Back in 2009, Vice President Biden stood in the closed Boxwood auto manufacturing plant in Delaware to announce that the federal government was stepping in with stimulus money by lending over half a billion dollars to an auto start up. He promised $359 million of it would go toward new manufacturing jobs when the Boxwood plant was reopened. Even better, those jobs would deliver a new “green” hybrid electric car to the US marketplace. The only catch: none of it was true.

The car, a gas/electric model manufactured by a start-up electric car company called Fisker, was actually built in Finnland.

Defending the choice to build it there, the company founder Henrik Fisker said they could find no plants equipped to make the car in the USA, and “We’re not in the business of failing; we’re in the business of winning . . . That’s why we went to Finland.”

As for the “green” designation, it turns out the Fisker Karma gets only 20 miles per gallon while running on its gasoline engine, according to the EPA. The EPA has also rated its electric performance at 52 MPRe, which is far less that the American built Chevrolet Volt (at 94MPGe). Even worse: an article at Forbes suggests the actual carbon footprint of this car is much, much less efficient than advertised, when the total energy costs of generating the electricity to charge the batteries are considered.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it comes hard on the heels of another “green stimulus” debacle, the Solyndra scandal, which also involved a half-billion dollar federal loan on a “green” project that failed to deliver the promised jobs or the environmental improvements. Readers unfamiliar with the Solyndra situation may want to check out what the Chicago Tribune has to say here.

And all those promised jobs at the Boxwood plant in Delaware? It turns out there were only 120 new openings, all of which were white collar positions.

As for the actual plant where Joe Biden made his promises, according to a post last June at AutoBlogGreen, “Unfortunately, Fisker only intends to use one third of the factory’s total floor space, meaning that the capacity to manufacture around 200,000 units annually will remain untouched.”