Electric car startup Tesla Motors plans to file for a public offering very soon, two anonymous sources tell Reuters — “any day,” according to one source. When we contacted Tesla for confirmation, the company supplied a statement from spokesperson Ricardo Reyes saying, “We do not comment on rumors or speculation.”

But Tesla CEO and Chairman Elon Musk has long discussed plans to take the company public. And whether that process begins in a matter of days, or further down the road, the startup’s filing would be a major event — not just because the last public offering of a U.S. automaker was Ford, as Reuters points out, more than half a century ago. It would also provide the first public glimpse of the financials for a company set to receive $465 million in direct loans from Uncle Sam.

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The award of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans for electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure in the last few months has provided a major boost for companies working in the space. That’s true for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec (with several partners, including Nissan) won a nearly $100 million grant from the Department of Energy in August to deploy 11,210 charging stations — tripling its total number of installations — in five states over the next three years. But the grant didn’t come cheap.

According to ECOtality’s first report of financial information since the grant award, released yesterday afternoon, the company saw revenue drop to $1.9 million during the three months ending September 30, down from $2.9 million in the same period last year — a change that ECOtality attributes largely to “the effect of the slowing economy and the focusing of resources on securing the DOE contract.” Meanwhile, operating expenses for the quarter jumped to $11.4 million, up from just $1.9 million a year earlier — an increase the company attributes primarily to bonuses paid to three executives after eTec snagged the DOE award.

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“Oil is finite, but information is infinite,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said a year ago in a talk for the New America Foundation. Fortunately, we have online tools to organize and manage that information, sometimes in the interest of reducing oil consumption, as well as emissions and fuel expenses for drivers. The California Air Resources Board has just launched such a web-based tool, with its revamped DriveClean Buying Guide.

Announced Thursday afternoon, the web site allows users to compare vehicles based on Global Warming and Smog scores — snapshots of how a car’s fuel consumption, carbon-equivalent emissions and contribution to smog (through production of certain volatile organic compounds) compares to all other vehicles in that model year. By state law, these scores now appear on an Environmental Performance label displayed in the window of cars manufactured since January 2009 and brought to market in California. Now they’re also available online in a ranking system similar to the side-by-side comparison tools offered by the federal FuelEconomy.gov site and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Vehicle Guide, but with a couple key differences, including increased emphasis on vehicles’ contribution to climate change (relative to FuelEconomy.gov, at least), more integration of rebate an incentive info and a more slick interface.

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President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao this week launched a joint effort to “reduce oil dependency, cut greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic growth” through accelerated deployment of electric vehicles — an effort that needn’t exist in opposition to “green mobility efforts.” Nor should it overplay the role of personal vehicles as a solution to the challenges of fast-growing urban centers, warns energy and transportation scholar Lee Schipper in the Dot Earth blog today.

A strong push for plug-in cars in the world’s two largest auto markets might sound like just what the planet ordered. “Virtually all of the emerging markets have economies that are booming,” venture capitalist Steve Westly said at the Cleantech Open awards event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and it’s oil that’s driving them. But getting off oil and onto electricity isn’t the only goal, Schipper tells Dot Earth. “Energy is only a means to an end. What are the ends, urban access and mobility, or cars for a small minority?”

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“Aptera’s production and delivery will be tied directly to funding,” said Aptera Motors CEO Paul Wilbur in a release from the ultra high-efficiency vehicle startup late yesterday. That very mild assessment belies the reality that Aptera is peering across the Valley of Death, where many ventures die for lack of funding at the critical commercial development phase. According to the release, dwindling cash reserves are forcing the company to delay production of its inaugural vehicle, the three-wheeled electric 2e, until 2010 rather than the end of this year as previously announced.

Hitting the new 2010 target (or any future production goal for that matter), will require Aptera to bring in fresh capital, and it’s banking on either a federal loan or private investment to come through. At this point, the company is shifting its focus away from development, which “has been outpacing the rate of fundraising.” The company has laid off an undisclosed number of employees, co-founder Steve Fambro is taking an extended vacation (he’ll return in the new year), and Chris Anthony, the other co-founder, is “stepping aside from day-to-day activities” — all in an effort, Aptera says, to slow the burn rate and free up resources for top priorities: raising cash and starting volume production of the 2e.

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Daimler’s car2go, a car-sharing pilot project with 200 Smart Fortwo vehicles first announced in March, officially kicked off Wednesday in Austin, Texas. Now city employees will be able to pick up networked vehicles at stations and designated parking spaces around Austin, and drop them off anywhere within the service area.

The Austin network, modeled after a similar Smart Fortwo program in Ulm, Germany, is a “barter agreement” worth $85,000 to the city, according to the Austin Business Journal. Daimler will provide mobility as a service (city workers will get a limited number of free car2go minutes), and Austin has designated free street parking spots around the city.

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For plug-in vehicle makers, “a radical new form of market segmentation” holds the key to reaching beyond wealthy, green-minded early adopters, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. The common approach of trying to build a vehicle that can satisfy virtually all the driving needs for a large swath of consumers may hinder the success of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles if applied to this nascent market, the consulting firm finds.

Instead, automakers should tailor plug-in vehicles for the primary “driving missions” of specific consumer groups, McKinsey suggests — in other words, make a car that meets some of the needs of some customers.

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Updated with comment from Ener1: Norway-based electric vehicle developer Think has narrowed the “short list” of locations for its first North American manufacturing facility to at least three states, including Indiana, Michigan and Oregon. A Reuters article published late Tuesday reported that Indiana has a lock on the facility, citing an interview with the CEO of Ener1 Charles Gassenheimer. But the Ener1 chief — whose company holds a 31 percent stake in Think as well as a contract to supply lithium-ion batteries for the upcoming Think City electric vehicle — may have jumped the gun, as Inside Indiana Business reported and Think confirmed with us this morning.

Think spokesperson Brendan Prebo tells us that Indiana, Michigan and Oregon remain on the “short list” for the facility — the latest game-piece in an ongoing competition among states to woo advanced battery and electric vehicle factories, which raise the prospect of not only bringing manufacturing jobs and future business to a state’s economy, but also government investment. Prebo confirmed with us in an email that, “Indiana is one of the states on our short list for manufacturing sites and has been for quite some time,” but the company has not yet finalized a decision about the factory location. While Prebo did not disclose how many states are still under consideration, he said, “An earlier report that a decision had been reached was premature.”

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Having logged a quarter of a million miles on the road in pre-production models, built more than 300 prototype battery packs and completed tests for more than 50,000 lithium-ion battery cells, GM says its Chevy Volt is on track to meet its remaining production milestones less than a year from launch. But the U.S. car giant, which lost $1.2 billion in its most recent quarter, says there were several key challenges it wrestled with but has now solved: reducing road noise when driving in electric mode, extending battery life and managing energy storage in hot climates.

According to Bill Wallace, Voltec battery engineering group manager, noise was “more evident than we expected” for the Volt. He said the automaker knew it would be an issue (internal combustion engines in conventional vehicles help drown out road noise) for electric mode, but loud culprits were “things we didn’t necessarily expect.” The Volt team discovered, for example, that it wouldn’t be able to use off-the-shelf bushings (used to reduce friction between mechanical parts) or certain hydraulic solutions. “We had some interesting noise coming in” from the bottom of the car, said Farah, so designers “made pressure-relief changes to block those things.”

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General Motors trotted out preliminary financial results for the first time this morning since it sloughed off bad assets to the government and emerged from bankruptcy this summer: GM saw a net loss of $1.15 billion between July 10 and September 30 of this year, but ended the quarter with $42.6 billion in cash on hand (cash and marketable securities), according to the company’s reporting, which has not been audited and does not comply with GAAP standards.

Much of GM’s cash reserves have been earmarked for existing expenses, including payments to parts supplier Delphi, but as David Welch notes over on BusinessWeek, the automaker is now “closer to making money than it has been for years.” That milestone can’t come too soon for GM. The extended-range electric Chevy Volt, which GM gave a starring role in its financial viability plans, is now closing in on a late-2010 commercial launch that’s likely to be anything but a money-maker in the near term.

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