Guest Post by Eric Peters
The Electric Dementia continues to wax, the latest evidence of which is Volvo’s announcement about its Polestar performance car arm becoming its electrified performance arm.
Hold up there, chief.
Continue reading “The Double-Batteried Electric Polecat”
Guest Post by Eric Peters
If you don’t think elections matter, wait about five years.
Then go shopping for a new car.
You will have your choice of a small hybrid car – or an electric car. Because by 2025, all new cars will be required by federal fatwa to average almost 50 miles-per-gallon – nearly twice the current fatwa-mandated average.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Back in the ‘90s, a movie came out accusing GM of killing the electric car. The movie was wrong. The real killer wasn’t GM.
It was a tag team of the market – and the government. One of those killers was innocent.
The other is still at large.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Depressing news. Mazda – one of the very few major car brands to not embrace the electric car tar baby – just did.
The same company that – just a year ago – said that “driving matters” has now officially announced it will “electrify” all of its cars by 2030.
Guest Post by Tom Luongo
Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is most likely going to jail. She wasn’t Steve Jobs with a vagina, she was a fraud.
George Soros is not a “billionaire philanthropist” anymore than Hillary Clinton is the “most qualified person to ever run for President.” He’s a cross between a virus and a vulture, first indiscriminately killing whole colonies of prey and looting their corpses long after they are dead.
Mark Zuckerberg is not the kid who brought the world together. He’s just a creepy stalker with powerful friends.
Elon Musk isn’t “the smartest guy in the room”. He’s a huckster. A talented huckster, for sure. But, the lies of the huckster always catch up with them, like right now.
Continue reading “Geniuses of The Left and the Glory of Cars”
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Electric cars aren’t just subsidized – they’re not taxed the same way that non-electric cars are. Their fuel – electricity – is the obvious example. It appears to be inexpensive because it’s not saddled with the disproportionate and – to use the language of the progressive left – regressive taxes that are applied to motor fuels, gas and diesel.
These, currently, average about 50 cents of the cost to the purchaser of every gallon.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Is there any upside to electric cars?
In the interest of fairness, this question should be fairly answered. As is true of almost anything – Hitler did build the Autobhans, after all – you can find a few good things to say about electric cars . . . if you look long and hard enough – and don’t ask too many pesky follow-up questions.
The heat works immediately –
An electric car is like a mobile space heater, one of those little boxes you plug in at home or work to take the chill off the room you’re in. They make heat as soon as you turn them on – assuming there is current flowing. In a non-electric car, you have to wait for the engine to warm up first. This usually takes several minutes, at least, on a very cold day and in the meanwhile you stay cold.
On the other hand . . .
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Welfare used to be about government cheese. Today’s it’s about grafting thousands of dollars to rich people so as to “encourage” them to drive around in electric cars.
Few seem to mind because electrics are the cablinasians of the car world; affirmative action/diversity hires whose merits must not be questioned – and their deficits never mentioned.
Well, congressional Republicans did exactly that – a startling thing, given the GOP’s usually reliable penchant for bringing-up-the-rear acceptance of everything Democrats enact (Obamacare, for example).
But this time, they broke ranks.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
It’s not just the government that’s pushing electric cars. The media is equally complicit. Both are engaged in what has to be described as nothing less than a concerted propaganda onslaught to convince the public that the naked emperor is indeed wearing a suit of the finest materials available.
But the question – why? – remains mysterious.
What is so important – to them – about electric cars? Why the urgency to create the impression of inevitability?
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Since they can’t sell electric cars – not enough of them, anyhow – and not without subsidies so huge they amount to outright bribes – the solution appears to be to outlaw all cars except electric cars.
This is no joke.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Maybe you remember Disco Fever.
Mid-70s, United States. For no apparent reason, suddenly everyone seemed to be singing in a high-pitched falsetto voice and wearing skin-tight lycra with open collared shirts displaying chest hair and gold medallions.
It was fun for awhile but got old fast.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Maybe the worst thing about this electric car business is the way it will – if it succeeds – homogenize cars, make one just like another in every meaningful way. Think about bumper cars. You pick a different body or color – but the cars are all exactly the same.
So it is with electric cars.
A motor is, after all, a motor. One spins the same as the others.
Unlike engines – which reciprocate. And which can be (and have been) made in an almost infinite variety of ways: Fours and sixes and eights and tens and twelves; in-line, 90 and 60 degree V. Horizontally opposed. Overhead valve and overhead cam.
Big and small block. Fuel-injected or turbocharged.
Supercharged.
This variety having endowed the cars they powered with distinctive character. Consider, for instance, the Ford small bock V8. Nothing in the world sounds like a solid lifter-cammed 289 HiPo drawing air through a Holley four barrel.
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
It ought to be sign of just how delusional the nation is these days that Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X is taken seriously. Musk continues to dangle his fantasy of travel to Mars before a country that can barely get its shit together on Planet Earth, and the Tesla car represents one of the main reasons for it — namely, that we’ll do anything to preserve, maintain, and defend our addiction to incessant and pointless motoring (and nothing to devise a saner living arrangement).
Even people with Ivy League educations believe that the electric car is a “solution” to our basic economic quandary, which is to keep all the accessories and furnishings of suburbia running at all costs in the face of problems with fossil fuels, especially climate change. First, understand how the Tesla car and electric motoring are bound up in our culture of virtue signaling, the main motivational feature of political correctness. Virtue signaling is a status acquisition racket. In this case, you get social brownie points for indicating that you’re on-board with “clean energy,” you’re “green,” “an environmentalist,” “Earth –friendly.” Ordinary schmoes can drive a Prius for their brownie points. But the Tesla driver gets all that and much more: the envy of the Prius drivers!
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Trump is ascendant not because he’s a freedom jouster but because the people are exasperated with a clueless (and contemptuous of them) party apparat that for years has been trotting out one inbred Bush after the next, with Bush-like things in between such as Mittens and Ted.
This is not a cheer for Trump. It’s a jeer at the elites.
The auto industry is just as clueless – and contemptuous – of the people who are its customers.
Witness the hilarious article in Automotive News last week (see here) bemoaning the fact that electric vehicles are a hard sell.
The article was headlined: Automakers’ Anxiety: Why Can’t We Sell EVs? The story went on to quote various auto industry crack pipe smokers such as Britta Gross, a speaker at the recent Electric Vehicle Symposium and Exhibition in Montreal. Gross is director of Advanced Vehicle Commercialization Policy at General Motors.
“Consumers (an awful word, isn’t it?) adore these vehicles,” she says. “People love the quietness, the smoothness, the seamless drive.”
Continue reading “But Why Aren’t People Buying Electric Cars?”
Guest Post by Eric Peters
It’s depressing when even Jalopnik – a car site that’s supposed to be into cars – throws a bukakke party for the new Tesla 3.
Which is a car in the same way that this is an airplane:
Elon Musk’s latest four-wheeled exercise in rent-seeking will reportedly be “sold” (fundamentally dishonest word; I’ll explain) for about $35,000 to start. Which is a “deal” – sort of – when compared with the other Tesla, which has a starting price just under $70k.
Jalopnik writes (if it can be described as such):
“The entry-level Tesla Model 3 sedan is coming the month and it’s not just supposed to transform the future of the company, it’s supposed to transform the electric car into (sic) a bit player for the sybaritic and the techno-weirdos into a clean vehicle for the masses….”
The “writer” (sorry, I can’t help myself) then goes on to abuse the “shit talkers” (that’d be me) who “howl all day” about the electric Edsel’s range and recharge issues – which have not been solved.
Guest Post by Eric Peters
The tragedy is, electric cars could probably work. If the government would get the hell out of the way.
The feds postulate requirements – basically, design parameters – that are at odds, that conflict – and make an economically sane electric car absolutely out of the question.
The government insist, for example, that every electric car be as “safe” as every non-electric car. This being defined as complying with every last federal standard – not necessarily meaning that the car in question simply refrain from being a death trap.
Most people outside the car business do not grok the distinction. They presume that every new car is “safe” since it meets federal crashworthiness standards (and other standards that have zip to do with that; bear with, I’ll explain) and every car that doesn’t, isn’t.
Nope. All it means is that every new car has met the currently applicable federal standards and made it through whatever crash tests apply today. It does not mean – out in the real world of two objects trying to occupy the same space, simultaneously – that a 2016 Chevy Aveo is a “safer” car to be in than a 1996 Caprice (“Shamu the whale” model).
Continue reading “Electric Cars Could Work… If The Government Got Out Of The Car Business”