All right, joining us now. It's always a pleasure to have Eric on. Eric Peters of Eric Peters autos dot com. He talks about mobility and liberty and these are things that everybody needs, whether they realize it or not. They need to have private transportation. Good to have you on, Eric, Thanks thanks for coming.
Thanks for having me on, David and preemptive Merry Christmas to you and your family.
Well, thank you, thank you. Uh yeah, we were just talking off air about the Partons. What were you what's your take on all of this stuff about uh Luigi and the things that are happening there.
Well, there's a lot of it that's fascinating to channel
my inner mister Spock. One of them is the you know, the the juxtaposition between the way Luigi has been lionized in some quarters and the way the Daniel Penny, 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 happen to be black, so naturally that makes him a racist.
Oh yeah, yeah, and I talked about that very thing yesterday. At 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 a criminal trials and stuff is there in process. But during the process it came out that it was actually the cops who let him die. You know, he's still alive when they got there, and they chose.
They didn't want to keep them exactly exactly.
So, but well, 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, been rested forty two times. They had a warrant out for his arrest because he'd beaten up a sixty seven year old woman and he jumps on the thing and he starts threatening to kill people.
And it wasn't just Daniel Perry. It was a couple of 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 I Actually I'm encouraged because in New York, in New York City, a jury acquitted in yeah, 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, 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. But let's talk a little bit about automobiles because things are kind of turning your way. We've got GM has
now shutting down. It's Cruise robo taxi operations, Mary Bera, that you've talked about before. The CEO her vision of transforming GM into a tech driven company with fifty billion dollars from Cruise now seems to be distant, is a polite way to put it.
Yeah, you know, reality bites sometimes, doesn't it. Just a couple of weeks ago, the CEO of the European combine Stilantis, whose name is Carlos Tavares, was fired. He was pushed out of his position because things are absolutely disastrous for Stilantis right now, and particularly for Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram Trucks, which are the formerly American brands that were bought out by Stilantis 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. 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 people, 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, you know, which, which used to be kind of the rock Star 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, you know, They'll be a Toyota or Honda for a vehicle like that. And so the other 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 twenty twenty five model that you can get under the Dodge or Chrysler brands,
or even the Jeep brands. That's still available with the Hemiva and the supercharge version, the Helpcat 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'd like to refer to electric vehicles as call the charger, which you need.
To charge the charger were either it's 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 brandsers. 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 it looks sort of like a I don't know, like an early two thousands Chrysler Crossfire somebody stepped on.
Yeah, from from the front and from the side, from the back, it looks like an air conditioning unit.
And so tone deaf, you know, you were talking earlier before we got on here about you this woke mind virus as Elon Musk calls it, and he's right about that. That's actually a really good term. Uh that afflicts these car companies. You saw that ad that Jaguar put out a couple of It's another training show, you know, a story time. 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 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? So I just see these people in dragging you race to the store to get one of these overprized Jaguar Electric Stars.
It's all very sad because Jaguar was one of those brands that was extraordinarily passionate. Liones, who was the founder of Jaguar, said that a car is the closest thing that will 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 there's brother had had a twelve cylinder Jaguar at one point. He bought it youth.
He pretty 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 one of my friends, his dad had an exj 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've just completely frittered that away.
Oh yeah, yeah. I used to be Jeremy Clarkson with the top gear guys. You know, he's not a jat jack, you know, And he would talk about on the movies, I'd give the Jaguars to the bad guys, especially the Bond movies. The Jags would go to the bad guys and the Aston Martin would go to a Bond or whatever. But yeah, it still had this real presence, that had this real personality, and now it's got a drag personality, not the kind you would want in an automotive.
Part of the sue is because they've dissipated the what would be a good way to put this, the the ethnic identity. You know, Jag was a British brand, and then it got sold off to TATSA. No offense to Tatsa, no offense to Indians, but they're not Brits, you know, and they don't understand that that cultural tradition, and so you know, now they turned the brand into this sort of drifting, anomaloust thing that really doesn't have any identity
any longer. Yeah, it's 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 Davidson's 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 you know they're just running these 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 forty million dollars for the last year, that full year that he was CEO of Stlantis, So you know, the consequence for him
is a cushy retirement. You know, if you or I are and competent, if we are slipshot, 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 it's it's obscene. You know that you can get forty million dollars a.
Year to destroy a contract.
But it's not performing. It's performing. You're you're 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 plans, 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, yeah. I don't keep up with the evolving financial ownership of these different companies. Stillantis, what was their background, what were the what was the car line that they that they owned before that?
Or was it just created or no, it's you know Pouja in or no, it's it's it's a French combine.
Okay, all right, So Pouja and Renaud merged to become within.
To Cron is part of that family. It's just it's a big European combine and it was an inappropriate marriage because I mean, there's nothing wrong with Puga's or Citrons per se.
You know, well, I've owned a Pugo, I would I would disagree with you there. There is something definitely wrong with Poujols.
Is profoundly different. You know, how would 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 V eight charger. You know, they probably regard them with contempt. You know, they look at you as a as a Roobe, as a hick, you know, some kind of redneck who wants to do burnouts and so on, which is partially true at the point.
There's a lot about it that, right, there's nothing.
Wrong with that, right, and 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. 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 lead to a citron.
Right.
What a crazy combination of the stuff that is. And as you point out, that's really is a cultural issue. We're talking about the British cars and 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 this feel to them that I thought was a lot of fun.
It was this rawness, this unreliability, but it was all of this wood did They had a big personality, you know, a wood dash ten teeny tiny little car and all the rest of this stuff. All of that was part of the personality. In the same way that a Dodge charger with this big muscle, uh, you know, car is also a kind of personality as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, Oldmoda had a way.
And you know something else that we flurried away. I just wrote an article about this the other day. It's a it's an interesting kind of an etymological shift. Remember when there were economy cars, Oh yeah, you never hear that term you used it 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 twenty twenty five mile of your car in this country for less
than twenty thousand dollars. 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 fifty something miles per gallon, but the buying 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 Chavette
of the early eighties, which was available with the diesel. Now, I know people will laugh, and back in the day people mocked the Chavette because it took what probably sixty seconds to get to sixty 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 fifty five miles per gallon. Wow, and
diesel fuel at that time costs less than gasoline. That's all gone now, all of the affordable entry level kinds of cars, our economy cars, are no longer extant in this country.
Yeah, oh that's absolutely true. Matter of if I think got a thing here, this is put out by not the Bee. They said America is a driving old cars than ever. Nobody can afford to maintain them. Thirty years ago, the average passenger car was about eight point four years old.
Today that is thirteen point six. You know, Eric, I can remember when I was in high school, like fifty years ago, Volvo had an ad campaign talking about, well, you know, the average age of a car in Sweden is eleven 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 all the time, I said, anything to do with rlie building, it has to do with socialism. They can't afford a
new car. You know. We 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 or 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. Not long in the US. But now we got a
situation where it's at thirteen point six years. And as they point out this thing, it's because of inflation, it's because of higher interest rates, it's because of a lot of other things, but it's really the government of inflation and the government expenses because of regulations adding on all kinds of unnecessary bells and whistles as you're talking about. And they got a picture of a of a truck. Here,
let's see what model truck is this. This is a Silverado twenty twenty four Silverado EV Crew Cab one hundred and four thousand, two hundred and ninety one dollars. Or you can get it for just thirteen hundred and forty dollars 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 nineteen sixty nine. They got a house like the mid seventies, before the big inflation kicked in at the end of the seventies, and they got in at about what was the median price of a home at that time, which is twenty five thousand dollars. Now you can't mind, yeah, now you can.
You can't get an for that anymore.
No, you can't get a truck for that, you know, anywhere close to it. But it's amazing and that again is all government inflation, government regulation that is pushing this stuff up.
Yeah, I've got another one for you that bears on this. I have an O two Nissan Frontier I think you and I have talked about it, which is a little compact cup truck, pretty basic when it was new. When it was new, its sticker price was just shy thirteen thousand dollars. Well, I got to thinking about the twenty twenty four Toyota high Lux Champ, which I think you and I have discussed. Yea, yet buy it in this country. You can buy it outside of the United States, and
it costs thirteen thousand dollars. Now here's where it gets interesting to me. I plugged my thirteen thousand dollars original sticker price from my two 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 twenty three thousand dollars today, which would still be
inexpensive for a new truck in this country. However, my truck is very similar to the high Lux, both basic for someone manual transmission basic trucks, except the high Lux
is ten thousand dollars less than 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 two thousand and two for about thirteen thousand dollars today, you know, assuming you even could you if they allows you to buy the high Lux, 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 ten thousand dollars in regulatory costs about Yeah, as mandates and things like that.
Yeah. Absolutely, And they gaslight people by portraying for They say the high Lux is unsafe, and what that means is that it's not compliant with whatever the jot NENTITTL is of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Code as it exists pertaining to twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five model year vehicle. So what does that mean. Well, that means it doesn't have six airbags. It doesn't mean it's an uncontrollable leap. It doesn't mean it's prone to crash.
I mean, heck, even that you know, the eighty two metro that we were talking about a moment ago. Of course, that be considered unsafe today too, as far as the regulatory standard school, 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. They're the visit sunds. You and I have talked about that, and 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, though I have lane keep assists, I have automated emergency braking, I have all these things, so I can peck at my screen on the you know, 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 assistance. I've had died on some rental cars, and I think that is an accident waiting to have an 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 breaking stuff on. It didn't help with the accident rate. As you point out, it just adjust 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 this stuff. 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 Stilantis 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 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 V eight will him me come back? What do you think will they bring 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 V eight, which means they're still making the V eight. 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 a 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 V eight in that thing, I think it would sell like gangbusters, particularly if they priced reasonably.
Yeah, I look at the money they could say from imitating the sound of a V eight.
Not to mention the self respect, I mean, that's it's it's you know, I never talked to Steve Caniskus, who's gone now. Caniscus was the guy at Dodge that was largely responsible for the renaissance of the muscle car and all of the stuff with the 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 elector charger and the sound that
was made. And Aye, my god, I don't know what they paid him to do that head, but it cost him to 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 a matter of fact that Handy says, Hey, Eric, my mom has a sixty three sports Roadster Thunderbird. He 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 a kind of you know, anadized. All the styling and everything used to have real styling with these things and uglified.
You know, there was a book I read years ago. I think it's called The Architecture of Doom, and it was about the Nazis and it was about these brutalist buildings that the Nazis will put together, and the Soviets did the same thing. All of these these totalitarian regimes, they uglify everything, and our our regeat It really is true there was a time when when public buildings they
at least tried to make them look attractive. Now, you know, they look they have this this sort of Bauhause industrial awful almost Auschwitze, and look to them, and the same is true. You know, the same is true with cars. They're repellent. You know a lot of them have these gaping cat fish faces and you know the overaught, 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's what you look at it 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 jet or type in my living room.
Yeah, or on the left either way. Yeah, yeah, it is. Uh. We talk about the architecture, the brutalist architecture. That's the thing I really hate. I went to the University of South Faria that I went to open up like in the early sixties or late fifties 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 and from the outside that looked like a really cheap imitation of a castle or something, you know, just
very uninvited, very unappealing, just awful and institutional looking. And that's the kind of stuff that we have now produced in our society. Is Roger Scrutin did a great series about the importance of beauty. You know, you're talking about architecture, you're 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 in shitification that what is happening to everything, whether it's how a device works or what something looks like, that pretty much encapsulates it right there.
It's not elevating, it's not inspiring. It instills despair and sadness, and you know, it gives you the sense of hopelessness, and you know, this is not a healthy thing. And the people who who are driving this, I'm you know, I'm increasingly persuaded that they're malicious. There's something wrong with them, and you know they are trying to just tear everything down for the sake of it. It's a nihilist evil even mindset.
I agree. Well, you know, when we look at the the the idea of Antonio Gramsey, they're going to march through the institutions. You know, he said, instead of us fighting it out in the streets with a revolution like that 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 Stlantis 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 endgame was that they were going to be one of the last one or two the 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 concession to run the autonomous cars, which looks like that's what Elon Musk is going for.
But I think this they they the words of George W. Bush. They misunderestimated the contempt the American people 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 Lyyant in charge of who loved cars, and you had people are we okay.
Yeah, well okay, it's just telling hand there. It was a comment that disappeared and so okay, go ahead. Yeah.
And you know the founder of Toyota, you know, this was a guy who really loved the vehicle and believed in it, and for him it was a family concern, you know. And a year or so ago they edged out Akio Toyota, 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 this 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 increasing all of this electrification stuff.
They were dragging their feet more than anybody.
Yeah, they're smart on that part. Yeah, 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 flowing out of business because of all of the money that they've lost on pushing these electric cars. Board is not much better off, and General Motors isn't a bad way too. You know, this is a cancer that has been metastasizing across the entire industry.
And we've had our rhino governor here, Bill Lee, and Tennessee, you know, gave all kinds of money to forward to do a electric plant, just as it's all circling the drain and going down.
Yeah.
The Masda 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's fully electric drive. And you know, that would have been a perfect utilization for the Mazda rotary engines. This is so compact, wouldn't.
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 idea 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 redguard rig and 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 is from their point of use, a problem as opposed to know, people just want to get in their cars and.
Drive, well, they want it plugged in because that's their whole game, is a centralized control. They want you plugged into a centrally controlled grid. We've talked about that forever as well. But you know, the mas the 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 plug ins, 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 the rotary engine. They're charging batteries which were 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 COVID.
Yeah. At 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, yeah, 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, ten 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 thirty 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 sheets. I mean, you want to sit in at sheets for fifteen or twenty minutes, and it's not just once a week. Again, you know, you get into circle the drained 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 sheets 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 sheets, you know, for for fifteen 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, you know, retro futuristic, like drive in theater, you know, where people it's a destination where people are going to go to hang out and meet 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, are you right?
You got to go to work? Yeah, you know what kind of fantasy world of these people living.
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't 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 that he's focused on with this doge, things like we're not gonna let people work from home, that type of you've got to be there and and so
he pushes that with his employees. But when it comes to him, he's like in the top twenty on the Diablo video game worldwide, So he's got plenty of time on his hand when he's when he's not being a billionaire, right, that's right, when he's not hanging out in mar Alago, he's got other people running the companies for him.
But I'd be interested to see whether now that you know he's good friends with Donald Trump, whether Trump is going to rescind the seventy five hundred dollars tacks kick back and 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 just
looking for affordable solutions rather than electrified solutions. That's the government's desire for you. They're looking for better value, he's said, and they're looking for reliable internal combustion engines. Boy, he's spot on, absolutely spot on.
And I 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? 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 that didn't go. You could literally drive across the country if you felt like it, just just because you know, I wanted to take that away from us.
Oh yeah, yeah, it really is. You know, when when Karen and I got married forty four years ago, he went to London and 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, and 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 setting around waiting for their schedule, and it's like wow, you know, I'm just used to jumping in a car and going in doing what I want. The distances weren't that large, but you know, they're further than you could walk. But it was such a straining thing.
It was.
It was really annoying. I got a couple of comments here when to get to audi Modern Retro Radio dot com. Good to see you there. He says. Reason CEOs are destroying their own companies' brands is because the New World Order United Nations puppets. They wouldn't be in those positions if they weren't. I agree, sort of. Prosessions 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 we're getting I'm not seeing any revenue from that.
Unfortunately, people are willing to sell out, you know, particularly if they're hands at a really big check.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, 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. In 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 say, 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, and you're going to look at that man in the mirror or that woman in the mirror and either are 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, uh isn't going to help you.
Then that's right.
Another comment here and it disappeared. I think, oh yeah, here it does Wes Robertson. He says an automotive industry collapse could send the US into a depression of me thinks we're 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 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 tacks 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 thirteen thousand dollars Toyota Highlux 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 great, that 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 of clue. You know, we'll see what he does. You know, we've had a couple of I wrote it. I think he probably saw what I wrote about his awful choices to be the next surgeon general. And then 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 a pusher that he's tapped to be the surgeon general.
What does that tell you about you? 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've got a couple of a 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 in 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 twenty twenty. And of course that we were out of it for maybe a month or something, you know, 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 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, that's right, because they want to want to throttle the foodsply that's right. No, it's literally 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 they'll be immune from it.
Yeah, the apex predators.
A stickability of it, you know. They 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 fifty 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, you know, their new spin on it. Seth Lander again, thank you very much for the tippy says, Happy holidays, everybody. Just got an eighty four dodge Ram Custom one hundred three eighteen kubic inch for my sixteen 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 three D printer, and you're set forever.
Prittor part means a great engine, not a super powerhouse, but a good, rugged, reliable engine and something that can literally be rebuilt from the oil pan to the carb breader. You know, if you learn how to use some big tools, you can do it for about one thousand bucks the machine machine costs and parts.
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's going to be the way of the futures is people are starting to get out of what they're trying to and trap us in.
Uh.
And so you got an article because you you focus very uh carefully and always have on this so called pandemic stuff from the very beginning of the nonsense about it. You got an article up there about the rumors about pardoning Faunci. What do you think about that?
Uhh, well, the president was set with Nixon. You know people have talked about, well, how can you partner somebody who hasn't been charged, let alone convicted of anything. Well, that that happened with Nixon's Nixon was informally 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, well while Trump stood by his side like a kind of spray Tan Wooden Indian. Yeah, he did absolutely nothing about it. You know, I wonder whether you know there's a terment in pro wrestling. It's called kfeb. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but it's just basically about these guys who are orchestrating their performance, you know, for the
benefit of the crowd. And you've got you've got the face, the you know, the good guy Hulk, and then you've got to heal the bad guy, Iron Cheek.
You know what Trump was referring to.
He said, that's it, you know, And so Iron Sheek would hit Hulk over the head with the folding chair, and you know, the halt would stagger, you know, like he was going to fall, and then you know, and and then he'd recover his strength, and you know, then he'd come back and he'd slammed the sheet to the ground and everybody would share because the good guy won. And you know, I wonder whether that 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. And if Biden does part in fauci,
that will be evidence of that having happened. In other pieces 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 sixth 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, not litt 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 continuous 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 entrapman in history. And it was an entrapment
by Trump. And you know, his lawyers telling him, oh, no, you can't do anything about it. Is that non violent 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, 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 Hunter Biden pardon is going to essentially, I think, force him to do something about it. But you know, when you look at the 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 a CIA.
Well yeah, but it's more blatant now, and it's more controus. You know, I think they're playing with dynamite. I think, you know, you see things. Everybody sees things like this egregious cretan 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 it most some sort of a minor jaywalking style technical foul and fraction 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 popular uprising is that it's idle worshiped, you know, 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 Ramaswami can make.
All the recommendations that they want, doesn't mean anything. I've seen one commission after another over the last thirty or forty 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 on the wars and turned 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 coercibly. That's an anthem can have that you know, it's always got to be at the direction of some 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 statute.
Yeah, several stories. I yeah, fight fight fighting thing or something.
Yeah, yeah it is. I'm already going to spray paint the thing gold to.
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 what I'm saying. You know that it's been a misdirection. Just like the Tea Party, they started focusing on, well, we're taxing of 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 instead of saying, okay, we're going to have a truce and we're going to re establish a rule of laws 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 as a tag team match. And so you've 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 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 money 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, Well, I agree, And the people who would ordinarily be apt or inclined to resist question it if it were say Biden or Harris we're 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 selection campaign really hinged on this, you know, this tsunami of illegals that have been entering the country over the past four years. How exactly is he going to
identify and deport all of these people? How exactly is he going to do.
That national ib right.
My fear is he can sue some sort of a papers please Passport checkport 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 home mega 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 nine to eleven. So you know, now Americans are used to having to deal with these blue shirted goons to get on an airplane. Well, soon, are they're going to get used to having to deal with goons wearing other kinds of sh 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 move to the satisfaction of some government goon 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 job's stuff. Right. So DeSantis and Republicans in Florida say, we're going to have mandatory you verify, Mandatory you verify to get a job. We're going to have to have an ID and biometric ID to fly anywhere. The real idea is kicking in next year under Trump. Right, the Republicans have always pushed back against, but now they're going to 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 a voter ID. It's ID I D ID. Even online, you know, we got we can't control our kids access to social media, so we need to have an online idea to get onto social media
or whatever. All of this stuff is pushed towards an I D. 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 it's quite worrisome. You know, there's this authoritarian law and order undercurrent that that is behind MAGA, and it really bothers me. It's something that has long bothered me about the Conservatives.
Oh you must love Tom Homan. What fuck that guy is? He's a stereotypical bad sheriff in town, isn't he Well, it's amazing, you know.
Don't go by what they say, go by what they do. You know. I got into a lively debate with the number of people over this guy. I think his name is Chad Honis. Oh yeah, this guy was one of the most brutal of the COVID thugs he had. Not only did he have this pastor or 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 the DEA, because the DEA doesn't respect for the constitution.
Just tell us, wasn't 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. Oh I still granted, I agree all the person and Trump chose him. Think about what that says about Trump.
Oh yeah, absolutely, hang on care and keep it going for a second. And the other part this is. A listener pointed out to me, said, his father in law was a billionaire who is 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 side, anything that you want to tell people about there, Eric, 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. So, you know, when 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 hyper cars that are out there. Although even the real cars that they are starting to get hyper expensive, aren't they.
Yeah, even the hyper cars aren't that interesting anymore. You know. 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 look at that beat Paul of engine, you know, 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 will bring to the table is well, this one is two tenths
of a second faster through the quarter mile. That's that's basically it.
Well, I'm waiting to get my praying mantis, you know, that's the one that's got the attachment. This. You get a clover in front of you, that's your your thing about somebody that's like a left winding bandit. You get a clover in front of you, you can use that praying mantis thing to grab them and flip them behind you.
Something that would be great.
Yeah, I would do, I would do always great. Talking to you, Eric petersap autos dot com or Eric Peters autos dot com. Thank you very much, Eric, good talking very Christmas. Everybody listening, thank you you too. The common Man. They created common Core and dumbed down our children. They created common past, track and control us their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.
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