that would produce an estimated 100 new jobs and 1,200 electric trucks a year.