The co-founders of Aptera Motors, Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, did not leave the three-wheeled electric car startup by choice, according to a report this morning over at Wired’s Autopia. Rather, unnamed sources tell the blog that Fambro and Anthony were pushed out in “a boardroom confrontation between the original founders and the auto industry veterans” brought onto the Aptera executive team last year.

Darryl Siry, former marketing chief for electric car startup Tesla Motors, writes that “the first sign of a rift” at the company may have been the design shift Aptera announced shortly after hiring Paul Wilbur as president and CEO in September 2008: Instead of bringing the futuristic-looking 2e (then called the Typ-1) to market by the end of that year, as previously planned, the startup said it would revise the design — and delay production as a result — in the interest of “satisfying the needs of real-world consumers,” according to a company statement at the time.

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Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup Coda Automotive, a spinoff from low-speed electric carmaker Miles Electric Vehicles, doesn’t want to play nice with the big guys. With an overhauled web site launched on Thursday, Coda now urges visitors to “flip gas prices the bird,” and writes in a blog post titled “Detroit Doesn’t Have the Answers,” that:

“It’s hard for us to believe that one of the industry giants will [get electric cars on the market quickly] –- especially considering their businesses were founded on and are still concretely rooted in the production of internal combustion, gas guzzling vehicles.”

Coda seems to be ramping up the aggression factor of its image and embracing the role of an underdog trying to shake up — and fight its way into — the auto industry. It will be interesting to see how that goes over with the EU and U.S. automakers, which Coda said in June it “may consider selling battery systems” to in the next couple years. The new site also includes images of the latest Coda Sedan designs, including small changes to the front, rear and exterior lighting (you can see the previous design here), and the first renderings of the interior. They’re small tweaks, but moving in the right direction (see images below).

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Louisiana offered up a hefty incentive package in order to bring the Kleiner Perkins and T. Boone Pickens-backed auto startup V-Vehicle Company to the state. And over the next few weeks, businesses in the state will be racing to secure some of the direct benefits of that move.

According to the latest report on the company from the local Monroe News-Star, V-Vehicle is now on the hunt for machine, service and auto component suppliers. It’s giving preference to Louisiana companies, which have until Nov. 23 to submit an application. Within a week of that deadline, V-Vehicle will make the first cut and invite a group of suppliers to interview. By then the startup expects to have word from the Department of Energy on its request for $250 million in low-interest loans.

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About 16 miles down the turnpike in Delaware from the old General Motors where startup Fisker Automotive plans to build an upcoming plug-in hybrid vehicle, Elon Musk, CEO of rival Tesla Motors, yesterday told an audience at the University of Delaware (and more joining via Second Life) that he has “some reservations about the feasibility of Fisker’s approach.”

According to the Delaware News Journal, Musk said, “It’s very tough to create a car company,” noting particularly high hurdles for engineering an electric car, adding, “Fisker is very far from overcoming those.”

Musk’s comments come at an interesting time for the two startups, which have each secured multimillion-dollar conditional loans from the Department of Energy to help accelerate them toward a new phase: higher volume production of more affordable vehicles.

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One thing is sure: The hybrid, tandem-seat 3-wheeler in the works at Oregon-based startup Green Lite Motors is no Prius. Less certain is whether there’s a market for the 4-feet-by-8-feet vehicle, which features “smart standup” technology that Green Lite President and CEO Tim Miller says will let the vehicle lean smoothly into turns and automatically right itself when it comes to a stop. But Green Lite just snagged one of the coveted regional finalist slots for the national Clean Tech Open business plan competition, and Miller sees a window of opportunity for this kind of vehicle.

The vehicle, now in third-generation prototype and able to get up to 100MPG, according to Miller, is the inaugural model from Green Lite. The design remains several steps away from commercial production, and faces high hurdles to win over consumers accustomed to having either four or two wheels on their rides.

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The rate of innovation in clean tech, next-generation transportation, green products and sustainable business initiatives has never been higher. This year, nearly $4 billion in venture capital investment has been poured into green innovation, making it the most active sector of VC investment today. Pushing these new technologies into the market will most certainly help consumers and companies function with a lighter footprint in the future. But what about now?

Consider these market predictions:

• Renewable sources will account for 14 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2030.
• Hybrid vehicles will number 11.3 million worldwide in 2020, 13 percent of global sales.
• Overall U.S. industrial energy consumption will drop 4 percent by 2030, while chemical companies will cut energy usage by 25 percent.

Encouraging? Yes. But this pace of progress won’t help us reach the emission reduction levels needed to avoid the serious climate change impacts forecast for 2050. The solution? Focus on the “Now.”

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Tendril Networks, which makes energy-management technology for consumers and utilities, is partnering with an unnamed “major computer game manufacturer” to build a new computer game whose main character, an “eco-warrior,” will gain power as users reduce their energy consumption in their homes. Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck, who hinted at the partnership during a panel discussion at The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, told us that the game manufacturer is a California subsidiary of a “non-American company.”

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Updated with additional comments from Ausra and First Solar: Ausra, the solar thermal startup backed by Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, said today it is selling its Carrizo Energy Solar Farm project, a proposed 177MW project still under development, to industry giant First Solar. Sale of the project, which is in San Luis Obispo, Calif., represents part of a major strategy shift Ausra announced earlier this year to focus on supplying equipment and technology, rather than developing massive solar plants.

Ausra secured a power purchasing agreement with California utility PG&E two years ago to sell 177MW of solar power from the planned Carrizo plant (it was expected to come online at partial capacity in 2010), but according to a release from Ausra, that deal is now “withdrawn.”

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Much of what information technology can do for the power grid, it can also do for water management. With the smart grid buildout, wireless sensor networks, software, and computing will be used to let utilities track energy use and identify problems in the network in close to real-time, delivering a more efficient grid that’s better equipped to handle renewable resources. According to a new report out from Lux Research, better information about water usage could save utilities money, make water management more efficient and provide one of the simplest solutions to the problem of water scarcity, which scientists have warned will be heightened in coming years by climate change and other factors, such as population growth.

As a result, the tide of water infotech is rising fast, and just as the smart grid buildout could be one of the largest creators of wealth in the decade, there are billions to be made in smarter water systems. Lux finds the market for water IT is set to grow to a $16.3 billion in 2020, up from just $530 million today.

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If you can efficiently separate tiny molecules of salt from seawater, you probably have the technology to filter out the larger bacteria, protozoan cysts, viruses and other contaminants floating around in much of the world’s freshwater. That’s part of what Richmond, Calif.-based NanOasis hopes will allow the company to not only provide tech for desalination projects in California, but also eventually sell into the market for water filtration systems in developing countries, the startup’s executives told me. “Water is a huge issue,” said NanOasis founder and President Christopher Kennedy. “Desalination is a starting point.”

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