A Salinas car manufacturing company that was expected to build environmentally friendly electric cars and create new jobs folded before almost any vehicles could run off the assembly line.

The city of Salinas had invested more than half a million dollars in Green Vehicles, an electric car start-up company.

All of that money is now gone, according to Green Vehicles President and Co-Founder Mike Ryan.

The start-up company set up shop in Salinas in the summer of 2009, after the city gave Ryan a $300,000 community development grant.

When the company still ran into financial trouble last year, the city of Salinas handed Ryan an additional $240,000. Green Vehicles also received $187,000 from the California Energy Commission.

When Debra Neel went to check out used Jeeps recently in Indianapolis, she left with a bad case of sticker shock.

"We were looking around $4,000 or $5,000 for a good used car for a teenager," but "you can't find them anymore," said Neel. That was readily confirmed by Bob Falcone, president of Falcone Volkswagen, Subaru & Saab in downtown Indianapolis.

Falcone said that a couple of years ago, Neel might have been able to get the 12-year-old Jeep she was considering at her $4,000 to $5,000 price point. The 2000 model on the lot, after all,  has almost 90,000 miles on it and gets only 16 miles to the gallon.

Its price tag today: $13,900.

"It's unbelievable," Falcone acknowledged. He said the used car market is the strongest it has ever been in his 34 years in business.

Findings released this week from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that, across the board, small, fuel-efficient cars are getting safer.

Six of 13 small cars the industry group tested won the Top Safety Pick award, and none earned a "poor" rating in any of four tests.

The top picks include the 2012 Ford Focus and Honda Civic, and the 2011 Hyundai Elantra, Lexus CT 200h hybrid, Nissan Juke and Toyota Prius.

This year's findings are a marked turnaround from just a few years ago when similar tests from the Virginia industry-funded group delivered frightening displays of crash test dummies slamming into windshields, and air bags deploying too late.

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