CODA Automotive Collapses - It's What We Have Always Said About Today's Electric Cars

By Marc J. Rauch
Exec. Vice President/Co-Publisher
THE AUTO CHANNEL

AUTO CENTRAL - May 6, 2013: CODA Automotive filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection last week. Their electric 4-door 5-passenger sedan was perhaps the least glamorous of all electric vehicles presented over the past few years as illustrative of the promising new green-era of electric cars that featured exotic entries from Tesla, Fisker, Aptera and Koenigsegg. Its plain simple appearance was almost what we might have expected from a Soviet-designed electric car, had the Soviet Union continued to burden our planet and Lada tried their hand at an electric vehicle.

CODA at assembly plant

But CODA’s failure wasn’t due to its lack of sizzle; its demise is due to the artificial nature of the entire electric passenger vehicle market. Electric cars will, one day, represent an important and significant part of our transportation landscape, and it will represent a viable alternative to fossil fuel-powered cars. But that day is decades away…perhaps as long as nearly a century in the future. The technology and the cost are just not there (or here).

As my business partner, Bob Gordon, has long opined, today’s electric cars are merely a diversion to settling on a serious alternative to our enslavement to gasoline and the foreign regimes that control the petroleum oil industry. The oil industry has supported electric cars; they’ve used them the way that a skilled magician uses sleight-of-hand to direct his audience’s attention away from what is actually happening. As our collective eyes are focused on the dazzling electric display, Big Oil disparages the real alternatives and gouges us to help support global terrorism, among other things.

   • SEE: Electric Vehicles - Solution or Diversion?

CODA wasn’t the first of the new electric car companies to fold, and it won’t be the last. The electric poseurs are tantalizing novelties, to be sure; and we at The Auto Channel enjoy the theoretical amusement that they provide as much as any automotive enthusiasts. However, what we need as a society is to get rid of gasoline, not find a new pin-up for our collective “spank bank.”

To read many of the stories that The Auto Channel published about CODA CLICK HERE

To learn about what The Auto Channel believes is the viable solution to our energy and economic problems, CLICK HERE