Atlanta's Carbon Motors - high-tech cop car builder - moving to Indiana

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Carbon Motors, an Atlanta-based company that hoped to build high-tech police cars in Georgia, said Wednesday it is moving its headquarters and production plant to Connersville, Ind.

The company, founded by former Ford executive William Santana Li, said it will invest $350 million in a 1.8 million-square-foot facility in Connersville, a town of about 14,000 between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, that will employ 1,500 people when production starts in 2012. The company said in June it had 10,000 orders for cruisers.

At a news conference Wednesday in Connersville, Li said: “We’ve got a long road ahead of us. There’s going to be a lot of blood, sweat and tears to make this all happen.”

In June, Li had said Georgia economic development officials were offering a 520-acre site in Hall County, near Braselton, in their bid to keep the company here.

Two weeks ago, the company said it had narrowed its site search to Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina.

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. said Wednesday it has not finalized the details of its incentive package. The company said it will apply for a federal loan through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program.

Neither Li, nor a company spokesman, nor a spokesman for Gov. Sonny Perdue’s office could be reached for comment Wednesday.

The company believes there is pent-up demand for its high-tech cruiser. In the U.S., police and sheriff’s departments typically convert Ford Crown Victorias or Dodge Chargers into cruisers.

The Carbon E7 cop cruiser combines police-specific needs with fuel efficiency, according to the company. It has a bulletproof door and dash panels, radiation and biological threat detectors, an automatic license plate recognition system and a 300-horsepower diesel engine that gets 28-30 miles to the gallon and has a top speed of 155 miles an hour.

In a comment posted on his company’s Web site Wednesday, Li thanked Georgians who went “above and beyond the call of duty in a private or public capacity to help the cause of producing the Carbon E7 for our nation’s first responders” in Georgia.

Among those he thanked were Perdue, Attorney General Thurbert Baker, and Georgia’s U.S. Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. He did not say why the company chose Connersville over a site in Georgia.

News services contributed to this article.