Sherry Boschert has an interesting blog post about Aurica Labs and their bid to take over the NUMMI plant. See: Media Watchdog Just Licking Its Balls The NUMMI plant is near me (in Fremont) and is due to shut down in two weeks as Toyota and GM pull out. It's the only automotive factory west of the Mississippi and there is some local angst over the plant closing. However it's a kind of relic in Silicon Valley as the typical employment here is high tech, not factory workers. Also it's an expensive place to run a factory because of the high land cost and high cost of living.
In any case last week a bunch of noise was going around because of Aurica Labs claiming they would make a bid to take over this plant. Sherry's post lists a litany of "news" sites that simply repeated Aurica's claims -- Motor Trend, Autobloggreen, Green Car Congress, and Gas 2.0
FYI I was on the EVCAST (evcast.org) on Saturday, and we discussed this story. The thing is that the Aurica Motors website looks pretty good except the information is pretty scant and you can't make much of their claim to have an advanced EV design. However once we found the Aurica Labs website - well, that website is a blast from the past with a 1995 style web design. Reading even just a bit of that site made it clear there was next to no credibility to this story, and that Aurica is likely blowing smoke and trying to make some kind of scam.
She pointed to these articles as being properly questioning ...
http://www.thecarconnection.com/marty-blog/1043313_ev-startup-aurica-motors-dreams-of-keeping-nummi-alive
http://blogs.edmunds.com/greencaradvisor/2010/03/would-be-ev-makers-plan-to-save-nummi-auto-plant-a-long-shot-at-best.html
Since there are sometimes scams floating around the EV landscape it's useful to look at this one.
First - the Aurica Motors site is very nonspecific while sounding specific.
Second - They made a big claim about a breakthrough controller. While there can be breakthroughs it'd be more believable with some solid information.
Third - The Labs website was all over the place talking about a whole range of unrelated projects. The closest to an EV sedan was an EV race car with odd claims all over the place.
Fourth - The poor design quality of the Labs site is a big red flag. It's style fits someone who doesn't have web skills which would match up with a tech guy developing a design. But it's style is out of place next to the good design sense of the Motors website. Plausibly possibly the guy running the Labs operation found some investors and got money to hire a proper web design shop and that could explain the huge gap in website design quality. It's just a red flag.
Fifth - Uh, I don't remember.
