Radioactive Communist Zombies

Obama Drove a Muscle Car?

Someone was trying to sell a car that Barack Obama leased when he was a state senator in Illinois in 2005-2007. The car?  A 340-horsepower Chrysler 300C (yes, it's got a Hemi).  The sellers were asking for a million bucks for this car that is probably worth about, oh, $10,000 (guesstimate).

Now President Obama is doing everything he can to ensure such gas-sucking (and fun to drive) behemoths are never sold again in America.  Apparently he didn't enjoy the roar of the V-8 as the car shot forward with amazing alacraty for a large sedan.  Or as Car and Driver said:

Eight cylinders hump out the Hemi's 340 horses and 390 pound-feet of torque, the power slipped under the floor to the rear where, in full fury, it paints the road with 10-foot patches of rubber and shoves the mass to 60 mph in a torrid 5.3 seconds.

Maybe Obama is one of those unreasonably prudent drivers.  Or maybe the power scared him and that's why he hates powerful (and fun) cars.

According to Fox New, he traded it in for a Ford Escape Hybrid, probably one of the snooziest vehicles on the road.

And now he's driven around in an armored limousine.

I hope someone asks Romney if he likes to drive.  If he answers "yes" it will make me happier to vote for him, as it appears I'm going to have to.

Corporate Average Top Speed

I am proposing that the government develop a Corporate Average Top Speed (CATS) standard for automobiles sold in America.  Faster cars mean Americans get where they are going sooner and are therefore more productive or can spend more time doing what they want to do.  Faster cars mean less congestion as people will get off the road faster.  And faster cars are funner to drive.

I don't know what the CATS is now for each automaker but I propose doubling it by 2025.  With American ingenuity this will spur innovation and create jobs.  And it will help the environment by turning all that black yucky oil in the clean, fresh CO₂.

You prefer the good gas milage and safety of a car that can't go 200 miles per hour?  Too bad, the government has spoken.

Yes, I'm joking.  But President Obama's logic for doubling Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards is pretty much the same.  I like fast cars, he likes green cars.  So he's imposing his desire for crappy cars on everyone as I'm imposing my desire for powerful cars on everyone.  Consumer choice somehow doesn't fit into Obama's way of thinking.

So in ten years when the only cars on the lot are underpowered, overpriced pieces of crap, you'll know who to thank.

Green Cars for Folks with Lots of Green

What does over half a billion in taxpayer money get you?  Cars that only the very rich can afford.

Fisker is sitting on a $529 million government loan guarantee to make electric cars.  Great.  Never mind they are being built in Finland.  The Fisker Karma (which, like a Chevy Volt has a gasoline engine to extend its range but will only go "up to" 50 miles on electric only according the their website) costs $97,000.  Very few people can afford that.

Now we could think back 100 years when only the very rich could afford cars.  Then Henry Ford came along, used the assembly line, and lowered the price of cars to the point where most people could afford them.  Could the same thing happen with electrics?  Or, what is more important, will they pencil out and finally be cheaper than a gasoline or diesel-powered car.  (I know, in matter of all that is environmentally holy, money must flow like rainwater into the coffers of the goddess Gaia.)  I doubt it will happen soon.  And in any case, why is government money going to build a car very few can afford?  (Yes, I know the government money was not to build the Karma but to build the slightly more affordable Nina which will only cost $57,000 and be built in the U.S.)

So we're taxing Joe Sixpack so Leonardo DiCaprio can ease his environmental guilt.  I'd say that's a good use of money, wouldn't you?

Streetcars to Save the Planet

Who knew Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has a blog.  I'm sure he writes it himself, too.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, today on his blog Secretary LaHood writes about streetcars and how they can make the world a better place.  Seriously.

Now I remember seeing pictures and video of streetcars in black and white with men in suites and women in quaint long dresses and big floppy hats.  That's because invariably the pictures or film are from 100 years ago.  There's a reason we don't have streetcars anymore: people stopped riding them.  With the invention of the automobile, people found they preferred the convenience and privacy of using their own car.

Now LaHood and other social engineers want to bring the streetcar back:

Everywhere I've traveled in the past three years, Americans have made it clear that when it comes to getting around, they want options that fit the unique needs of their communities. The Obama Administration certainly understands the value of providing transportation choices, and that includes modern streetcars that reflect the character of the communities they serve.

As part of that commitment, yesterday the Federal Transit Administration kicked off the first ever Streetcar Conference in Portland, Oregon, to help transportation planners from around the country figure out how to build and manage great streetcar projects in their communities.

Even in places like Portland where there are streetcars, very few people ride them and they are heavily subsidized by government.  So of course LaHood wants to spread this to a community near you so you can pay for streetcars no one rides.  (In Portland there is a streetcar tax that employers have to pay.)

I like cars and I like driving and I hate public trasportation for many many reasons.  Until gasoline is $8 a gallon, it's going to be tough to get me and a lot of Americans to ride streetcars.  Of course, another four years of this Administration's energy policies and that might happen.

What Does the Volt Cost You?

Speaking of the Chevrolet Volt boondoggle, you might be wondering what one costs.  Would you believe $250,000 per car and counting.  Oh, that's not the MSRP, that's the taxpayer subsidy each one has sucked up its electric plug in, just to be on the road.

The total taxpayer bill for the Chevy Volt about $3 billion.  And there's been a measly 6,000 of them sold.  That's $250,000 per Volt on the road.  Add to that the $7,500 taxpayer credit and the fact the government still owns a big piece of GM, and the subsidies keep on coming.

I don't know what you think is a reasonable subsidy for a car that is more expensive to operate than a Chevrolet Cruze Eco.  Let's say it's $500 (which is a lot of money when there's be zero subsidies for the Toyota Prius). That means if no more government money goes into the Volt (unlikely) GM would have to sell a whopping 6 million of them.  That is also unlikely.

When the government bailed out GM and basically made it build this car, billions of taxpayer dollars went into its developement.  Is it worth it?  At a cool quarter million per car, I don't think so.

Social Engineering via Cars Not Working So Well

So far in the these United States, social engineering has its limits.  You at least have to get it through Congress (unless it's done by executive order or over reaching bureaucracies of the Obama Administration).  But so far, government can't make us buy the cars they want us to.  So far.  If the Obamacare individual mandate is upheld by the Supreme Court, then who knows what comes next?

So Obama wanted GM (which the government owned a big portion of) to build a car he could approve of.  Thus came the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid.  And when Obama gave Chrysler to Fiat, he said they had to bring their high-gas-mileage "500" to our shores.  They were glad to do so than sell a lot of low-mileage Jeeps.

How are these "Obamacars" (as Henry Payne lables them in Planet Gore) selling?  Not too well:

"[N]ot selling as well as Fiat North America . . . had planned. The 500 will probably finish out the year with sales in the low 20,000s, well short of management’s 50,000-unit prediction . . ."

Thus writes Dan Neill, the liberal car columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Why not, you wonder?  Well, most Americans don't like tiny cars and they like cars with some oomf for the cut and dodge driving of freeways or the long interstate road trip.  The 500 is uniquely bad at both.  The car is cute, I'll give you that all day.  But it's not what Americans want.

So how about the Chevy Volt?

“General Motors predicted it would sell 10,000 Chevrolet Volt automobiles by the end of the year,” reports Neil Munro at The Daily Caller, “but it is only on track to sell roughly 6,000 of these plug-in hybrids.” In 2009 supporters were predicting 120,000 would be sold in 2012.

And it's worse, because about 1,000 of that 6,000 seems to be purchases by governments.  Yes, not only are taxpayers on the hook for developing and building this boondoggle, they are paying to buy it, too! Oh, and they are paying private buyers a $7,500 tax credit that almost (but not quite) makes the Volt affordable.

So while Obama tries to change the type of car you drive to be more environmentally friendly, Americans are buying what they want.  Guess that issue will be dealt with in Obama's second term, because if they can make you buy health insurance, they can make you buy a Volt.

Electric Car Dreams Crash on the Highway Divider of Reality

Remember when electric cars were going to sell in the millions?  Thousands of new jobs would be created, too, as consumers would line up around the block for these dream machines.  Dream machines, indeed.  The dream, like most government boondoggles, is turning into a nightmare of evaporating taxpayer money and low demand for plug-in cars.

The Washington Post (Hat Tip: Planet Gore) reports that after burning through $5 billion in taxpayer cash, the whole electric car scheme is spinning its wheels (love these metaphors?).

A123 Systems, a battery maker that received $380 million in government support, announced recently that declining orders had forced layoffs. Instead of up to 3,000 new Michigan jobs as Obama and the company had predicted, it now has 690 employees.

Battery maker EnerDel, recipient of a a $118 million federal grant, took a hit when its key customer, electric-car maker Think, declared bankruptcy this year. Johnson Controls, which received a $299 million stimulus grant, opted to build one factory instead of two because of lower-than-projected demand, a company official said, and that one is now operating at half capacity.

California electric-car maker Aptera announced it was shutting its doors because of problems raising capital. And General Motors — whose moderately priced Volt was supposed to drive Obama’s push for 1 million alternative vehicles by 2015 — revealed last week that it would fall roughly 38 percent shy of its goal of selling 10,000 Volts this year.

Why?

“Many in this industry have jumped the gun on how aggressive the growth of electric vehicles will be,” said Kevin C. See, an analyst at Lux Research.

In other words, people aren't buying these short-range transportation appliances. Problem is there's no "individual mandate" to buy electric cars (wait until Obama's second term and/or the new CAFE regulations kick in leaving only gas-sippers that are as joyful to drive and roomy as lawn mowers your only vehicle choice).

A lot of Americans can operate a calculator.  Those that can't buy lottery tickets.  Those who can, look at expensive electric cars and say, "pass."  Americans don't want to drive expensive little wheeled boxes that give you range anxiety.  And apparently, they aren't too interested in the Chevy Volt, either.

And what really annoys me is the waste.  This is all to "stop" global warming, which has had so many holes knocked it in, the only reason to take it seriously is so you can control other people's lives.  Which is the goal of the environmentalists, anyway.

So look for the "Automobile Choice and Protection Act of 2014" to have the "electric car individual mandate" (especially if the Supreme Court rules Obamacare constitutional). 

Drunk Driving Enforcement About Money, Not Safety

I've said multiple times that speed limit enforcement along with speed and red light cameras are not about safety but about revenue raising.  Now (H/T Instapundit), some are saying the same thing about drunk driving enforcement. Ronnie Schreiber writing at Cars in Depth says ever since the blood alcohol content (BAC) was lowered to 0.08%, the roads have been less safe:

[A]fter there was a national push by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lower the legal BAC limits nationally from 0.10% to 0.08%, backed up by federal pressure on states, alcohol-related traffic fatalities went up in 2000, after 20 straight years of going down. That increase shouldn’t have been surprising. The push for a de facto national limit of 0.08% came after a 1995 NHTSA study already showed that some states that lowered the BAC limits were less safe than before.

Now how is that possible?  Well the quick answer is that it moved enforcement from those genuinely dangerous to those exceeding an arbitrary number (the same thing happens with too-low speed limits, by the way).  But Schreiber says it's more complicated than that because jurisdictions now see drunk driving as a cash cow and in most states have set up sobriety check points to catch those that happen to exceed 0.08% BAC:

Most drivers that have a BAC of between 0.08 and 0.10 percent are not driving badly enough to catch attention from police. They may be buzzed but they aren’t swerving, speeding badly, or failing to keeping up with traffic. When police are busy at a sobriety roadblock or setting up surveillance near restaurants and bars, they are not out on the roads trying to find more dangerously impaired drivers. Yes, they get some folks on the cusp of legal intoxication, generating lots of revenue in the process, but they don’t make the roads safer. A nighttime sobriety checkpoint might take more than 20 police officers away from tasks that actually make our roads safer. Only nine states don’t allow suspicionless sobriety checkpoints.

Washington State is, fortunately, one of those nine.

So we're taking cops away from finding truly dangerous drunk drivers and putting them in checkpoints to catch you at 0.08% because you had wine with your business dinner.  That makes a lot of money for jurisdictions but may not be increasing safety.  So why do we have this low limit and sobriety check points?

Drunk driving and sobriety checkpoints are big business. To begin with, a single DUI conviction can mean thousands of dollars of revenue for the jurisdiction that issued the citation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. While sobriety checkpoints don’t catch many seriously drunk drivers, they do nab folks for equipment infractions or other sorts of minor crimes and they end up generating a huge amount of revenue for those municipalities and police officers that do use checkpoints.

A healthy distrust of government is a good thing.  Even when it claims to be trying to make us safe, it's often just about money.  Until people realize this, however, we are probably suck with over-reaching "safety" laws like speed limits and BAC levels set too low.

Who Runs the US? The EPA, Apparently

You live in the United States and think it's a democracy where your vote counts?  Not in Obama's USA.  In Obama's America, bureaucrats run the country they way they see fit, bypassing Congress and using thirty-year-old laws to justify egregious actions today.

The Wall Street Journal has an unsigned op-ed about how the EPA is pretty much in charge.  Take for instance, auto design:

The fuel-economy rule is classic Obama EPA. Until this Administration, fuel standards were the remit of Congress, via its Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. In 2007, the legislative branch raised those standards with a bill requiring the U.S. fleet to hit 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a 40% increase. The industry is struggling to keep pace with those steep requirements.

[EPA Administrator] Jackson is now casting aside 35 years of Congressional prerogative. Because the Obama EPA has declared carbon dioxide a "pollutant," and because cars emit CO2, Ms. Jackson is citing the Clean Air Act in her bid to commandeer Detroit. While the EPA officially worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Nhtsa, the agency previously in charge of efficiency standards), it's clear the EPA is calling the shots.

This is bad news if you want to own and drive a car in the future. For instance, the first round of CAFE rules are estimated to have cost about 2,000 lives per year (which would total 72,000 lives as of now) as cars got smaller and lighter.  The rules the EPA is spewing now doesn't even take safety into account.

The new EPA CAFE rules mean cars will be much more expensive (meaning poorer people will be forced into older cars that won't get as good of mileage) and much less safe (not to mention fun to drive).

And they could cause the American auto industry to go bankrupt again:

The only way Detroit can hit these averages will be by turning at least 25% of its fleet into hybrids. But hybrid sales peaked in the U.S. two years ago at 3% of the market and are declining. The EPA's $157 billion price tag includes only the estimate of what manufacturers will have to invest in new technology, not the billions more that will hemorrhage when nobody buys their EPA-approved products.

The EPA can't (yet) force you to buy the type of cars they want you to drive.

So if the EPA is running the car industry now, what other parts of your life will they commandeer?  This is just one of the many reasons we need to get this man out of the White House in 2013.  If he's re-elected, this country is over (which I'm starting to wonder if that's not his plan).

EU Biofuels Mandate Spews Carbon

Apparently there are still people out there concerned about carbon dioxide (Why?).  And the European Union (EU), which apparently still exists, in an effort to cut down on carbon emissions has mandated biofuel usage (just like the US did with ethanol).  Now a study shows that the biofuels are at least as bad as gasoline at producing carbon emissions (Hat tip: instapundit).  From the EurekAlert! website:

A new study on greenhouse gas emissions from oil palm plantations has calculated a more than 50% increase in levels of CO₂ emissions than previously thought – and warned that the demand for 'green' biofuels could be costing the earth.

You see, biodiesel requires palm oil, and that means cutting down palm trees.  And that exposes the ground to sunlight.  And that causes tropical peat lands to break down and release (wait for it) CO₂ which makes biodiesel a significant source of greenhouse gases.

I guess letting markets decide what fuels should be used is not acceptable but it sounds like dead dinosaurs are still better than biofuels.  And cheaper, too.  But the last thing the EU wants is freedom of choice and free markets when it comes to saving the planet.