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Dec. 11, 2024 - The David Knight Show
55:53
INTERVIEW Eric Peters Auto Manufacturers' HUGE U-Turn on EV's & Self-Driving
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All right, joining us now, and it's always a pleasure to have Eric on, Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.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 for coming on.
Thanks for having me on, David.
Preemptive Merry Christmas to you and your family.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, we were just talking off air about the part.
What's your take on all of this stuff about Luigi and the things that are happening there?
Well, there's a lot of it that's fascinating to channel my inner Mr. Spock.
One of them is the juxtaposition between the way Luigi has been lionized in some quarters and the way that Daniel Penny, the man who intervened to prevent a serial violent criminal from attacking people again, was treated the man who intervened to prevent a serial violent criminal from attacking people again, was treated and charged, you know, and painted 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.
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 out.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which is understandable.
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'd 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 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?
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.
Enough is enough.
That's right.
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.
Let's talk a little bit about automobiles, because things are kind of turning your way.
We've got GM is 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 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 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 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 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 get a 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 device.
That's what I like to refer to electric vehicles as, called a charger, which needs a charge.
The charger that needs a charge.
That can be their advertising slogan.
The charger that needs a charge.
How about that?
Right.
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, it looks sort of like an early 2000s Chrysler crossfire that somebody stepped on.
That's right.
Yeah, from the front and from the side.
From the back, it looks like an air conditioning unit.
And they're so tone-deaf.
You were talking earlier, before we got on the air, 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, 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?
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 delusional.
It's a real twist on the idea of a drag race, isn't it?
Sure, right, right.
You 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 the Jaguar.
Karen's brother had a 12-cylinder Jaguar at one point.
He bought it used.
It was pretty old.
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.
And we would go and pop the hood and just look at the engine.
It was just a really provocative and gorgeous thing that got you interested in the car.
It was special.
It was something different.
And they've just completely frittered that away.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it used to be Jeremy Clarkson with the Top Gear guys.
You know, he's like, oh, Jack, oh, Jack.
You know, and he would always talk about it.
In the movies, they'd give the Jaguars to the bad guys, especially the Bond movies.
The Jags would go to the bad guys, and 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.
Yeah.
Not the kind you would want in an automotive context.
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've 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-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 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, you know, 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, and the company's not performing.
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.
Yeah, I don't keep up with the evolving financial ownership of these different companies.
Stellantis, what was their background?
What was the car line that they owned before that?
Or was it just created as a holding company?
Oh, Pujol and Renault.
You know, Pujol and Renault.
It's a French combine.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So Peugeot and Renault merged within two...
And Citroën 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 Peugeot's or Citroën's per se, you know.
Well, I've owned a Peugeot.
I would disagree with you there.
There is something definitely wrong with Peugeot.
Ethos is profoundly different.
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.
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 nothing wrong with that, 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, 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 Hazzard's General League to a Citroen, right?
What a crazy combination of the stuff that is.
And as you point out, that 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.
But the Spitfires and the MGs and things like that, they had this feel to them that I thought was a lot of fun.
It was this rawness, this unreliability.
They had a big personality, 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 this big muscle car is also a kind of personality as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, something else that we've figured away, I just wrote an article about this the other day.
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 2025 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 40 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.
As a matter of fact, I've got a thing here.
This was put out by NotTheBee.
They said Americans are driving older cars than ever, and 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, it doesn't have anything to do with reliability.
It has to do with socialism.
They can't afford a new car, you know?
We were changing out cars after three to five years, I guess it was, that Americans were switching out their cars.
But 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 U.S., But now we've 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 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.
Yeah.
I can remember and date myself here, but this is the ravages of inflation.
My sister is a good bit older than I am.
They got married in 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.
Can you imagine?
Yeah, now you can't.
You can't get an RV 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.
I've got another one for you that bears on this.
I have an O2 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 you and I have discussed before.
You 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 transmission, basic trucks.
Except the Hilux is $10,000 less in real dollars.
So that's a measure of our impoverishment.
In order to get something comparable to what you could buy back in 2002 for about $13,000 today, assuming you even could, if they allowed you to buy the Hilux, you're paying essentially that much more to get it.
It's obscene.
And I do my best to make people aware of this.
You're paying $10,000 in regulatory costs.
And mandates and things like that.
Absolutely.
And they gaslight people by portraying, for example, 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 heap.
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.
They're the visible.
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 been they're habituating people to not be responsible for controlling the car.
Because after all, 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 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 Stellantis and the CEO there.
Now that he's gone, there's a lot of people there that are talking about, you know, We're good to go.
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.
They did a really fine job with the styling of 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 priced it reasonably.
Yeah.
Look at the money they could save from imitating the sound of a V8. Not to mention your self-respect.
I never talked to Steve Kuniscus, who's gone now.
Kuniscus 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, he left just after.
Remember the Super Bowl ad?
You know, there was this elaborate ad showing the new electric charger and the sound that it was making.
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 imagine having been a party to that.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Well, it is a farce, isn't it?
It truly is.
As a matter of fact, Handy says, hey, Eric, my mom has a 63 Sports Roadster Thunderbird.
He says it's beautiful.
Yeah, that was the thing.
It used to be, as you point out, many times you said, yeah, it's been kind of anodized, all the styling and everything.
It used to have real styling with these things.
And uglified.
You know, there was 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 totalitarian regimes, they uglify everything.
And our, you know, our regime, it really is true.
There was a time when public buildings, they at least tried to make them look attractive.
Now, you know, they look, they have this sort of Bauhaus, industrial, awful, almost Auschwitzian 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 catfish faces and, you know, 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's right.
That you look at and go, you know, wow, man, that's just a great looking car.
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-Type in my living room.
Yeah, or on the lift, either way.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it is.
We talk about the architecture, the brutalist architecture.
That's the thing I really hate.
I went to the University of South Florida.
I went to open 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, they look like a really cheap imitation of a castle or something, you know, just very uninviting, very unappealing, just awful.
And And institutional looking.
And that's the kind of stuff that we have now produced in our society.
Roger Scruton 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 inshittification.
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.
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...
I agree.
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 endgame 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 concession to run the autonomous cars, which looks like that's what Elon Musk is going for.
But I think this, they, in the words of George W. Bush, they misunderstood the contempt the American people had for their plan.
And they're going to go out of business before they can make that happen.
They have a mercenary mindset.
You could put these same people in charge of a toothpaste company and it would be the same thing.
And if you look at the automobile industry in the past 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 him there was a comment that disappeared.
Okay.
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, a year or so ago, they edged out Accio 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 bum's 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 were 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.
This is a cancer that has been metastasizing across the entire industry.
And we've 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.
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 it's interesting that's why they don't make it anymore because it was actually practical and you know that you know the latest thing that the engineers 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 every everything that the government throws at them oh yeah they can't really This idea of the plug-in hybrid to deal with these electric car mandates.
And, of course, Michael Redcard 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, you know, 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 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 the rotary engine, they're 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.
At the core of this, the problem, I think, is, well, there are many problems, but 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.
And they try very hard to equivocate and rationalize, and they'll talk about, well, you could recover what was the latest figure, something like 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 at a Sheetz?
For 15 or 20 minutes.
And it's not just once a week.
Again, you get into this 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 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, 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 eat and do social stuff and all the rest of the 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're right.
You've got to go to work.
What kind of fantasy world do these people live in?
I know what kind of fantasy world he lives in.
He's a multi-billionaire.
For him, work is optional.
He can if he wants to.
Most people, on the other hand, have got to be someplace.
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.
They don't have an extra hour a week to budget just sitting around to wait somewhere.
Well, he knows that.
I mean, that's one of the things he's focused on with this Doge thing.
It's like, we're not going to let people work from home, that type of deal.
You've got to 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...
It's the 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 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, 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 they 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 really annoying.
I got a couple of comments here I wanted to get to.
Audi, modernretroradio.com.
Good to see you there.
He says, the reason CEOs are destroying their own companies' brands is because of New World Order and 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 we were getting it.
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 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.
You remember the game Scruples?
I don't know if you ever played that or not.
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 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.
That's It's going to be more frightening than the mirror, I've got to tell you that.
A million dollars 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 U.S. into a depression, he thinks.
Were the EVs a monkey wrench that was thrown into the system for that purpose?
What do you think?
It could well be.
And 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.
I would like to see him make cars great again.
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?
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 in 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 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've got a couple of things there about it.
But, you know, when you look at, he likes to go everywhere.
He says, well, future and whether we're going to 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 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, OK, I'm going to get out of it.
And 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, 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 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 in some of these countries.
That's right.
Because they want to throttle the food supply.
That's right.
You know, 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.
That's the despicability 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 50 years.
It's for you and me and all of the deplorables to deal with this new dark age 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 tip.
He says, happy holidays, everybody.
Just got an 84 Dodge Ram Custom 100 318 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 use a 3D printer.
And you're set forever.
Print your parts.
A 318 is 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 carburetor.
If you learn how to use some basic tools, you can do it for about $1,000.
Machine all the costs and parts.
Yeah, yeah.
That's going to be the wave of the future, is people starting to get out of what they're 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?
Uh, who?
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.
You know, 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's...
Trump stood by his side like a kind of spray tan wooden Indian.
He did absolutely nothing about it.
You know, I wonder whether, you know, 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, you know, for the benefit of the crowd.
And you've got the face, you know, the good guy, Hulk Hogan.
And then you've got the heel, the bad guy, Iron Sheik.
Maybe that's what Trump was referring to when he said covfefe.
Yeah, that's it.
And so Iron Sheik 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 I wonder whether that's what's going on with Biden and Trump.
Maybe they sit behind the curtain together and they have a beer together.
I wouldn't be surprised.
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 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 entrapment 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.
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 the Hunter Biden pardon is going to essentially, I think, force him to do something about it.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, they don't care.
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 who are guilty of it 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's enough already and we've got to cut taxes and all that, and there's an echo of that 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...
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 in 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 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.
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 you 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, 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 taxing off already.
Okay, so what do we do about this?
Are we going to cut some programs?
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.
So instead of saying, okay, we're going to have a truce, and we're going to reestablish a rule of law so that 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 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.
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...
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, I
agree.
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, 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 these gung-ho MAGA people will say, yeah, we've got to do that.
So, you know, we're going to have a new apparat.
Like, we've 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, soon are they 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 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 jobs stuff, right?
So DeSantis and Republicans in Florida said we're going to have mandatory e-verify, mandatory e-verify to get a job.
We're going to have to have an ID and biometric ID to fly it.
The real ID is kicking in next year under Trump, right?
The Republicans have always pushed back, 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 voter ID. It's ID, ID, ID. Online, you know, 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.
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 Homan.
Yeah, right.
What a thug 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.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
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, you know, 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.
This guy 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 agree.
He's still granny.
I agree.
He's an awful person, 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?
Well, sure.
It's kind of eclectic.
For those who aren't familiar with it, I call it the world's best libertarian car site because, as far as I know, it's the only libertarian car site.
So 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 today are starting to get hyper expensive, aren't they?
Even the hyper cars aren't that interesting anymore.
Back in the day, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini was really a spectacular car.
I mean, again, just like with the Jag, you lift the hood and look at that V12 engine, you know, 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 two-tenths of a second faster through the quarter mile.
That's basically it.
Well, I'm waiting to get my praying mantis.
That's the one that's got the attachment.
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.
That would be great.
Yeah.
I'd buy that option.
I would, too.
I would, too.
Always great talking to you.
EricPetersEPAutos.com or EricPetersAutos.com.
Thank you very much, Eric.
Good talking to you.
Thank you, David.
Merry Christmas to everybody listening.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You too.
The Common Man.
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 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 at TheDavidKnightShow.com Thank you for listening.
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