June 17 (Bloomberg) -- V-Vehicle Co., backed by billionaire T. Boone Pickens and a venture capital firm employing former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said it plans to begin making cars by late 2010, joining a line of new California-based automakers.

The company, partly funded by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, where Gore is a partner, today unveiled a $248 million plan for a former auto-parts factory in Monroe, Louisiana. Joseph Fisher, a spokesman, declined to comment on what type of cars the company would make when contacted by phone.

Tesla Motors Inc., Fisker Automotive Inc., also backed by Kleiner, Aptera Motors and Coda Automotive have all announced plans to make electric cars on growing concerns about carbon pollution. They face U.S. auto sales at a three-decade low, which have pushed and General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC into bankruptcy.

San Diego-based V-Vehicle is “not discussing product specifics at this time for competitive reasons,” Fisher said. Pilot production of “high-quality and fuel-efficient cars” should begin late next year and then ramp up in 2011, he added.

While Fisher declined to say whether V-Vehicle would build gasoline-engine or plug-in models, Pickens said making natural gas-powered cars was a possibility.

“When I got into it, it was already going to use gasoline,” Pickens told reporters at conference in Calgary. “We’ll go to natural gas at some point.”

Matano Design

Design of V-Vehicle models will be led by Tom Matano, who oversaw design of Mazda Motor Corp.’s Miata roadster in the 1980s and is executive director of industrial design at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University.

V-Vehicle eventually plans to hire as many as 1,400 workers at the former Guide Corp. plant in northeast Louisiana, it said in a statement. Louisiana promised incentives of as much as $67 million, the state’s economic development agency said in a statement. The factory closed in 2007.

The company intends to apply for so-called advanced technology vehicle manufacturing loans offered by the Energy Department to aid production, Fisher said.

A call to Ray Lane, a managing partner with Menlo Park, California-based Kleiner, wasn’t immediately returned. The firm hired Gore as a partner in 2007.

Closely held Guide was sold by GM in 1998 to Palladium Equity Partners LLC before the automaker spun off its entire auto-parts business.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Ohnsman in Los Angeles at aohnsman@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 17, 2009 22:01 EDT