Summary
➡ The article discusses how companies like Jaguar and Harley Davidson have lost their unique identities due to changes in ownership and management. It also criticizes CEOs who are paid large sums despite poor performance and the negative impact on employees. The article further discusses the disappearance of affordable economy cars, replaced by expensive entry-level cars, and the increasing age of cars on the road due to inflation and high costs.
➡ The 2024 Toyota Hilux Champ, a basic truck, is cheaper than similar models in the U.S. due to less safety features. However, these features, like multiple airbags and advanced driver assistance technologies, are argued to make cars less safe by encouraging reckless driving. The article also discusses the potential return of the V8 engine in certain models, and criticizes the lack of aesthetic appeal in modern car designs, comparing it to brutalist architecture. The author suggests that this trend reflects a broader societal shift towards ugliness and despair.
➡ The article discusses the struggles of car companies in transitioning to electric vehicles. It suggests that companies are risking their survival by pushing for electric cars, with some like Volkswagen and Nissan on the verge of bankruptcy. The article also highlights the practical issues with electric cars, such as long charging times and limited range. It mentions that Mazda’s CEO believes that gas cars and mild hybrid models will still dominate sales in the next five years.
➡ The text discusses the future of the automotive industry, with some believing in the rise of autonomous and electric vehicles, while others argue for the continued value of traditional, gas-powered cars. The Mazda CEO believes customers want affordable and reliable cars, not necessarily electric ones. The text also touches on the freedom and convenience that comes with owning a car, as opposed to relying on public transportation. There are concerns about the potential negative impacts of a shift towards electric vehicles, including the possibility of an industry collapse.
➡ The text discusses the importance of learning practical skills like car mechanics and 3D printing. It also delves into political topics, including the possibility of pardoning Fauci, the role of Trump and Biden, and the potential for a populist uprising. The author criticizes the idolization of political figures and the lack of action on important issues, such as entitlement programs and foreign wars.
➡ The text discusses concerns about political leaders using their power to control and manipulate the economy, energy use, and cryptocurrency. It also highlights fears about the potential for increased surveillance and identification checks, possibly leading to a loss of personal freedom. The text suggests that these issues are being presented as solutions to problems, but may actually lead to more control over citizens.
Transcript
Spock. One of them is the, you know, the juxtaposition between the way Luigi has been lionized in some quarters and the way that Daniel Penney, the man who intervened to prevent a serial violent criminal from attacking people again, was treated and charged, you know, and painted as some sort of a villain and of course, naturally, a racist because the criminal that he intervened to prevent from hurting people just happened to be black. So naturally that makes him a racist. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I talked about that very thing yesterday. First I talked about, you know, Luigi and then I talked about Daniel Perry.
And it truly is amazing. You know, during the, I didn’t follow this as it was going. I didn’t report on it because, you know, I don’t typically do that on criminal trials and stuff as they’re in process. But during the process, it came out that it was actually the cops who let him die. You know, he was still alive when they got there and they chose, they didn’t want to get aids, they didn’t want to give him, which is understandable. So but, you know, they didn’t bring any charges against them. It was all about race and it was all about race because of Alvin Bragg, the Soros district attorney.
And you know, when you look at this guy, he was a credible threat. He’d been arrested 42 times. They had a warrant out for his arrest because he had beaten up a 67 year old woman. And he jumps on this thing and he starts threatening to kill people. And it wasn’t just Daniel Perry, it was a couple other guys, one of them was black who subdued him. It is crazy, isn’t it? But that is New York, isn’t it? They’ll come after Daniel Perry. Actually, I’m encouraged because in New York, in New York City, a jury acquitted him, which is a remarkable thing.
I think New Yorkers, as blue as New York is, have Gotten tired of being accosted by violent criminals when they’re trying to get to work riding the subway. That’s right. I think enough is enough. That’s right. That’s absolutely. That’s a great point. That even in New York they couldn’t get that. So I think people are getting tired of that. I think they’re really tired of the Soros district attorneys who want to turn a blind eye to real crime and to come after everybody for non crimes. And that’s really a big part of that with Alvin Bragg and stuff.
Well, let’s talk a little bit about automobiles because things are kind of turning your way. We’ve got. GM has now shutting down its cruise robo taxi operations. Mary Barra that you’ve talked about before, the CEO, her vision of transforming GM into a tech driven company with $50 billion from crews now seems to be distant is a polite way to put it. Reality bites sometimes, doesn’t it? Just a couple of weeks ago, the CEO of the European Combine, Stellantis, whose name is Carlos Tavares, was fired. He was pushed out of his position because things are absolutely disastrous for Stellantis right now and particularly for Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram trucks, which are the formerly American brands that were bought out by Stellantis a number of years ago and which were successful.
But under Tavares they really went whole hog in on this EV thing and they canceled all of their popular models and their popular engines and they tried to push these electric things on people and people don’t want them, they’re not buying them. And short of the federal government coming in and eliminating all of the alternatives which they’re trying to do, by the way. But people still do have the option of not buying a battery powered vehicle or a hybrid vehicle, which is a partially electric vehicle. And they’re not. Why would they? It just doesn’t make sense for most people.
So you know, now these dealers are stuck with all of this inventory that they can’t sell. And some of the brands like Chrysler, this is how bad it is. Chrysler has a minivan. That’s it. It has one vehicle in its entire lineup, a minivan. And Dodge, which used to be kind of the Rockstar brand because of the Charger and the Challenger, now all it has is this little crossover called the Hornet, which isn’t a bad car. There’s nothing wrong with it. But people generally don’t go to Dodge to buy little crossovers. They’ll go to Toyota or Honda for a vehicle like that.
So the only other vehicle that they currently have in their lineup that is at all desirable is the Durango, which is a holdover. And by the way, that’s the last 2025 model that you can get under the Dodge or Chrysler brands or even the Jeep brands. That’s still available with the Hemi V8 and the supercharged version, the Hellcat version of it. They still have that. But the take home point is they’ve got basically two cars in their inventory. Imagine being a dealer trying to entice customers and you have no inventory except for the inventory that people don’t want.
And then, you know, they’re about to bring out this, this, this device. That’s what I like to refer to electric vehicles as called a charger which needs to charge. The charger that needs a charge. That can be their advertising slogan. The charger that needs a charge. About that. Right. You know, and the same problem is besetting Jaguar, Mercedes and all of these other brands. And I told them off the record, people in the companies, look, guys, what you’re trying to do here is to make basically another Tesla with your badge on it. And what’s the point of that? You know, you’re basically eviscerating everything that made your brand something other than a Tesla.
But you know, the Jaguar thing is just so cool. It looks like a pink air conditioner, you know. Well, now, yeah, it looks sort of like, I don’t know, like an early 2000s Chrysler Crossfire that somebody stepped on. That’s right, yeah. From, from the front and from the side, from the back it looks like an air conditioning unit. So tone deaf. You know, you were talking earlier before we got on here about this woke mind virus, as Elon Musk calls it, and he’s right about that. That’s actually a really good term that afflicts these car companies.
You saw that ad that Jaguar put out a couple of weeks ago. It’s another tranny show, a drag queen storytime. If you didn’t know it was ostensibly for a car brand, you would look at that and go, what, what, what’s that all about? You know, they really do believe, I think in their minds, that this is somehow going to promote and prompt people to go to a Jaguar store and buy one of their devices. It’s just, it’s delusional. It’s a real twist on the idea of a drag race, isn’t it? Sure. Right, right. See these people in drag and you race to the store to get one of these overpriced Jaguar electric cars.
It’s all very sad because Jaguar was one of those brands that was extraordinarily passionate. William Lyons, who was the founder of Jaguar, said that a car is the closest thing that we’ll ever make to something that is alive. And he was absolutely right about that. You know, the evocativeness of the early designs like a Jaguar E Type, I mean, that thing, it’s just one of the sexiest cars ever conceived and made available. And even parents brother had a 12 cylinder Jaguar at one point. He bought it used. They were so magnificent that even though they weren’t the most reliable vehicles, somebody once quipped that a Jaguar on a lift is better than most other cars on the road because they were so beautiful just to look at.
When I was a kid, one of my friends, his dad had an XJ sedan, you know, and we would go and pop the hood and just look at the engine. It was, it was just a, just a really provocative and gorgeous thing that got you interested in the car, that it was special, it was something different. And they just completely frittered that away. Oh yeah, yeah. It used to be Jeremy Clarkson with the Top Gear guys. You know, you saw, oh, Jag o Jag, you know, and he would always talk about, in the movies, they’d give the Jaguars to the bad guys, especially the Bond movies, the Jags would go the bad guys and the Aston Martin would go to Bond or whatever.
But yeah, it still had this real presence, it had this real personality. And now it’s got a drag personality, not the kind you would want in an automotive. And part of this too is because they dissipated the. What would be a good way to put this? The ethnic identity. You know, Jag was a British brand and then it got sold off to Tata. No offense to Tata, no offense to Indians, but they’re not Brits, you know, and they don’t understand that cultural tradition. And so, you know, now they turned the brand into this sort of drifting, anomalous thing that really doesn’t have any identity any longer.
Yeah, this is everywhere. You know, Harley Davidson is now run by this woke German guy. You think a woke German guy understands anything about, you know, Americans and Harley Davidsons? He doesn’t. So, you know, he’s pushing these electric bikes. And the idea that a guy who likes a Harley is going to want an electric scooter, because that’s what it is, an electric motorcycle is a contradiction in terms. If it doesn’t have an engine, it’s a scooter. An engine defines what a motorcycle is. And they’re Just running these companies into the ground. And I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about there’s no consequences for this.
To get back to Carlos Tavares, I think he was paid $40 million for the last year, the full year that he was CEO of Stellantis. So the consequence for him is a cushy retirement. You know, if you or I are incompetent, if we are slipshod, if we don’t do a good job, anybody, you know, any ordinary person, if you’re an incompetent plumber, an incompetent electrician, there are consequences. You know, you lose work, you lose money, you’re probably going to lose your house. But, you know, we’ve gotten to a point in this country where some of these CEOs are paid regardless of performance.
And they’re paid to such an extent that it’s obscene. You know, the idea that you can get $40 million a year to destroy a contract, it’s performing poorly, you’re destroying the company and you’re being compensated. And, you know, I feel so terrible for these people who are good people who work at Chrysler and Dodge assembly plants trying to make good cars, trying to do something productive, and they’re the ones who are going to bear the consequences for the destruction of these brands. Oh, yeah. I don’t keep up with the evolving financial ownership of these different companies.
Stellantis, what was their background? What were the. What was the car line that they, that they owned before that? Or was it just created as a holding company? Peugeot and Renault, it’s, you know, Peugeot and Renault, it’s, it’s, it’s a French combine. Okay, all right, so Peugeot and Renault merged to become within. To. Citroen is part of that family. Yeah, it’s just, it’s a big European combine. And it was an inappropriate marriage because, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Peugeots or Citroens per se, you know. Well, I’ve owned a Peugeot. I would, I would disagree with you there.
There is something definitely wrong with Peugeot. Ethos is profoundly. You know, the people who are running those companies don’t really relate to and don’t understand the mentality of people who are interested in a car like a V8 charger. You know, they probably regard them with contempt. You know, they look at you as a rube, as a hick, you know, some kind of redneck who wants to do burnouts and so on, which is partially true. There’s a market, right? There’s nothing wrong with that. That was part of the joy and fun. And it’s part of what made American cars different.
You know, you and I, I mean, there was a stark difference when you and I were in high school. You know, if you looked at American cars over here and European cars over here. Oh yeah. It was immediately obvious what the difference was. Yeah. Now they’re kind of the world car and they all sort of look the same. That’s right, yeah. Imagine a company that has a product line that ranges from the Dukes of Hazards, General Lee to a Citroen. Right. What a crazy combination of stuff that is. And as you point out, that’s really is a cultural issue.
We’re talking about the British cars in Jaguar and that type of thing. I remember, you know, the cheap sports cars that were around that I bought one of them, a Spitfire, you know, but the spitfires and the MGs and things like that, you know, they had this feel to them that I thought was a lot of fun. It was this rawness, this unreliability. Had a wood. They did, they had a big personality, you know, a wood dash, teeny, teeny, tiny little car and all the rest of the stuff, all of that was part of the personality.
In the same way that a Dodge Charger with his big muscle, you know, car is also a kind of personality as well. Yeah, yeah. And you know, something else that we frittered away. I just wrote an article about this the other day. It’s, it’s an interesting kind of an etymological shift. Remember when there were economy cars? Oh yeah, you never hear that term used anymore. That’s been replaced by entry level. And the distinction is important. You cannot buy a car, I’m pretty sure any longer, a 20, 25 model year car in this country for less than $20,000.
They pretty much pulled all of the economy cars off the market. And at the same time, while there are a handful of economy cars or economical cars, I should say like a good example being a Toyota Corolla hybrid. It gets 50 something miles per gallon, but the buy in cost is much higher because now you’re paying for this hybrid technology to do things that just an engine could do. Forty years ago, I referenced the Chevette of the early 80s, which was available with a diesel. Now I know people will laugh and back in the day people mocked the Chevette because it took what, probably 60 seconds to get to 60 and its top speed wasn’t much higher than that, but it was dirt cheap.
And in addition to that, it was incredibly cheap to drive because it got 55 miles per gallon. Wow. And diesel fuel at that time cost less than gasoline. That’s all gone now. All of the affordable entry level kinds of cars or economy cars are no longer extant in this country. Yeah. Oh, that’s absolutely true. Matter of fact, I got a thing here. This is put out by not the Bee. They said Americans are driving older cars than ever. Nobody can afford to maintain them. 30 years ago, the average passenger car was about 8.4 years old. Today that is 13.6.
You know, Eric, I can remember when I was in high school, like 50 years ago, Volvo had an ad campaign talking about, well, you know, the average age of a car In Sweden is 11 years. And they show a picture of a Volvo because, you know, we’re so reliable and all this kind of stuff. And I used to say to people at the time, I said, anything to do with reliability, it has to do with socialism. They can’t afford a new car. You know, we were, we were changing out cars, you know, after like, you know, three to five years.
I guess it was that Americans were switching out their cars. But, you know, part of it was that they weren’t made that well, but the Volvos weren’t made that much better either. It was really that the people couldn’t afford to do it because people weren’t keeping the Volvos that long in the US but now we got a situation where it’s at 13.6 years. And as they point out this thing, it’s because of inflation, it’s because of higher interest rates, it’s because, because of a lot of other things. But it’s really the government inflation and the government expenses because of regulations adding on all kinds of unnecessary bells and whistles as you’re talking about.
And they’ve got a picture of a truck here. Let’s see. What model truck is this? This is a Silverado 2024 Silverado EV Crew Cab, $104,291. Or you can get it for just $1,340 a month financing, I can remember and date myself here. But this is, this is the ravages of inflation. My sister is a good bit older than I am. They got married 1969. They got a house like the mid-70s before the big inflation kicked in at the end of the 70s. And they got in at about what was the median price of a home at that time, which was $25,000.
Now you can’t imagine. Yeah, now you can. You can’t get an rv. No, you can’t get A truck for that, anywhere close to it. But it’s amazing. And that again is all government inflation, government regulation that is pushing this stuff up. I’ve got another one for you that bears on this. I have an 02 Nissan Frontier. I think you and I have talked about it, which is a little compact pickup truck, pretty basic. When it was new, when it was new, its sticker price was just shy of $13,000. Well, I got to thinking about the 2024 Toyota Hilux Champ, which I think I have discussed before.
Can’t buy it in this country. You can buy it outside of the United States and it costs $13,000. Now here’s where it gets interesting to me. I plugged my $13,000 original sticker price from my 02 Frontier into the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator to find out what that would be today in today’s inflated dollars. And it turns out it’s about $23,000 today, which would still be inexpensive for a new truck in this country. However, my truck is very similar to the Hilux. Both basic four cylinder, manual trans transmission, basic trucks. Except The Hilux is $10,000 less in real dollars.
So that’s a measure of our impoverishment, you know, in order to get something comparable to what you could buy back in 2002 for about $13,000 today, you know, assuming you even could, if you, if they allowed you to buy the Hilux, you know, you’re paying essentially that much more to get it. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s obscene. And I do my best to make people aware of this. Yeah, you’re paying $10,000 in regulatory costs and mandates and things like that. Absolutely. And they gaslight people by portraying, they say the Hilux is unsafe. And what that means is that it’s not compliant with whatever the jot and tittle is of the federal Motor Vehicle Safety Code as it exists pertaining to 2024, 2025 model year vehicles.
So what does that mean? Well, that means it doesn’t have six airbags. It doesn’t mean it’s an uncontrollable vehicle. It doesn’t mean it’s prone to crash. I mean, heck, even the 82 metro that we were talking about a moment ago, of course that would be considered unsafe today too, as far as the regulatory standards go. But millions of people drove them and they didn’t die in them. You know, I mean, granted, it didn’t have six airbags, you know, and it didn’t have all of these bells and whistles. And advanced driver assistance technologies that they now require a vehicle to have.
But we’re paying through the nose for it. And ironically, in a lot of ways, I think arguably we’ve gotten to a point where a lot of these safety things are making cars less safe. The visibility is horrendous. You and I have talked about that. And they’re encouraging a passivity and recklessness, in my opinion, on the part of the drivers who have. They’re habituating people to not be responsible for controlling the car because after all, oh, I have lane keep assist, I have automated emergency braking. I have all these things so I can peck at my screen on the dashboard and I can check my email and I can play music and even watch videos instead of paying attention to my driving and not following the car ahead of me too closely and things like that.
Oh, I absolutely hate that lane keep assist. I’ve had that on some rental cars and I think that is an accident waiting to happen in and of itself. But you’re right, these types of things, and we’ve seen this in the past when they put any like braking stuff on, it didn’t help with the accident rate, as you point out. It just adjusts people’s behavior. They want you to be less responsible. You look at the way they move the Overton window with all the stimulus checks and all the rest of the stuff. It’s. It’s all about a pacification program of people in the west.
And that really is what this is about. You know, when you’re talking about earlier, you mentioned Stellantis and the CEO there. Now that he’s gone, there’s a lot of people there that are talking about, you know, the things that he did wrong. They wouldn’t say it while he was still there because they’d get fired. But a lot of them said everybody wanted to keep the Hemi, but he was absolutely determined to get rid of it. And so some of them are saying, asking, will the V8, will Hemi come back? What do you think? Will they bring it back on a new management? I think it could.
And the reason that I say that is because they are still making the Durango with the V8, which means they’re still making the V8. They have not yet gotten rid of the tooling and everything that is necessary to make that engine so they could simply ramp things up again. You know, I’ve seen the new Charger device, you know, the replacement for the old Charger and Challenger. It’s a good looking car. You know, they did a really Fine job with the styling of the, you know, this electric charger that they’ve got on deck. And if they were to put the V8 in that thing, I think it would sell like gangbusters.
Particularly if they price it reasonably. Yeah, look at the money they could save from imitating the sound of a V8. Not to mention the self respect. I mean that’s, it’s, you know, I never talked to Steve Kuniskis, who’s gone now. Kuniskis was the guy at Dodge that was largely responsible for the renaissance of the muscle car and all of the stuff with the Hemi and the Hellcats and all of that. And that poor guy, you know, he left just after, remember the super bowl ad, you know, where, you know, he, there was this elaborate ad showing the new electric charger and the sound that it was made and.
Oh my God, I don’t know what they paid him to do that ad, but it cost him his self respect, I’m sure. I mean, I can’t, I can’t imagine having been a party to that. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, it is, it is a farce, isn’t it? It truly is. Matter of fact, handy says, hey, Eric, my mom has a 63 sports roadster Thunderbird. Says it’s beautiful. Yeah, that was the thing. You know, it used to be, as you point out many times, you said. Yeah, it’s been kind of, you know, anodized. All the styling and everything used to have real styling with these things and uglified.
You know, there’s a book I read years ago, I think it was called the Architecture of Doom and it was about the Nazis and it was about these brutalist buildings that the Nazis would put together. And the Soviets did the same thing. All of these, these totalitarian regimes, they uglify everything. And our regime, it really is true. There was a time when public buildings, they at least tried to make them look attractive. Now they look, they have this sort of Bauhaus industrial awful, almost Auschwitz look to them. And the same is true with cars. They’re repellent.
A lot of them have these gaping catfish faces and the overall super hyper macho look of the trucks. And I know some people like that. But it’s really difficult to find a car that makes you smile anymore that you look at and go, you know, wow, man, that’s, that’s just a great looking car. That’s, that’s, that’s a piece of art. I’d like to have that in my living room. Yeah, you know, I’d love to Have a Jaguar E tape E type in my living room. Yeah. Or on the lift. Either way. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is you.
We talk about the architecture, the brutalist architecture. That’s the thing I really hate. I went to University of South Florida that went to opened up like in the early 60s or late 50s or something. And so it’s all this mid century brutalist architecture which is just raw concrete. You know, the buildings that I went to class in from the outside that looked like a really cheap imitation of a castle or something. You know, just very uninviting, very unappealing, just awful and institutional looking. And that’s the kind of stuff that we have now produced in our society.
Was Roger Scrooge did a great series about the importance of beauty. You know, he’s talking about architecture, he’s talking about art, he’s talking about music and how all these things have been trashed. The word of the year and I’ll just put this out there. Warning for the kids was a term that they developed called and shittification. Yeah, that’s well said. Talk about what is happening to everything, whether it’s how a device works or what something looks like that pretty much encapsulates it right there. Yeah, it’s not elevating, it’s not inspiring, it instills despair and sadness and it gives you the sense of hopelessness and this is not a healthy thing.
And the people who are driving this, I’m increasingly persuaded that they’re malicious, there’s something wrong with them and they are trying to just tear everything down for the sake of it. It’s a nihilistic, evil even kind of mindset. I agree. Well, you know, when we look at the idea of Antonio Gramsey, we’re going to march through the institutions, you know, he said, instead of us fighting it out in the streets with a revolution like they did in Europe, over class and that type of thing, we need to take over the institutions from the top down. And you know, over the years you and I have talked about this.
I really do believe that these people, like this newly departed Stellantis CEO were fully in on the game. And they were willing to sacrifice their companies, I think, for this political agenda. I think some of the stockholders and other people had a different idea and you know, it seemed to me like their end game was that they were going to be one of the last one or two that would be standing, that they would be a favorite of a government either in France or in the United States or Germany or something like that. And they’d be given the, the concession to run the autonomous cars, which it looks like that’s what Elon Musk is going for.
But I think this, they, in the words of George W. Bush, they misunderestimated the contempt the American people had for their plan and they’re going to go out of business before they could make that happen. They have a mercenary mindset. You know, you could put these same people in charge of a toothpaste company and it would be the same thing. And, you know, if you look at the automobile industry in the past, when it was, when it was successful and it was something that made people feel good, you had people like Sir William Lyon in charge of who loved cars, and you had people.
Are we okay? Yeah, we’re okay. I was just telling Karen there was a comment that disappeared. Go ahead. The founder of Toyota, this was a guy who really loved the vehicle and believed in it. And for him it was a family concern. A year or so ago, they edged out Akio Toyoda, who was the grandson of the founder, and, you know, he had the guts actually to come out, you know, when it wasn’t popular. And to say that this push to these devices, this bums rush to electrify everything is going to be the end of the company.
And, you know, good on him for doing that, for standing up at the time that it was appropriate to do that. They are now beginning to come around. You mentioned Mazda. You know, Mazda, you know, was very, to use the word, hesitant about embracing all of this electrification stuff. They were dragging their feet more than anybody. Yeah, they’re very smart on their part because they have not committed massive resources to failure as all of these other car companies have, which has been just completely disastrous. Volkswagen and Nissan are on the verge of going out of business because of all of the money that they’ve lost on pushing these electric cars.
Ford is not much better off and General Motors is in a bad way too. You know, this is a cancer that has been metastasizing across the entire industry. And we had our rhino governor here, Bill Lee in Tennessee, gave all kinds of money to Ford to do an electric plant. Just as it’s all circling the drain and going down. Yeah. The Mazda CEO had made some statements. He said the range extending version of the rotary engine is only offered in certain markets. And this is something you’ve talked about before in the past. What was it? Chevy Bolt, I think that had a gasoline engine that was just there to charge the battery, but otherwise it was fully electric drive.
And you know, that would have been a perfect utilization for the Mazda rotary engine since it’s so compact, wouldn’t it? Yeah, compact and efficient, you know, and operates at a steady speed and its only purpose is to generate electricity to feed the battery. And that’s, you know, that’s not necessarily a bad idea. Yeah, the Volt was a practical electric car, which of course is interesting. That’s why they don’t make it anymore, because it was actually practical. And you note that, you know, the latest thing that the engineer is, boy, you feel bad for these guys, or at least I do.
The work that they have to do to try to figure out ways to kind of end run and get around everything that the government throws at them. They came up with this idea of the plug in hybrid to deal with these electric car mandates. And of course, Michael Redgard Reagan, the guy who’s currently in charge of the epa, was bemoaning the fact that people aren’t plugging these things in. In other words, they’re not tethering them to the core, which from their point of view is a problem. As opposed to people just want to get in their cars and drive.
Well, they want it plugged in because that’s their whole game is centralized control. They want you plugged into a centrally controlled grid. We’ve talked about that forever as well. But you know, the Mazda CEO just came out. He said Americans primarily want gas cars. He said even at the end of the decade, he believes traditional gas cars and mild hybrid models will make up about two thirds of Mazda’s annual sales. He thinks that plugins, plug in hybrids and EVs will represent the remaining third. In other words, most vehicles will still have gas engines five years from now.
And when he talks about the mild hybrid models, I think what he’s talking about is, you know, the rotary engine, they’re, you know, charging batteries, which we’re not allowed to have in this country. And the Europeans are shutting this down because they come up with this absolutism, you know, zero emissions. And it’s the same kind of destructive authoritarian absolutism as zero Covid. Yeah. @ the core of this, the problem I think is, well, there are many problems. One of the fundamental problems really isn’t range, which everybody talks about so much. It’s the wait time associated with the charge.
Yes, yes. And this is just not acceptable, you know, and they try very hard to equivocate and rationalize and they’ll talk about, well, you know, you could recover. What was the latest figure? Something like, you know, 10 miles in a couple of minutes or something like that. Well, that’s not going to take you very far. And I can put, you know, it literally takes seconds to pump one gallon of gas into a car. And that one gallon will take the typical car 30 miles. And, you know, if you pump four or five gallons, which takes two minutes, maybe less than that now you can go a couple hundred miles.
Most people are just not going to accept standing there or being tethered to some charger at a Sheetz. I mean, who wants to sit in sheets for 15 or 20 minutes and it’s not just once a week? Again, you know, get into the circle the drain kind of synergistic problem because the range isn’t much to begin with, which means you have to charge often. And since you don’t get much charge unless you’re willing to wait a really long time, you start out with even less range. So now you have to end up at the Sheetz or the Walmart or wherever this fast charger is and, you know, sit there.
I mean, imagine that a couple of times a week, maybe even three times a week, having to go park at a Sheetz, you know, for 15 minutes or for a half hour. Who’s going to willingly do that? Well, you know, and Elon Musk is actually doubling down on this thing because he’s creating this elaborate thing. I’m sure you’ve seen it in California. It’s like this retro, futuristic, like drive in theater, you know, where people, it’s a destination where people are going to go to hang out and eat and do social stuff and all the rest of this stuff for a very, very long time.
But he can’t reproduce that everywhere. And a lot of people don’t have that kind of time. You know, you’re right. You got to go to work. Yeah. You know, what kind of fantasy world do these people live in? I guess. Well, I know what kind of fantasy world he lives in. Right. He’s a multi billionaire. So, you know, he, for him, work is optional. He can if he wants to. Most people, on the other hand, have got to be someplace. That’s right. You know, they’re expected to be at their employer and ready to work at a certain time of the day.
They have appointments, they have to keep things of that nature. That’s just life. You know, they don’t have an extra hour a week to budget, just sitting around to wait somewhere. Yeah, well, he knows that. I mean, it’s one of the things he’s focused on with this Doge thing is, like, we’re not gonna let people work from home, that type of deal. You gotta be there. And so he pushes that with his employees, but when it comes to him, he’s like, in the top 20 on the Diablo video game worldwide. So he’s got plenty of time on his hand when he’s.
When he’s not perk of being a billionaire, right? That’s right. When he’s not hanging out in Mar a Lago, he’s got other people running the companies for him. I’ll be interested to see whether now that, you know, he’s good friends with Donald Trump, whether Trump is going to rescind the $7,500 tax kickback and eliminate all of the carbon credits that have given Elon Musk so many of his billions. Yeah, well, you know, we began by talking about how GM was bailing out of this autonomous cruise thing, but he is doubling down on it and saying that’s going to be, you know, the wave of the future.
Nobody’s going to have any gasoline cars, and nobody’s going to be driving their cars, and he’s going to own everybody’s car and, as we’ve talked about many times, rent it to you by the ride. Meanwhile, the Mazda CEO says customers are just looking for affordable solutions rather than electrified solutions. That’s the government’s desire for you. They’re looking for better value, he said, and they’re looking for reliable internal combustion engines. Boy, he’s spot on. Absolutely spot on. And they also want the spontaneity that attends the freedom of movement that we have taken for granted for so long, which I think it’s beginning to dawn on people we ought not to take for granted.
And what do I mean by that? You know, if I wanted to, after we’re done with our interview, I can just jump in my truck and go somewhere, you know, I don’t have to think about, well, have I charged it up enough and have I got enough range to go where I want to go, and if I get there, do I have time to wait? You know, we as a culture have enjoyed this magnificent, wonderful benefit of just being able to go wherever we want to go whenever we feel like it. You know, you don’t have to plan your life around it because you just put some gas in it and go.
You could literally drive across the country if you felt like it. Just because, you know, and wanted to take that away from us. Oh, yeah, yeah. It really is. You know, when Karen and I got married 44 years ago, we went to London and to the UK to kind of hang out and we got this ticket to ride the public transportation, you know, and it’s like you get a discount for doing it. So you could ride the buses, you could ride the subway and everything. In a lot of cases it was kind of convenient. But when it came to buses and you had to get somewhere else or to a train, you know, just sitting around waiting for their schedule and it’s like, wow, I’m just used to jumping in a car and going and doing what I want.
The distances weren’t that large, but you know, they were further than you could walk. But it was such a restraining thing. It was, it was really annoying. I got a couple of comments here. I wanted to get to audi modern modernretroradio.com Good to see you there. He says reason CEOs are destroying their own companies brands is because a New World Order United nations puppets. They wouldn’t be in those positions if they weren’t. I agree. Stored possessions says getting ads on live shows now rumble is starting to suck like that. Every product we get goes fast before it’s banned.
I didn’t know that was happening. I didn’t know where you’re getting. I’m not seeing any revenue from that. Unfortunately, people are willing to sell out, you know, particularly if they’re handed a really big check. Yeah, that’s true. You know, it’s, it’s a horrendous thing. You know, I’ve never had somebody offer me a billion dollars, you know, to sell out. And, you know, being honest, who knows? I would hope I wouldn’t. It’s an awfully tempting thing. Well, you know, that was always a thing that you remember the game Scruples. I don’t know if you ever played that or not, but we, Yes, I do.
We played it. And after a while it’s like, you know, I’m seeing a pattern here. You know, they got the same types of things that are going on and will you do it for this amount of money? How about for that amount of money, you know? And so they start changing the dollar amounts and just tweaking it slightly to see, you know, what’s your selling point. But at the end of the day, you know, we have to live with ourselves. And if you have any kind of a conscience, you know, you’re going to look at that man in the mirror or that woman in the mirror and either you’re going to be happy with what you see or not.
And that’s not something that you can put a price on. That’s right. And I know as a Christian, one day I’m going to stand before God face to face. It’s going to be more frightening than the mirror, I got to tell you. That isn’t going to help you then, probably. That’s right. Another comment here. And it disappeared, I think. Oh, yeah, here it is. Wes Robertson, he says an automotive industry collapse could send the US into a depression, methinks. Were the EVs a monkey wrench that was thrown into the system for that purpose? What do you think it could well be.
And, you know, we’ve got about a month until the orange man ascends to the purple. And it will be very interesting to see what he does. You know, I. I would like to see him make cars great again. You know, forget America. One way he could make America great again is by, among other things, ending the chicken tax that prevents a lot of these manufacturers from importing these affordable vehicles, particularly small trucks into this country. He could do that, you know, how about letting Americans buy that $13,000 Toyota Hilux champ? Can you imagine what a boon that would be to some young person who wants to start a contracting business? You know? Oh, I agree.
It would be great. But I don’t think he’ll do it because he’s all about stopping imports. You know, that’s right. And you know, again, that’s what we call law enforcement, a clue. You know, we’ll see what he does. You know, we’ve had a couple of. I wrote. I think you probably saw what I wrote about his awful choices to be the next surgeon general. And that other. The guy, the thug that he had tapped to be the head of the dea. Luckily that guy had to bow out. But that horrendous Covidian Kabuki army pusher that he’s tapped to be the surgeon general, what does that tell you about him? Why would he choose those people? Of all the people that he could have chosen, he chose people like that.
Oh, yeah. Oh, she’s awful. Absolutely awful. You got a couple of. Couple of things there about it. But, you know, when you look at. He likes to go everywhere, he says, well, future, whether we’re going to destroy, build this country back, we’re going to do drill, baby, drill. That’s his favorite phrase. He says that all the time. Well, you know, he left the Paris climate Accord at. And when we talk about shutting down the economy completely, that’s what that’s about, you know. Yeah, you can throw a monkey wrench into the automotive industry and shut it down.
But if you want to shut down all industry and all manufacturing, that’s what the purpose of the Paris Climate Accord is. And it was a treaty and it was a treaty that we got into because Obama and John Kerry said we’re in it. And there wasn’t. Trump wouldn’t do anything to stop that and neither would any of the senators. Nobody would call it out. They all pretended that we were in it. And a clause that was put in there that I think was put in there just for the United States says, well, if you decide that you’re going to get out of the Paris Agreement, you got to wait four years.
And so Trump says, okay, I’m going to get out of it, but I can’t do it then until just after the election in 2020. And of course we were out of it for maybe a month or something before Biden puts us back in. They don’t have the authority to put us in this. But when you look at what has been done to the UK for example, I mean they’re shutting down all of their, not just their coal power plants, but they’re shutting down the coal plants that they use to make steel and they’re shutting down the mines.
It’s complete de industrialization. They’re criminalizing farming. That’s right. Because they want to throttle the food supply. That’s right. It’s literally a depopulation agenda. It’s an impoverishment agenda. And the common denominator is that all of these people who are pushing this are people who are at the very apex of the pyramid and who have creosis like wealth and think they’ll be immune from it. Yeah, the apex predators despicability of it. It’s not to worry. I’ve got my bunker with my thousands and thousands of gallons of diesel fuel and my generators and I’ve got all the food I could possibly want for the next 50 years.
It’s for you and me and all of the deplorables to deal with this new dark age that they want to, that they want to create. That’s right. Yeah. They want a feudal society. They want a technocratic feudal society which is their new spin on it. Seth Landra again, thank you very much for the tip. He says happy holidays everybody. Just got an 84 Dodge Ram Custom 100318 cubic inch for my 16 year old son. Good, simple and easy to work on. Great for learning mechanics. And if your son can learn that, that’s going to be learn that.
Learn how to Work on the car and learn a little bit about how to make, how to use a 3D printer, and you’re set forever. Print your part. 318 is a great engine. You know, not a super powerhouse, but a good, rugged, reliable engine and something that can literally be rebuilt from the oil pan to the carburetor. You know, if you learn how to use some basic tools, you can do it for about a thousand bucks. And machine, machine costs and parts. Yeah, yeah. That’s going to be the wave of the future, is people starting to get out of what they were trying to entrap us in.
And so you got an article because you focus very carefully and always have on this so called pandemic stuff from the very beginning, the nonsense about it. You got an article up there about the rumors about pardoning Fauci. What do you think about that? Well, the precedent was set with Nixon. You know, people have talked about, well, how can you pardon somebody who hasn’t been charged, let alone convicted of anything? Well, that happened with Nixon. That’s right. Nixon wasn’t formally charged, let alone convicted of anything. But Jerry Ford pardoned him in advance. So it certainly could be done.
And it would provide a really interesting way for Donald Trump to claim his hands are tied and he can’t do anything to bring Fauci to account. Never mind that Fauci basically ran the country for the last year of Trump’s presidency while Trump stood by his side like a kind of spray tanned wooden Indian. He did absolutely nothing about it. I wonder whether there’s a term in pro wrestling. It’s called kayfabe. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing it correctly, but it’s just basically about these guys who are orchestrating their performance for the benefit of the crowd. And you’ve got, you’ve got the face, the good guy, Hulk Hogan, and then you’ve got the heel, the bad guy, iron cheek.
Maybe that’s what Trump was referring to when he said covfefe. Yeah, that’s it. And so iron cheek would hit Hulk over the head with the folding chair and the Hulk would stagger like he was going to fall and then he’d recover his strength and then he’d come back and he’d slam the sheet to the ground and everybody would cheer because the good guy won. And, you know, I wonder whether that’s what’s going on with Biden and Trump. You know, maybe they sit behind the curtain together and they have a beer together. I wouldn’t be surprised you know, and if Biden does pardon Fauci, that will be evidence of that having happened.
Another piece of evidence. We’ll see whether Trump actually does issue a blanket pardon to people who actually deserve it and for whom the pardon power was intended. Meaning those people that Trump threw under the bus for the January 6th, so called insurrection, who’ve been rotting in jail for nearly four years, who at most were guilty of disturbing the peace and maybe trespassing, the kinds of things you and I would have gotten a ticket for, let alone be thrown in a cage. Oh, it disgusts me, you know, and one of the guys that was rounded up and I talked about this earlier, how they’re accelerating the arrests of people even after the election and immediately before the election.
None of the judges would say, well, we’ll do a continuance and see what’s going to happen if Trump’s going to pardon people. But, you know, one of the guys, cowboys for Trump, he said, this is the greatest entrapment in history. And it was an entrapment by Trump. And, you know, his lawyer is telling him, oh, no, you can’t do anything about it. That nonviolent behavior of what people did is expressly permitted in the First Amendment to peacefully assemble and redress your grievances. To peacefully assemble and redress your grievances is protected. But he didn’t have the backbone to do anything about it because he’s got a lawyer telling him, hey, that’s they’re going to come after you.
Well, they came after him anyway. And so I think it’s a good thing that, you know, the Hunter, Barton Hunter Biden pardon is going to essentially, I think, force him to do something about it. But, you know, when you look at the total betrayal of these people and how, you know, Republicans in general have just run from it, there’s only a couple of them that even bothered to go to the prisons and, you know, talk about the horrific conditions that are there. But, you know, this is something, Eric, I’ve seen all my life, the CIA going in, orchestrating coups, and then training the dictator that they put in to run a secret police.
I mean, this is, you know, this is a pattern that has gone on all my life with the CIA. Well, yeah, but it’s more blatant now and it’s more, you know, I think they’re playing with dynamite. I think, you know, you see things, everybody sees things like this egregious cretin Hunter Biden and various other people like that literally getting away with, like, appalling horrific crimes involving real harm to real people. And meanwhile, people who haven’t harmed anybody and you know, who are guilty of at most some sort of a minor jaywalking style, technical foul infraction are prosecuted to the nth degree for things like that.
And people are really getting tired of it, I think. And I think this is one good thing about Orange man is I do think he’s sort of set in motion a populist uprising, you know, and I just hope that this populist uprising isn’t channeled in the wrong direction and then becomes the pretext for something even more awful than we’ve been dealing with for the past four years. Well, the problem with the populist uprising is that it’s idol worship, you know, and I saw it with some of the Tea Party stuff earlier on, you know, when they said the tax, enough already and we got to cut taxes and all our.
And there’s an echo of that with Doge and that nonsense that. And I think that’s going to be a bunch of nonsense. There’s not anything that, you know, Musk and Ramaswamy can make all the recommendations that they want. It doesn’t mean anything. I’ve seen one commission after another over the last 30 or 40 years make all kinds of recommendations, but it requires Congress to act on it. We can’t even get Mike Johnson to allocate some money to help the people who are freezing to death, literally. We had somebody who died from the cold. He won’t do anything to help them, but he’ll keep channeling the money to foreign wars, no problem, foreign governments, you know, he doesn’t have any problem with that.
So they’re not going to do anything to seriously reform it. And the vast bulk of the money that’s being spent, even if you were to say they were going to cut back on the wars and the military industrial complex, the vast bulk of the money is there with entitlement programs that they would have to change the law on. So there’s not really anything that’s going to happen with any of that. I agree. Ultimately I think this is just industrial policy, you know, Soviet style command and control. And it just comes down to, well, which, which person is going to direct this Sovietized economy and in what direction will it be? It’s not, let’s return to a free market model, one in which people are free to transact with one another, non coercively.
That’s anathema. Can’t have that. You know, it’s always got to be at the direction of some leader. And you’re right about the cult of personality that’s surrounding Trump. I saw something the other day, you may have seen it as well. Apparently they’re going to erect some God awful statue. Have you seen it? Yeah, several stories high. Yeah, fight, fight, fight thing or something. Yeah. Are they going to spray paint the thing gold too? They keep saying that they are not guilty of idolatry, but if it looks like it, it walks like it, it stands like it, it looks like it’s idolatry to me.
I tell you, it’s. They just keep going down that road. And that’s why I’m saying, you know, it’s been a misdirection. Just like the Tea Party. They started focusing on, well, we’re taxed enough already. Okay, so what do we do about this? Are we going to cut some programs or what do you want to talk about? They didn’t want to talk about that and they didn’t want to talk about the proper role of government and neither does Trump. Trump wants to make this all about loyalty to himself and he’s not making this. Even when you look at this talk about getting revenge and things and he says, well, success is going to be our revenge.
And yet at the same time throughout that interview, interwoven through it is this undercurrent of I’m going to get even with these people instead of saying, okay, we’re going to have a truce and we’re going to reestablish a rule of law so the victor doesn’t get to jail his political enemies. They’re not going to do that and they’re not going to fix the economy. And you know, all of this drill baby, drill stuff, I really think what’s going to happen with it, Eric? I think they’re going to come in, you know, we got, it’s a tag team match.
And so you got the Democrats, like Biden and all the rest of them, they come in with prohibition, right? They got prohibition on crypto, they got prohibition on energy use. Trump is going to come in and say, we’re going to open up everything and everybody can do whatever they want to with crypto and you can use whatever form of energy you want, but, but you’ll pay a carbon tax or you’ll have to pay for carbon sequestration, which my buddies have already set up a business to monetize that. And my buddies have already set up a business to tokenize everything.
And so I think that’s the danger. You know, it was one pastor said God’s delivered us from one evil to challenge us with another. They’re going to come at us with the same agenda, but they’re going to do it in a subversive way to make you think that it’s going to be, hey, it’s just an open market freedom type of thing. And, you know, but it’s going to be that type of approach. I think I agree. And the people who would ordinarily be apt or inclined to resist or question it if it were, say, Biden or Harris that were promoting it, will accept it because it’s their guy who’s, who’s imposing it.
One of the great worries that I’ve got, you know, Trump’s election campaign really hinged on this, you know, this tsunami of illegals that have been entering the country over the past. How exactly is he going to identify and deport all of these people? How exactly is he going to do that? A national id, Right. My fear is he’s going to institute some sort of a papers, please, passport check, port regime on us, you know, in the name of apprehending and identifying all of these non citizen aliens who are in the country. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of, you know, these gung ho MAGA people will say, yeah, we got to do that.
So, you know, we’re going to have a new apparat like we got with the Homeland Security apparat under Bush, you know, after 9, 11. So, you know, now Americans are used to having to deal with these blue shirted goons to get on an airplane. Well, sooner they’re going to get used to having to deal with goons wearing other kinds of shirts at every border, at every state, or when they drive across the county line, are they going to get used to having to stop at a checkpoint and prove to the satisfaction of some government goons that they’re an American citizen? I think it’s a possibility.
Oh, absolutely, it is a possibility. Take a look at what they’re doing. I mean, you know, we’ve got. And they’re still pouring it on with the jobs stuff. Right? So DeSantis and Republicans in Florida said we’re gonna have mandatory E Verify. Mandatory E Verify to get a job. We’re gonna have to have an ID and biometric ID to fly anywhere. The real ID is kicking in next year under Trump. Right. The Republicans have always pushed back against, but now they’re gonna bring it in under Trump. Biometric IDs with TSA. They want control so they can have jobs because illegals are taking our Jobs away.
They want to have voter id. It’s id, id, id. Even online we can’t control our kids access to social media, so we need to have an online ID to get onto social media or whatever. All of this stuff is pushing towards an id. And interestingly enough, every one of those things that I mentioned are sore points with conservatives because Biden has come in and made these things worse for the most part. And so now Trump will come in. You know, it’s a problem solution, problem solution. And they hand this stuff off like a relay baton with each other.
Right. It’s quite worrisome. You know, there’s this authoritarian law and order undercurrent that is behind maga and it really bothers me. It’s something that has long bothered me about the conservative. Oh, you must love Tom Holman. Yeah, right. What a fuck that guy is. He’s a stereotypical bad sheriff in town, isn’t he? Boy, it’s amazing. And you know, don’t go by what they say, go by what they do. You know, I got into a lively debate with a number of people over this guy. I think his name was Chad Honister. This guy was one of the most brutal of the COVID thugs he had.
Not only did he have this pastor arrested in Florida for having the effrontery to allow people who wanted to attend his services. We’re almost out of time. Yeah, I told everybody he’s perfect for the DEA because the DEA doesn’t have any respect for the Constitution. He wasn’t doing anything more than opening the doors and saying, hey, if you want to come in and worship, you’re free to do so. Not only did he have that man arrested, but he publicly shamed him. He had a big press conference where he denounced him for being a threat to public health.
He’s Bill granny. I agree. And Trump chose him. Think about what that says about Trump. Oh yeah, absolutely. Hang on, Karen, keep it going for just a second. And the other part, this is a listener pointed out to me, said his father in law was a billionaire who was convicted of a crime that Trump pardoned. So that’s how this Democrat who is so heavily connected with all these other people, that’s how he got his name in the hat. Because that’s all it takes, isn’t it, Eric? It’s truly amazing. Before we go tell people about your site, anything that you want to tell people about there at Eric Peterson.
It’s kind of eclectic. For those who aren’t familiar with it, you know, I call it the World’s best libertarian car site. Because as far as I know, it’s the only libertarian car site. You know, we get into all sorts of things. We get into the stuff that other car sites get into, which means car reviews, technical stuff, things having to do with what’s going on in the business. But we also have a lively conversation going on there about the things that you and I talk about, about political things. Some of them tie into cars, some of them don’t.
But all of these things are kind of related when you really think about it. And so that’s what I try to do there. I try to have a synergistic kind of bringing together of all these common themes and try to explain to people how they’re related and they’re not separate things that aren’t connected because they really are connected. That’s right. You talk about real cars, you don’t talk about these hypercars that are out there. Although even the real cars today are starting to get hyper expensive, aren’t they? Yeah, even the hypercars aren’t that interesting anymore. You know, that’s right.
Back in the day, you know, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini was really a spectacular car. I mean again, just like with the Jag, you lift the hood, look at that V12 engine, you know, and, and, and they had all this just interesting styling. Now they’re all the same plastic insect shapes. You know, it’s like this insect versus that insect. And the only thing that they really bring to the table is, well, this one is 2/10 of a second faster through the quarter mile. That’s basically it. Well, I’m waiting to get my praying mantis. You know, that’s the one that’s got the attachment there.
Some you get a clover in front of you. That’s your thing about somebody. That’s like a left wing bandit. You get a clover in front of you, you can use that praying mantis thing to grab them and flip them behind you or something. That would be great. Yeah, I’d buy that option. Would too. I would do. Always great talking to you, Eric Peters, epautos.com or Eric PetersAuto thank you very much, Eric. Good talking. Thank you, Dave. Merry Christmas to everybody listening. Thank you. You too. The Common Man. They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing. And the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away their most powerful weapons. Symptoms are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It’s time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you’ll find@thedavidknightshow.com thank you for listening.
Thank you for sharing. If you can’t support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thedavidknightshow.com.
[tr:tra].
See more of The David Knight Show on their Public Channel and the MPN The David Knight Show channel.
Author
