A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before any cars could run off the assembly line.
The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company.
All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan.
The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009 after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant.
When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city of Salinas handed to Ryan an additional $240,000 in investment money.
Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue said he was "surprised and disappointed" by the news. City officials were equally irked that Ryan notified them through an email that his company had crashed and burned.
Salinas Redevelopment Director Jeff Weir said Green Vehicles folded because of a "lack of investors," and a $2.7 million grant from California Energy Commission that never materialized.
Donohue said he will work with the state to try to get at least $240,000 back from the now-defunct company.
Last year, Salinas city officials said they were excited about Green Vehicles moving from San Jose to Salinas because they wanted to turn Salinas into a hub for alternative energy production.
City leaders wooed Green Vehicles to jump-start the sputtering local company and turn Salinas into an "electric valley." Donohue and Weir both voiced their high hopes for Green Vehicles.
The start-up company promised city leaders that it would create 70 new jobs and pay $700,000 in taxes a year to Salinas.
Green Vehicles was supposed to be up and running by March 2010 inside their 80,000 square-foot space at Firestone Business Park off of Abbot Street.
Ryan had lofty goals, listing his company's mission as: "To make the best clean commuter vehicles in the world; To manufacture with a radical sense of responsibility; To engage in deep transparency as an inspiration for new ways of doing business."
Green Vehicles designed two vehicles, the TRIAC 2.0 and the MOOSE, which it planned to manufacture.
On July 12, Ryan wrote a blog post announcing that his company was closing.
"The truth is that not realizing the vision for this company is a huge disappointment," Ryan wrote.
Ryan outlined three mistakes he made while steering his company into a brick wall. All three reasons boiled down failing to generate enough capital.
Click the video below to watch Ryan being interviewed last year.
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