US grants for electric vehical manufacturer.

I own a bussiness and I'm moving into electric vehical manufacturing. I know that there has been billions of dollars allocated to grants to stimulate this market in the US. I was wondering if anyone here has tapped into this resource. And if so, how did you do it and what was your experience like?

If it is anything like Australia, and I would think it would be similar, for a govt. to assist your business you must already have a successful manufacturing business with a proven track record of sales and profitability. Which means that you already have investors, products, sales and a damn good business plan.

If your a start-up with none of the fore mentioned..... forget it, it's too risky for the grantor.

hard yards need to be done.

$2.4 billion (Or more) to manufacturers in 2009 alone, mostly fizzled and the technology was lost to foreign countries in bankruptcy court. How much more since? Is the government even interested anymore? The target year was 2015 to reach 1 million cars, and it a miserable failure at that.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/smith-electric-keeps-on-truckin

Smith Electric relied heavily on the $32 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, allowing Smith to actually subsidize the purchase of electric vehicles to entice customers. In other words when a company like Frito-Lay purchased a Smith EV, they didn’t pay full price. While it may have gotten some customers through the door, it didn’t bring them back for more.

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But ask not for what they'll give your for an electric car factory, but for what they'll give you for a factory in an Indiana town where the unemployment is 18%, etc. At least if you want the reliable and ongoing money. If electric vehicles still are hip and trendy to the government that'll just be icing on the cake.

Dauntless said:

But ask not for what they'll give your for an electric car factory, but for what they'll give you for a factory in an Indiana town where the unemployment is 18%, etc.

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Good idea. Talk to the governor of Indiana about the factory in Elkhart where my Think EV was built. They'd love to get that back up and running. Federal grants take a lot of effort, money and time to get. From what I've seen, you need a devoted staff and a lobbyist or two.

It really depends on the scale of what you're trying to do. Big grants from the DOE are going to take a lot of effort ahead of time...it won't be your seed money. However, more local grants (at the state level, for example) are not too hard to come by if you can get an affiliation with a University that has an alt-energy program and you target the grants at projects rather than the building of a company, per se. If you can use students to build your first prototype, for example, you may be able to get a grant to purchase your materials or pay for lab testing, and so on. I know people here in MI who are doing this...if the govt of MI is interested, I can only imagine many others are as well. Good luck.