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Feb. 20, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:14:10
Delingpod 57: James Ruppert
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Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's guest, but actually, this week's guest is really different, and I reckon that he is going to make a lot of special friend avatars very, very happy.
This is going to be a car-tastic conversation.
And the cartasticness is all going to be on one side, because I know bugger all about them.
But my special guest knows loads about them.
His name is James Ruppert, and he's written a book called Demotorised the 200-Year War on the Motorists.
So I think it's a bit of cars, a bit of politics.
Is that right?
Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
And you've come...
Before I go on, you drove to my house in a car, in a BMW, and I looked at it and I said, because I don't know enough about cars, I said, James, is this a really shit car or is this a really good car?
And you told me it's a really good car.
It's a really good car.
It's a really cool car.
It's, for complete anorak nerds out there, it's an E21 BMW 3 Series, which means it's the first series ever.
Of the 3 Series model.
That was the model that basically broke it for BMW and established them as the maker of premium cars in Europe.
So what year are we talking here?
My particular car is 1979, but they date from 1975 to 1982.
So 70s, is that considered now to be just the really classic era?
Yeah, I think things are shifting forward and forward as people get older.
It's cars which were very relevant when they were younger.
So you're actually finding very early 60s cars and 50s cars are falling out of favour because everyone who drove those is dead now.
But 70s cars and 80s cars and very much 90s cars, 90s hot hatches, people are very into now.
But it's because people are there in their sort of middle 30s to late 30s can afford to buy a really good version of the car they always promised themselves or the car they crashed and reversed into a hedge or whatever 20 years ago.
So it means a lot to them.
That's so true.
But the upside of my vehicle is it's 40 years old, so you don't pay tax.
And I really like that.
And also I can go into low emission zones.
So as well as being cool, as well as being really good to drive.
And it's got, you know, it will keep up with the modern traffic.
There's nothing wrong with it.
The only downside is if I crash, I may die.
But apart from that, it's got a lot going for it.
So you die because there's no airbag?
Yeah, there's no airbags.
It's actually not too bad in crash protection for the era, but compared to modern cars.
But the best thing is to do, and it concentrates your mind wonderfully, is not to crash.
And I think if more people did that, we'd have safer roads.
Yes, although it's not always in your control.
No, it isn't.
But I think you can do an awful lot.
Do you drive like an old woman?
Is that what you're saying?
You drive defensively, especially if you...
If you've ridden a bicycle, if you've ridden a motorbike at any point in your life, you actually learn to see problems as they come up.
And if you speak to racing drivers who drive on the road, they actually drive well within the limits.
I spoke to one racing driver who said that he never listens to the radio.
He would never have a radio on or music on because he thinks that's a distraction.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's a bit worrying.
And do they drive within the speed limit?
Yeah, I think they do.
Do they?
Absolutely.
But I'm talking to a chap who was the first Stig, a chap called Perry McCarthy, and he did all the Top Gear stunts in the old days.
But he was very, very, you know, adamant that he would never, you know, compromise his concentration.
And he was very, you know, he basically thought people don't pay attention.
Of course they don't, because that's the way modern cars are.
They're designed to make things as easy as possible.
And that's something I do cover in demotorise as well.
Cars, you know, we're being dumbed down.
You know, when you can press a button and you can parallel park by a button, then that's taking away a skill.
It is, that's true.
Yeah, that's right.
So in few years apart, people won't be able to park.
It'd be as simple as that.
There isn't a button to press.
And I think that's what they're trying to do.
They're trying to de-skill us so that, you know, we'd have no reason to actually drive.
And that's where the self-driving cars come from.
I don't think anybody actually asked for a self-driving car because at the end of the day, that used to be a minicab.
You'd run up for a minicab and that would take you somewhere.
I really don't think many people, certainly people who like cars, don't want self-driving cars.
But I think for most people, they haven't thought about the long game.
Where is this going?
Where is self-driving cars taking us?
It's taking us to a future where we don't own cars and we won't be able to decide where and when we actually go to various places.
Yes.
We're playing devil's advocate here.
Why shouldn't one?
What's not to like about having cars that just kind of take you from A to B without you having to concentrate?
You can get your work done.
You can read a magazine if magazines still exist when you can do all sorts of stuff.
You can save time.
Yeah, I suppose there is an argument for that.
And if you're very rich, which is probably going to...
This is, again, where we're going.
The ordinary person who just wants to get to work or just wants to commute, just wants to take their kids to school, it has no relevance to them at all.
But again, if you want to be driven, there were things called chauffeurs in the old days.
But I suppose...
That's quite labour and cost-intensive.
It is, absolutely.
But I... I just don't see what the upside is for people being able to do this.
As I say, I think there's an underlying reason why they don't want us to drive anymore.
They really do want to restrict us.
And I talk about they, but I explain who that is.
Yes, you do.
Go on, because otherwise we're going to sound like they've got lizard heads.
Absolutely.
They could well have.
It's quite dangerous to go down this whole route when you start to question things, because people do think that you're mad.
You take the red pill.
Absolutely.
And you can either think, yeah, fine.
I mean, I can go into the reasons why I've actually done this book, and that might be the best way to do it.
I was invited on to Radio 5 and a report came out in the middle of last year.
It was an all-party report from Parliament and it was to do with the future of the car.
And basically they said the future of the car won't exist.
They were against private ownership of cars.
They wanted to ban diesel cars and petrol cars and have electric cars and eventually ban diesel.
Electric cars, they also said there as well.
And I don't think people thought, yeah, I mean, I was invited onto the programme to sort of stand up for the car.
So there was obviously a BBC presenter who was against me, and there was an environmental lady who was obviously against me.
That's standard BBC procedure, by the way.
Very, very much so.
You were the token freak.
I was the token freak.
I was the one saying, but yeah, I don't think this is a very good idea.
And we can extremely fast forward and everything is coming to pass at a furious rate.
In fact, we may only be 12 years away from banning from the sale of brand new...
This is Michael Gove's plan?
Yeah, that's right.
Which is...
Interesting.
I mean, on a just anecdotal personal note here, Gove is not, he's not Bonorzic.
He's not very good at driving.
He's not interested in cars.
So I do find it slightly odd that somebody, somebody who really doesn't give a toss about cars and never has done and never gets it should be in charge of deciding whether the rest of us get to drive them.
Well, again, it was something that we didn't really get to vote on.
Or if we wanted to vote for the Green Party, then that's fine.
That's very clear.
Yeah, if you want to ban cars and you want to change the way transport is, vote Green or vote Labour or vote whoever.
But we seem to have had a Conservative government that doesn't seem to be very Conservative at all, especially when it comes to this.
So when I was on the radio show, obviously, it was two against one.
The lady who was the environmental lady still had a car because obviously it was very convenient.
And so that, in a way, that scuppered a whole argument and reason for being there.
It seemed mad.
But I was ganged up on and they even said, what about the children to me?
They even used Al Gore.
You know, Al Gore, a completely discredited film, a discredited man when it comes to anything to do with the environment.
And, you know, I just said, look, I said, I'm very, very old.
And I just remember being...
I'm frightened by this.
I personally wasn't frightened, but I think I found it amusing when I was younger.
When they said, well, petrol's running out, they said there's going to be an ice age, there's going to be raging fires.
There was all sorts of catastrophes.
We don't hear much about peak oil anymore, do we?
Well, peak oil is another one that I go down because, yeah, absolutely.
We were told, yeah, by the year 2000, you won't be putting petrol in your car because there won't be any petrol.
And yet there's more oil around than ever.
And nobody seems to be explaining this.
But they've actually changed the definition of peak oil.
They're talking about peak extraction because we'll move to other things.
They're not saying we're running out anymore.
Whereas that's what they said in the 70s and 80s.
Yeah.
Right.
So, yeah, so it was just the fact that there seemed to be a lot of ignorance, and I didn't see many people, apart from me, sticking up for the car.
You know, I don't see the AA or the RAC. This is noticeable, isn't it?
It is.
Now, how is that?
You're right, you've named two motoring organisations there that ought to be really fighting tooth and nail for the motorists, and they seem rather to acquiesce in the establishment's attack on them.
They seem to accept this managed decline attitude.
Yes, they do.
Because they're part of the establishment.
I mean, I asked all motor organisations in the UK five questions that I put at the back of the book.
And there were only about five organisations, actually, that actually replied to me.
The AA and the RAC were amongst the people who completely ignored me.
I rang them repeatedly, left messages, emails.
And they were not interested in answering my really five basic, not controversial questions.
And I said to them, I will reprint what you have.
I won't comment on it.
It will just say, this is what the RAC said about the future of cars.
They weren't interested in doing it at all.
So, and actually the only people who would do it are the Alliance of British motorists who are, you know, by comparison to the ANREC, like a grassroots, and they will, but they don't get airtime.
You never hear them.
No, I've never heard of them.
But they're like on our side.
They're like, you know, yeah, let's drive.
They're very clued up on speed and, you know, roadworks and all those sorts of great things.
They know exactly what's going on, but they never get the exposure.
Let's pause for a moment.
You, I would suspect, are more representative of where the average British person is than the establishment.
You can tell me all about the establishment in a bit.
But surely we're still a nation of petrolheads.
Not without reason was Top Gear the most enduringly popular programme on BBC until it moved to Amazon.
So do you sense a sort of grassroot support for your view?
I think it is with all these things.
I think it's with all what we have, we have a media who are completely and utterly biased.
If you listen to the media about any subject, you would think, you know, you can get lost in the Brexit stuff.
But when people are actually asked, what do they think about things?
I think they deliver an answer that the media hate and do not like.
If you ask everybody about cars, everybody needs a car.
And it isn't just for fun.
I think half the time they just think, oh, people are just going to drive around and have picnics.
People don't.
The car is a fantastic tool.
It's helped us go to work.
It's helped us socialise.
It helps us get educated.
Poor birds.
Absolutely.
Actually, it's never worked for me.
I've never, ever, ever pulled a bird as a result of having a car.
And I had a bloody Opal Manta when I was at university.
That's a good car.
I had a red Opal Manta.
The number of shags I had as a result of that car, I would say, is zero.
So, I don't know.
I'm not convinced that girls...
Girls aren't as shallow as you'd like them to be sometimes.
No, that's absolutely true.
I think, yeah, girls should be given a lot more credit.
I think, yeah, they see...
They see through us.
Completely through us.
Yeah, that's right.
We're so transparent.
Right.
But the best thing is to find a very good woman to marry and then you don't have to worry about things like that.
I want to do a whole podcast at some stage on good wife material.
Ideally I want to talk to a girl, a sympathetic girl about this because I think it's one of the most underrated qualities in womankind, good wife material, which obviously is a range of skills.
But anyway, back to cars.
They are good for many, many things.
They bring us...
Let's face it, driving a car, that feeling of, we've all had it, that feeling of liberation you get when you pass your driving test and you think, where can I go?
I know, I can go anywhere I like.
All I need to do is be able to afford the petrol to take me there and it's fantastic and I can just go on and on and on.
That feeling, there's nothing like it, is there?
Absolutely not, no.
And I think that is what they want to take away from us.
I think that's what people in government would rather look at, a bus timetable.
And then we come to an interesting thing where I live and where you live, there is no such thing as a bus.
God, no.
Absolutely no.
And it means, and I know this from my daughter, my daughter would not...
She wouldn't be able to socialise.
She would not have a job.
She would not have had an education if there were no cars involved.
If we couldn't have dropped to somewhere or by the time she could drive, then she could go and do her own thing.
And I think that's completely awesome.
There's so many surveys.
And again, it's because everybody's based in London or they're based in a major city.
And they say, oh, young people don't like cars anymore.
They're not driving.
Well, maybe in London because you don't have to have a car because there's a tube at the bottom of the road.
There's a bus going past every five minutes and there's Uber.
And all of that.
But out everywhere else, the rest of the country.
And again, this is why what you see on the news, what you see reflected in the media is always incorrect, because the majority of the country doesn't live in London.
And one day they may understand that.
Yeah, yeah.
We live in the remote sticks, as you can see, and we're a three-car household.
You can't survive on...
You have to have, certainly, a car per adult, because otherwise you can't get anywhere.
You can't get to the train station.
I use trains whenever I can, not least, actually, because I find driving nowadays longer distances...
Because the police are so hot on speeding now, it's much, much harder to really enjoy your journey like you used to.
I mean, how old are you?
Actually, I'm in my 60th year.
I know I don't look it.
No, no, no.
Okay.
So you and I come from pretty much the same generation.
And as we've grown up, we've seen the car go.
We've probably caught the tail end of cars being a means of freedom and fun.
Because I remember my dad's Jensen and my dad's succession of Jags.
There was never any question that driving a car was anything but fun.
And I remember we used to drive down to Salcombe.
And I remember we had a holiday home there.
And I remember driving down in my dad's V12 Jag.
And we'd take turns to drive.
And I remember him berating me whenever I let the car go below 100.
Yeah.
He sort of said, well, look, what are you doing?
We've got to get there.
And I was thinking, yeah, but Dad, what about speed traps and stuff?
And I remember coming down that hill, when you get past Bristol, there's a sort of cut through the hills and then there's a long down bit and the police quite often wait for you on the motorway bridge.
And I remember going under that bridge at about a ton and thinking, oh my God, are they going to get me?
I'm being absolutely terrified.
But anyway, now they've got, as I discovered to my cross the other day, they've got these...
These cameras that can sort of see you from space, let alone from a motorway bridge.
Yeah, that's right, the average speed change.
I got busted in North Yorkshire, who apparently have the worst police.
I mean, you know, North Yorkshire police can't stop you if you're a paedophile rape gang, grooming and raping underage girls.
But they're really hot on you going 80 miles an hour on a motorway.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, again, one of the fascinating things, you know, looking into the book and the history of speeding, in fact, there were no speed limits until the 1960s.
You had speed limits in towns and things like that, but actually we were trusted.
And there was a golden age in the 1930s where I know there were, you know, a fraction of the number of people on the roads.
And if they were on the roads, they were posh and had a nice car.
But people were given a real freedom to actually decide how fast they wanted to go.
And I think on the whole, people respected it.
You could still get pulled off the road for...
You know, having too much alcohol or driving like a lunatic.
So, you know, it wasn't as if it was completely lawless, but there was still, you know, a respect to say, you know, we will allow you to drive as fast as you want, but, you know, you've got to do it in a safe way.
And it's very unfortunate that that can't be done anymore, although...
The capabilities of cars when it comes to stopping distances and things like that is, you know...
Well actually, so tell me, given motoring technology now, what do you think, should there even be a speed limit on the motorways?
Well, actually, they have been floating the idea of raising the speed limit to 80, but they're doing that because of electric cars, and they're doing it because of car technology, so that actually you will keep the same distance because of the radars on cars.
But again, this is one thing I'm fearful of, is that yes, it'll only be certain cars allowed on the motorway to do it.
My old Crock won't be allowed to do 80 miles an hour, but if you've got...
If you've got a Tesla.
If you've got a Tesla, then you'll be allowed to do it.
I've noticed this.
This seems to be another rich person scam.
All the people I know with Teslas have so much money anyway that...
They don't really need the taxpayer to be subsidising their electricity points, which is happening at the moment, it seems to me.
It seems to be a sort of reverse Robin Hood tax, where the poor are being, well, it's the Sheriff of Nottingham tax, isn't it?
The poor are being robbed to enable rich people to drive Teslas.
That's right.
And it's just the fact that the subsidy to actually buy an electric car has been there for so many years.
It's been reduced recently, but it was still 5,000 quid.
That's 5,000 quid of my money and your money.
I don't want to give someone 5,000 quid.
Again, if a technology is so fantastic, if a car is so good, people will buy it.
It doesn't matter how much it costs.
They'll want to go and buy it.
So you shouldn't have to do this.
Again, that sends alarm bells ringing in that, yeah, so there must be some shortfalls in this technology so that you have to give people money in order to buy it.
But as you say, the people who buy Teslas are very well off anyway on their virtue signalling.
I want you to tell me a bit more about the they, because one of the reasons I'm not dismissing you as a crazy conspiracy theorist is Is that the they you describe, I suspect, is not dissimilar to the they that promotes and benefits from the great climate change scare.
I mean, there's a whole massive money-making industry, and it's money-making combined with that kind of banstabatory zeal that the left has.
So can you maybe enlarge a bit on this they?
Yes.
I mean, it would have been, I mean, part of the reason for doing this book, and I've done it in a certain way, in that I've tackled all the aspects of motoring.
So I've tried to make it a bit funny, because that's one of the things I do in books.
I like to put bad gags in there.
But some of the people who buy my books have said this is like my serious album, in that there's lots of facts in it.
But I felt I had to do that.
But I also felt I had to, because I've known, you know, I've listened to you over the years, and I know that you've said that if you go down the climate route with things, and you get into science, then you can get really lost.
And lots of people can throw facts at you.
What they do is they throw pretend facts.
Since you mentioned it, I was going to mention it briefly.
So I was at Durham University the other day, and I love going back to Durham University to do debates there.
And in the drinks afterwards, I was surrounded by a kind of a semicircle of undergraduates, like one of the horns of the fighting buffalo in Zulu.
And they gathered around me to sort of effectively berate me for being a climate change denier.
And what I find is that when they...
The scientific...
In inverted commas, arguments for the climate change scare.
There are so many and diverse that it is quite impossible to shoot them down even if you're a scientist.
So I started talking about, look, I said there have been times before within human history where the planet has been as warm as it is now and there can have been no anthropogenic input because this was pre-industrial.
So you've got the Minoan warming period, the Roman warming period and the medieval warming period.
And I thought that this would be fairly obvious and a given.
And then one of the kids started presenting me to this case that actually the medieval warming period was actually man-made because there'd been some kind of...
because the wiping out, I think, of people in the Americas or something by cholera or...
This was a wacko theory I hadn't heard before, but it was presented to me with shining-eyed zeal, as though this is a really important point that I really ought to know about, and I hadn't.
And the idea that there could be any anthropogenic influence on climate in the medieval period...
It seems to be so astonishingly absurd, and yet, because I hadn't got at my fingertips the rebuttal, I was left sort of thinking, well, where do we go from here?
All I can do is contradict this person, which is not really a valid argument.
So, yeah, sorry, digression.
Carry on.
That's right.
But all of this, you can go into so many different directions the whole time.
The fundamental problem we have with the problems that we have now, it does stem back to politicians.
It's that politicians want easy answers.
So this is how we, with just two examples.
Firstly, with the diesel industry.
The example is that first of all, there was the climate meeting in Kyoto where they decided CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
So CO2 bad, right?
CO2 bad.
So then somebody goes, you do realise that there's less CO2 comes out of the diesel.
And so you say that to a politician, they go, oh, right, fantastic.
Okay, so we'll encourage diesels.
We've changed the tax system.
And the unfortunate thing is that manufacturers go along with this.
You know, they are so craven and they are so beholden to the politicians.
They just go, yeah, okay, then we'll just make more diesels because I suppose we're going to make more money.
But they don't question it.
So that's why we, you know, so they looked into it.
Okay, so less CO2 comes out.
But then they never saw all the noxious particles that come out, the really bad stuff that comes out of diesels.
So that was completely missed.
And then when we come to electric cars, again, someone said to a politician, you do realise these are zero emission cars, there's no emissions at all.
And the politician goes, really?
Oh, well, we better all have electric cars then.
So they're not thinking about it.
The production of the batteries, not thinking about the production of the car, they're never zero, never ever zero.
And again, yes, you can get into all sorts of figures with people saying, well, you know, after eight years, they pay for themselves and so forth.
But in both cases, where we have the encouragement of diesels, and then we have now the active promotion of purely electric vehicles, it's driven by politicians who see a very short-term...
Silver bullet answer to what they want.
They want to keep people happy.
They go, yep, we go for zero emission cars.
They're not zero emission at all.
And this is what I can't believe.
Again, AA and RAC, the very least that they should be doing is thumping people on the table and just saying, you know, this is completely wrong.
How are they not zero emissions, Tommy?
Well, they're zero emissions when they're driving around because there's nothing to come out of a tailpipe because there is no tailpipe, but they have to be produced.
So there is a manufacturer involved in making an electric car.
So if you're scrapping an old car, so you're getting rid of a car that's been made.
My car has been made once, 40 years ago, so actually I'm doing the greenest thing possible.
I wrote a book called Bangonomics about 26 years ago.
It did very, very well.
And the word bangonomics has fallen into use.
And maybe I should have copyrighted that in some way, but it doesn't matter.
But there's lots of people that do that.
People have done it throughout time in that they've kept something going.
You know, it's the most green way of doing things, repair things, keep it going.
You know, what's the point of getting rid of something, you know, just because it's got, you know, it's built in obsolescence because it's got a new colour or it's got a new, you know, silly thing.
Again, there was a chap called Vance Packard.
I don't know if you've ever come across him.
And he wrote a book about called The Wastemakers.
And he explained, and this was in the 1950s, about how General Motors and Ford...
And Chrysler.
They would simply just change a little widget on the car, change the styling.
It was all exactly the same underneath, but it would make people buy the next version of the car.
And that's effectively what we're in now.
I mean, we are at peak car.
In a way, there's not much more that you can do to cars.
And people are very excited because of the fact, oh, now we have electric cars.
It's a reason to shift you out of your old car into a brand new car.
We're being forced to do this by the government as well.
So...
Yes.
It's normally markets that decide this, and instead the government has decided to accelerate this program without considering the cost.
Because I'm sure I've read somewhere that electric cars...
But the process of manufacturing them and the process of, you know, things like the cobalt needed for their batteries, which is very rare and mined under the most appalling conditions in places like Congo, I think, that actually their environmental claims just don't stack up.
No.
No, that's it.
And also, once we all have electric cars, that's great.
Then the environment is, because they're already mentioning it now, then there's pollution from tyre wear and from brake wear.
And they say this, they say, well, you know, you're still getting pollution.
So you cannot ever please these people.
Hang on, surely there's no more tyre wear and brake wear than there is on a petrol difference?
No, I know.
But then that's the excuse that they will use.
They will say, okay, well, you've got an electric car.
I mean, also, you've got to research where the electricity to charge your car comes from.
That's surely the bigger worry.
That is huge.
Especially if, as seems to be the case, they're heading towards very expensive electricity.
I mean, electricity derived from offshore wind is going to be particularly expensive, three times probably the amount that fossil fuel energy would cost.
We're not exploiting our shale gas, which would be the obvious route towards providing the electricity that might fuel these cars.
So I think we're heading for something very expensive.
Extremely, yes.
I mean, when this was announced two weeks ago, Twitter, which is obviously a lunatic platform, But I said, you know, great, okay, we're all going to have to buy electric cars, but where is the electricity come from?
But so many people have so much faith in Ofgem, just saying, well, Ofgem don't see there's a problem.
Why are you concerned about this?
And so that is their answer.
It's just like, yeah, don't worry, it's all going to be fine.
So there's no questioning of it at all.
And this is why I get very disappointed by people who do my job, which is write about cars, is that really there should be a whole movement of people just saying, right, you know, let's bother people, let's start a movement, let's write loads of features.
And here I am, I'm the only person who's written a book, which at the end of the day, I could finish my career.
James Ruppa is, you know, a lunatic.
And he should not be given any...
Well, you do look quite like a lunatic.
I do, absolutely.
You do look like Dominic Frisby.
You know, you're one of them.
You've got the beard.
I know.
But I feel your pain, my fellow James.
Yeah.
Because...
I look at the economics writers now, economics and business writers in the Telegraph, for example, and I see people who ought to be writing about economics are instead endorsing every green shibboleth.
I mean, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has completely jumped the shark.
So has Jeremy Warner.
I mention these because these are writing in a conservative newspaper.
And Environment correspondence and science correspondence have all gone to the dark side.
And they're thinking, well, hang on a second.
Isn't your job to write about actual science rather than junk science?
Isn't your job to write about real environmental problems rather than imaginary ones about vanishing polar bears or whatever bullshit that David Attenham was going to come up with on his latest series to do with walruses or whatever?
Yeah.
So it doesn't surprise me at all to learn that motoring journalists have dropped the ball as well.
You mentioned the car industry.
Why is the car industry so shit at defending itself?
Well, they've gone completely woke.
I mean, they are obviously big globalist companies, but I mean, if you're looking for help there...
Amongst their number, you just won't get it.
And as I said to you, they should have stood up to the governments and said, no, going for purely electric cars is not correct.
You see, Toyota and Honda did a very clever thing.
They came up with a hybrid.
It's the perfect match.
It's not an ideal sort of car.
In a way, you've still got two engines.
You've got an electric one and you've got a petrol one, so it's complicated.
But the Japanese are building it, so it's very reliable.
But what it means is you drive into a built-up area, it switches off.
Or you're just driving on electric if they're so concerned about fumes.
Then hybrid is absolutely perfect.
You've got no range anxiety.
You can use it just like a normal car.
And that's a car they're going to ban.
Are they going to ban it?
Yeah.
So they're going to ban the sale of hybrid cars.
Why?
Why?
Because petrol engine bad.
Oh, I see.
Simple as that.
It's as simple as that.
Again, they haven't thought it through.
Whereas a hybrid for the majority of people, if you thought, oh, well, you know, you make loads of jokes about, you know, Prius and Prius drivers and so forth.
At the end of the day, it's a very reliable Toyota car and they will run for hundreds.
I hate them.
Yeah, they're horrible things and obviously you get in the back of one, you know, when you get picked up by an Uber in London.
But as a technical, mechanical item, it's brilliant because it will run on electric and then when you're out of town, it'll switch to petrol so you can go down the motorway and you won't have a problem.
You won't.
You don't have to plug it in.
Again, if you follow these people who are borrowing electric cars, journalists borrowing electric cars, half the time they're having a coffee.
So, yeah, I've just stopped for two hours to charge, so I have a coffee.
So you just think, if you had a real job where you had to go and sell something in Birmingham, you wouldn't be able to stop for two hours.
Okay, you might be able to catch up on some invoicing, but it's a constant thing about stopping and starting and where am I going to plug it in?
And again, if you borrow a car from a manufacturer, you actually get everything installed for you back at home.
You will have a point installed for you.
I'm missing a trip.
Absolutely.
I think you should sign up to become a motoring journalist.
But I mean, I wrote for The Independent for many years, who actively hate cars.
How did that work then?
I wrote for a magazine called Car, a very well-known monthly magazine, and they had an association with, when the Independent first came out, it is RU, if you remember the strap line.
And so after they were going for a couple of years, they wanted car experts, so they got people from Car magazine to do it.
So I was one of them, and I used to write about used cars and do general features for them.
Yeah.
So that was always very, very, very good to do.
And I think there was a...
I emailed you about this.
I remembered that I haven't come sort of just now to, you know, realise how badly we're treated by our politicians and masters.
In 1997, when Labour were first elected, they swore that they would get people out of their cars.
That was way back then.
Oh, did they?
Yeah.
And I thought it was fascinating to, say, to look into what they drove.
Now, this is something you actually can't do now because that was the early days of the internet.
So there was nothing to Google.
I don't think Google existed really then.
So you couldn't Google it.
So you had to phone up each government department and say, you know, what was John Prescott driving and so forth.
And they would actually tell you.
And they won't do it now.
I sort of tried to do it a few years ago and they said, well, for security reasons, you can't tell me other things.
But they could tell you all that sort of stuff.
So I wrote this big feature and the independent printed it.
It was fantastic that they did about what they all drove.
But it was so controversial that John Prescott phoned up the Independent and then the Independent phoned me up.
They were absolutely, they were scared out of their lives.
We've got the Deputy Prime Minister for you on the phone because he's really annoyed about what you've written, about what cars he's got.
And I said, well, I can write about cars if it's on your drive.
You know, it's in the public domain.
But he went a bit nuts.
Is this when Prescott acquired his name Two Jags?
Well, he was known as Two Jags before that, because I did speak to him about it, because he did have Two Jags, but he always had a golf, strangely enough.
Two Jags and a golf.
Two Jags and a golf.
But it was quite fascinating.
Obviously, at that time, famously, Tony Blair had a people carrier because he had all those kids and so forth.
But again, it was just sort of saying, well, look, and also the amount of subsidy that the politicians got to actually drive a car.
So never mind about the first-class rail travel, they would also get, in those days, something like 24 pence a mile.
It's something that you couldn't even dream of just as a private motorist, and that upset them hugely.
But in a way, that was the last time I did anything like that.
So what was this shocking revelation?
Was it the number of cars they had or the quality of cars they had at I think it was the hypocrisy, you know, saying we're going to get everybody out of their cars.
Well, you better start.
Why don't you all start?
And then maybe we might pay some attention to you.
But it was just the fact that they all needed cars.
Like, we all need cars.
Like, everybody in the country needs cars to actually live a life and work and get on with things.
You can't do anything by a bus timetable.
If you're working a shift and you start at two in the morning, you're not going to get anything.
People who live in cities have no imaginative empathy for people who live in the country.
They really have no idea how impossible it is to get around.
And I'm sure special friend avatars in America and Australia and places like that who live in the boondocks, they're going to totally sympathise with this and be aghast at this war on the motorist, which is being conducted by townies.
Well, that's right.
But it's also rather like the parking in Northampton.
I mean, there is workplace parking charges so that if a company has, you know, a dozen spaces, they will get charged 500 quid a year per space.
So, but, you know, again, it doesn't matter whether you do live in the town or in the countryside.
If you had to get to work at two in the morning, there's no way, you know, a bus isn't going to take you there.
You know, you've either got to pay for a cab, which is a lot of money, Or you've actually got to park there.
But again, you're not doing it for fun.
You're not doing it to show off.
You're doing it because that's how you get to work.
And I don't think any local politicians or national politicians take this into account at all.
I need to make some coffee, and I don't know whether you drink coffee, but I think I'm going to drink it anyway.
But before we go for our coffee, I wanted to ask you, and we'll continue afterwards, I wanted to ask you, your car, your 40, well, 1979, you said, didn't you?
Yeah, it's 40 years old.
Apart from the lack of airbag...
Can it do all the kind of road holding things that cars can do now or is it objectively more dangerous?
No, it's a very comfortable car.
It's a very sophisticated car.
It's a car that if you drove it in 1979, if you stepped out of an Escort into that, you'd go, wow.
So it is that good.
And it's actually got air conditioning.
It was factory fitted air conditioning.
So it's actually got a creature comfort from now.
And what size is the engine?
Two litre.
Two litre.
Two litre, six cylinder.
So it's a large-ish engine, but it's basically a luxury small car.
Because cars now seem to maximize engines.
What I mean is that they seem to have smaller engines and get much more out of them.
Is that right?
Yes, they do.
I mean, they're very, very efficient, especially, you know, the petrol engines they have now.
They're fantastic.
Because with all of these things, if you ask a manufacturer to do something, you know, make a car run on tinfoil or, you know, soil, I can guarantee you that they will do it.
But they're just being led down the wrong path.
I suppose what I'm leaning to is in the way that we had Concorde and then we lost it.
And some previous guests have argued that actually we are losing IQ points every generation.
And that one of the symptoms of that is that we actually were more capable of high-tech engineering and stuff in the 1960s and 70s than we are now.
And I was wondering in the same way, you've got your BMW, I've got my Golf 4 Motion with its 4x4, 2.8 litre engine, V6. Is that a better car than they're building now?
Well, it's very different.
It is comparing oranges and apples, really.
I like oranges.
Yeah, I know.
They're juicy.
They're juicy in a way that apples aren't.
But I would like to think that X potentially, I mean, it's a terrible cliche that, yeah, I read Dan Dare and Dan Dare told me I would be having a hover jet car by now.
They promised us jetpacks.
Absolutely.
And that's what I haven't got.
It's a bit like I'm watching reruns of Lost in Space, the original 1960s I watched as a child.
It was set in 1977.
1997, sorry.
And, you know, families are not lost in space now.
So we are just so behind the time.
I'm very disappointed.
I mean, I loved all that.
I stayed up to watch moon landings and all that sort of stuff when I was young.
I loved all of that.
And, yeah, and again, that's what you get with the environmental.
The environmental people are so depressing and so basically don't do anything.
I can't identify with that at all.
It's a very backward religion.
I actually want things to be better.
I would love it if things were made better for us, but they don't seem to be.
I'm sensing a book title, actually.
Something like The Shittification of the Future, whereby...
The really exciting future we could have had and that technology was inexorably leading us towards is being stolen away from us by bureaucrats and technocrats and Puritans and virtue signalling politicians who just don't want us to enjoy the fruits of technology.
They want us to go to a sort of, well, travel around in coracles and live in yurts and all that other Extinction Rebellion shit.
That's right.
Well, I quite look forward to co-authoring that book with you.
Well, actually, you can do it for me.
I've got loads of really good ideas that I never do because I'm just too lazy.
Let's have the coffee and then we'll talk some more.
A phenomenon I noticed, what, about 10, 15 years ago, is that houses...
You drive past a bunch of council houses or sort of not expensive-looking houses...
And you see parked in the driveway, cars more expensive than I could ever afford, or would think to afford.
And this seems to have spread all over the country.
This is people buying their cars on sort of...
It's not like HP, is it?
It's something else.
Right, yeah, they're PCPs.
Yeah, I mean, in the old-fashioned days, it was like HP, but...
This is sort of a circle of despair, really, because you never actually own the car, so you will run it for three years.
You can't run it over a certain mileage.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you've got to look after it to an extent.
extent you may have a package where which includes servicing and things like that and after the three years you give it back but there is obviously money that's still owed on the car and it's a whole program so the only way to make it work is to actually buy another car.
It's a sort of a huge scam.
scam operated by the car manufacturers in that they make so many cars they have to do something.
So it was essentially somebody devised this trick to pump prime the car industry which was otherwise failing.
That's right yeah.
Because they do effectively make more cars than they need to because car factories, you can't just turn them on and off like a tap.
You know, they do have to work at a certain rate.
So they're always producing brand new cars.
And again, they will register cars to boost their sales so that the cars aren't actually sold, they're just registered.
And they'll go on a deal a lot and they'll be...
Actually, those are the cleverer cars to buy because...
You're going to save yourself quite a few thousand pounds on those, but effectively they are brand new.
They've just had one previous keeper, which has been the manufacturer or the dealer.
Oh, I see.
So when you go to one of these car lots, what are you looking for?
Well, it depends what you want to spend.
I mean, I come from the car trade.
I saw firsthand people buy cars and then bring them back and they weren't necessarily the cars that I was selling.
And you would say, well, it's only worth this because, you know, immediately you take it.
It's the old thing.
You take the car out of the showroom.
It's worth, you know, maybe half, maybe 60%, maybe 70% if you're lucky.
That's terrible.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is.
I mean, again, people are buying cars because it's show-off.
It's a one-up on Nextdoor.
It's to make yourself feel good.
And there's nothing wrong with that if you want to do that.
But you've got to realise that you are losing real money.
And I think people went for the personal contract purchase, the PCP, because it didn't feel like you're spending as much of your own money, because obviously you're putting a deposit down, you're paying a monthly amount.
But because it is an ongoing scheme, you've either got to pay off the balance at the end or put it into a new car.
So that's why people are in this cycle, because you just think, oh, you know, I'm going to pay, you know, five, six thousand pounds.
I'll have nothing to show for it.
I might as well get another car.
Yes.
So then people are in this cycle and that's it.
And it's difficult to get out of.
And actually for some people you can understand because they want an easy life.
You know, that's fine because they don't want the car to break down.
So lots of people all over the country were persuaded to spend more money than they can afford on this, to get caught in this endless cycle where they have to keep spending more and more money.
Presumably it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, The happiest, the unhappiest I've been with a car, I bought a Skoda Yeti, or I didn't buy the Skoda, I never owned the Skoda Yeti using the system.
And even at the end they sting you, where there's a man comes round to your house and he examines every tiny, tiny scratch on the car, just on the paintwork, and knocks off loads.
That's right.
It's like being given a sort of rectal examination.
It's really painful and embarrassing.
And you think, I didn't want to sign up for this.
Whereas my Golf, which I bought for £2,000 off eBay, I mean, it does cost me quite a lot every year at the garage.
Is that normal?
I mean, should I be laying out £500 here, £250 there?
It was expensive.
If a car was expensive when it was new, it's always going to be expensive to maintain.
So that's always the best way to look at it.
But still, I'm probably doing better with that car.
You're up on the deal.
That's right.
And plus, you're having fun.
Yes, yes that's true.
So is it going to, is it this Ponzi scheme type thing, is it going to employ it at some point?
It could do.
It depends if there's sort of a world economic shift and people start defaulting on these things, then yes, it could do.
But certainly this is the way that you will have to buy electric cars because you don't buy the batteries because you have to lease the batteries because batteries are eventually run out and they have to be replaced.
And again, this is another elephant in the room that is never talked about.
But as we know with A mobile phone with a laptop computer, the battery life decreases.
So, okay, it might take eight years to decrease, but they're very expensive to buy new, and they become unaffordable for all ordinary people, in that when, you know, just somebody who wants to get to work can only buy an electric car, the only ones they can afford are the really cheap ones, and that's going to have a very poor battery life.
But all these things, again, these...
These are not being explored now.
These aren't being thought through.
There's no one in government thinking to themselves, oh yes, we should think about this, because they're not clever enough.
So you're saying when you buy an electric car, you're not really buying a car.
You never really own it or it has no value because the battery, which is about the main component, is just going to run down to the point of uselessness.
Yeah, it's going to have to be replaced at some point.
How many years, you say?
It depends.
I mean, there's again, because we're at such an early stage, people haven't owned the cars long enough to actually find that out.
But what people are saying that maybe about eight years, you know, you will probably have to, because there are a number of cycles that you can have with all batteries.
And once they reach their, you know, maximum amount of cycles that they can be recharged, then they're done.
And I think it's as low as 70%.
You've got 70% in a battery.
It's not good enough to have in a car anymore.
All those voters, those working class voters in the Midlands and the North who lent their vote to the Conservatives, I imagine they are your constituency and I imagine that very few of them have any idea of what this government is trying to do to cars.
And if they do find out, do you think they're going to be happy about this?
I don't think they are.
I mean, I'm very lucky.
I speak to real car owners.
I speak to people who actually go out, pay their own money for cars.
Some of them are enthusiasts, but an awful lot of them, because actually buying a car is quite a distressing experience.
I find it fun because it's what I do.
But for a lot of people, they'll do it maybe once every five years.
And it's a big deal.
And you see, one of the things coming up now is people are saying, well, if they're going to ban the sale of, you know, petrol and diesel cars, my car is going to be worth less anyway.
You know, what the government are effectively doing is, you know, making cars worthless after, you know, a certain period or certainly worth a lot less.
But yes, absolutely.
I don't think this was thought through at all.
I think if people had been given this as one of the choices when they actually voted, they might have said, ah, I think you should think about that a tiny bit more.
Because it's been brought forward.
You know, it's been brought forward just this year.
So it's apparently 12 years away.
And I could see them saying in maybe, you know, a few months' time, ah, let's make it 10 years.
Then it'd be, let's make it five years.
And it's creating uncertainty.
And there's people who build cars.
I mean, if we had like a massive...
Electric car industry, and there was a British Leyland of, you know, battery cars here, and the government would say, yeah, let's ban it all, because we make the best electric cars.
Okay, I can see a case for that, so maybe they're doing it in our interest.
But I can't see any upside to this at all, because we don't effectively have a car industry anymore.
Yes.
I'm old enough to remember a time when politicians wouldn't stop banging on about the car industry and about the threats to the car industry and about what effects this might have.
And imagine if Nissan pulls out of Sunderland or wherever.
Has that changed now?
Have we given up on cars?
Aren't I right in thinking the big motor show in Germany was a disaster this year and the German car industry is absolutely screwed?
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, the traditional motor show is being, you know, paired back.
And I think it's the Frankfurt, which isn't coming back.
Huge show.
So that's the end of an era?
No Frankfurt motor show?
No, that's right.
Oh my God.
What does that mean?
Tell me the significance of that.
It's very strange, really, because if you speak to, again, the ordinary person, they couldn't care less about it.
I mean, I've spoken to people about this saying, well, let's do a big feature on this big show coming up.
And I say, well, actually, the real car bar couldn't care less, because half the cars they have there are what's going to come in the future.
It has very little relevance.
The actual car bar, it's an industry circle jerk thing in that, you know, they're all there.
They've all got to be there.
But increasingly, it's a lot of money to spend on building a stand and fanning about for, you know, a few weeks.
And they are not getting sort of even a promotional return on it.
And you can't even have Dollybirds on the stand now.
Sadly not.
No, I remember those great days.
Well, why would you not?
It just seems to me so wrong.
Given that, look, if you're a fit-looking girl of, what, 17 or 18, or however old they have them, it's good money.
It is.
And, hell, if you've got the looks, why not make the most of it while you can?
Well, there's...
Well, there's a lot of car journalists and sports journalists who should be very ashamed of themselves for being so superior about all of this because the last, actually, a few years ago, you would get sanctimonious car journalists a lot younger than me who would say how dreadful it is.
They would take a picture, but they would say, isn't this awful?
But they do genuinely mean it.
They do think it's demeaning to women.
And at the end of the day, they are just being paid to be there.
It's a job for them.
And it's a bit like the Formula One.
I mean, you know, we're going on a slight tangent.
And this probably could be the end of my career.
I'm saying I don't see anything wrong in that.
They still do it in BTCC. You still have...
The grid girls there.
What's beauty?
The touring cars?
Oh yeah, the touring cars, yeah.
Which is a working man's Formula One, which is a very good...
I guess what my friend, Matt Neal, he's my childhood friend.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh wow, really, you know Matt?
Yes.
My daughter will be very excited to know him.
Oh really?
Yeah, because she thinks he's great.
Well, the thing is, it was just Matt who used to, Matt and Sophie, his sister, we used to go on holiday together.
Oh right.
So all our family holidays when we were young, Dick and me and Matt and Sophie, and Helen actually, my sister, my sister.
And so we don't really think of him as anything other than Matt, who drives a racing car.
So he's done well.
He's done extremely well for himself, because he's involved in the actual team itself, isn't he?
It's a team that he runs, and he's won the BTC. It's so boring.
Formula One used to be fantastic.
Obviously, I come from Lauda and Hunt and it was, you know, unfortunately people died.
I've seen that.
I've seen that movie.
Yes, but that isn't it.
Sorry, mate, but isn't that slightly the point?
It really is.
You know, people were on the edge and it made it exciting and I love the fag packet cars.
As well, you know, the Rothmans cars, the JPS cars, they look brilliant.
Black JPS. Yeah, but it was, yeah, it was a man's job to drive a Formula One car and I think it was a lot better and a lot more exciting for that.
It was just a great time, it was interesting, but now it's corporate and it's, I suppose, very reflective of what the modern world is.
The circuits are boring, you can't tell the difference between them.
The racing isn't exciting and I... Because I went to, I got flown to Silverstone once in a helicopter, which is the only way you can get in and out because it's so crowded and miserable.
And I thought it, as you know, they spend a lot of money on hospitality.
And so you're drinking, you're in the tent drinking champagne.
But the thing they don't tell you.
Before you go, it's that you can't hear a bloody thing because there's all these bloody cars going...
So you've got the nice drinks and attractive girls, but you've got no ambience at all.
It's all horrible noise.
It is.
And also, you don't know what's going on.
If you know who's winning, I'd be very, very surprised.
So tell me, why is it so boring?
Why is it boring now?
I think the drivers don't seem to have a personality at all.
The rules are very constraining.
I mean, years ago, people could do exciting things with cars.
You know, one week, someone's, you know, put, you know, like a huge wing on the back.
All right, so we're all put wings.
But because they've got such tight regulations around it, it really should be, okay, have more than one class, but it should be do whatever you want.
This is Formula One.
You know, you want to put, you know, a jetpack on the back.
I totally agree.
Oh my God.
You want it to hover.
It'd be like Wacky Racing.
Yeah, it would be like Wacky Racing.
Make it hover.
You know, make it a mile long.
Come on, that's cheating.
Hovering.
Come on.
I think in our new motor racing rules, there's got to be at least wheels touching the ground.
Otherwise, they're aeroplanes, aren't they?
Or hovercraft.
Yeah, they would be hovercraft, wouldn't they?
But...
But it's a lot, isn't it?
No, I agree.
You'd have this incredible battle between the manufacturers.
And so, obviously, what we do, we increase grid girls exponentially.
You could do whatever you liked to the car.
I think probably what we'd do is we'd reduce the safety regulations so that there was much more driver risk.
Because actually, look, I'm sorry.
You kind of want to be on the edge of your seat.
Are they going to survive this when they overtake the hairpin bend?
Well, this is it.
I think that's why people do like the BTCC, because there is contact.
There are splinters of wing going and doors going, and there's drivers getting in each other's face afterwards and saying, do they?
Yeah.
It is.
That's why the working man likes to do that.
I usually go to Snetterson and watch that once a year, and it's fantastic.
Isn't it weird, by the way, That racing driver who's in a coma because of a skiing accident.
What's his name again at the moment?
Schumacher.
Schumacher.
Yeah, the greatest, one of the greatest drivers.
Do you think he was the greatest?
I think, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you can't sort of...
I mean, it's a bit like Hamilton now.
I know he's in the best car.
It's like Schumacher's in the best car, but they make sure they're in the best car.
And so they can drive really well, but they're probably very good at politics, which is why they are where they are.
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you.
Do you reckon that had they been competing in the days of Hunt the Shunt and Niki Lauda, do you think they would have cut the mustard or do you think they'd have been too bland?
I think some of them would have struggled.
I think Hamilton is actually a fantastic example of the power of persistence because he had no money behind him or anything.
And it was really, you know, the family going to McLaren and saying, this is the future.
And fortunately, he could back it up with his driving skills.
But that doesn't happen with a lot of people.
There's lots of fantastic drivers who couldn't get the sponsorship, who weren't clever enough.
And actually, he's been clever enough to get in his position.
So he deserves whatever he has.
So he might have done well.
But I do agree with you.
Because a lot of them, it's because their families have got lots of money.
So they sponsor the team.
So they get into the driving seat.
Whereas with Hunt and also with Lauda, Lauda had to do an awful lot, although he didn't come from a poor family, but he still had to work really, really hard to get where he was.
But again, he was a remarkable...
I mean, Laudo, who died, I think, just before Christmas, was a remarkable person.
I mean, again, I don't think anybody would have been able to have got into the driving seat of a car weeks after being so badly burnt.
There isn't anybody who could have done that or who would do that now.
They really were heroes.
Well, that's what I was hoping you were going to say.
I was hoping you were going to tell me that, look, that none of these people would have beaten Fangio or Stirling Moss or whoever, because actually the drivers of yesteryear were cut from a more dashing cloth.
Absolutely, and Graham Hill, but also the major difference, although motor racing isn't my specialist subject, but the drivers of yesteryear actually drove in different classes.
So people like Jim Clark, he won the British Touring Cars.
So that's how versatile he was.
They would drive in rallies.
They would drive in the American series because they needed to in order to get paid money to live on.
But they were so versatile, they could drive in all these different disciplines.
And that's what none of these Formula One drivers can do now.
I mean, actually, the most skilled drivers are probably the rally drivers because that is remarkable how they keep cars on gravel, basically.
But in the old days, they did everything.
And that's what I think makes the older drivers better.
Is America our last hope, do you think?
Trump's America.
Because I can see that we're conducting an experiment now, which I don't see how we're going to reverse in the UK under this green tyranny that's being sold to us in the name of Dominic Cummings.
I worry that...
Dominic Cummings' vision of the future, which is that he thinks that you can run an economy through technocracy and pouring government money into science, which I don't believe actually works.
That combining with Boris trying to please his green girlfriend and Gove having got the green bug for some bizarre reason...
That combination of a very, very efficient sort of uber-spad and a Prime Minister who's just integrating virtue signalling and Gove seems to me a sign that we are doomed, you and I, certainly, and all those of us who believe in petrol.
Very sad it is.
I can't understand what's happened to old Boris because he used to write car reviews.
He did.
Did he used to do them in GQ? I think he did.
Yeah, he did.
Before GQ got totally touched.
Before GQ, yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, his ear has been turned and maybe it is his girlfriend.
I don't know.
But again, to repeat it again, I don't think anybody voted for this at all, because they would have voted Green.
You know, I would have voted Green if I didn't want to drive a car anymore.
But this is being done for me by a Conservative government, so I don't really understand that.
We didn't get the option from any of the parties.
There was no...
I mean, it's not like Labour would have been any better.
No.
That's the problem.
We haven't been given a choice.
There seems to have been a kind of...
We won the Brexit vote, but there seems to have been some kind of coup conducted by the kind of people who are essentially the Remainer class.
Yet again, the Remainers have ended up on top in defiance of what the British people actually want, would you say?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
The real world isn't on Twitter, but everything seems to be decided there and everybody seems to want to please everybody there.
And I really don't understand why we have gone down this route.
I mean...
My book, Demotorised, is trying to put this right.
It's trying to bring it to people's attention.
People can write a better book than this.
People can write a more scientific book than this.
And what I want it to do is to spark a tiny bit of debate.
So, you know, they can say, well, Ruppert's a lunatic.
But maybe explain why.
It might make people look into things a bit more.
And that's what I want.
But there just seems to be a wide acceptance.
And unfortunately, this is within the car industry.
And I do quote...
Most of the big manufacturers, they've all signed up to this.
You know, it is a big cabal.
In the same way that the big oil companies have signed up to the anti-CO2 agenda.
Yeah, that's right.
They've all promised that we're going to sell fossil fuels without selling fossil fuels in the future.
Yeah, that's right.
How does that work?
It's extraordinary.
That's the subject of a whole other podcast, corporate cowardice.
Yeah, but the manufacturers are the most cowardly of the lot.
And then you find it quite strange because then we have the VW cheating with the emissions.
So what they did was actually very clever.
That's what engineers do.
There's a fantastic little chip on board that says, oh, I'm being tested for emissions, so I've got to do this.
I've got to lay down and I've got to alter things and I've got to reduce it.
How fantastically clever that is.
It is.
It's brilliant, isn't it?
German technology being dedicated towards evading the testing procedure.
Absolutely.
So they did that.
And then also Volkswagen were also found to be testing the emissions on monkeys.
Oh, you don't know about that.
Absolutely, you do have to read it.
But yeah, they actually put monkeys in perspex cages.
They put obviously the fumes in.
It's a bit like the beagles smoking years ago, because you'll remember that.
And then they would look at the lungs and the tract and the various passages to see how they were affected by it.
And so I wouldn't say there's very many companies could actually come back from that.
So if a major company was found to be testing emissions on, and they also did it on humans, they did that in Germany, they tested the monkeys in an American company.
Well, I do allude to that.
But they did the monkeys in by with an independent testing facility that was, you know, as far away from them as possible, but they still got caught out.
And to me, I can't understand why in this virtue signaling woke world, a company that's tested things on an animal.
Which I think we can all agree is these days a very wrong thing to do, never mind testing them on humans.
But they seem to have got away with it.
And actually, Volkswagen sales went up, you know, the next year.
This is either under-reported or people have just swept it, you know, to one side and said, oh, well, don't worry about that.
That was just an aberration.
But also...
When it came to cheating, the only people that Volkswagen settled with are the most litigious.
So in America, they've settled.
In Canada, they settled.
In Europe, apart from a bit in Germany.
So anybody who bought a Volkswagen here that was a diesel and had the cheating software, fine.
Right.
I think...
Steve Malloy has written about the way that the Environmental Protection Agency in the US has actually conducted particulate matter experiments on humans.
Is that the same thing?
You're talking about particulate matter that monkeys are being exposed to fumes?
Yeah.
But it wasn't EPA. This was Volkswagen themselves.
Yeah, sure, sure.
And they did it with some other manufacturers.
But do we know what happened to the monkeys?
Are they...
I don't know whether they're living the life of Riley in the Caribbean on their compensation claims.
Well, they wouldn't do that.
Come on.
They wouldn't rehouse them in the Caribbean.
They might give them, I don't know, in Darmstadt.
What happens in Darmstadt?
Maybe that's a place you would send a monkey to retire with lung injuries.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know about the condition of the monkeys at this time, but it is the fact that they did use monkeys.
Right.
And my point with that is that I think if any other company did that, they would be shut down.
You know, there would just be such, you know, an outcry, but they seem to have got away with it.
And VW are reinventing themselves as an electric car company now.
So we'll forget all of that stuff.
We'll just make battery cars and you'll forget about everything.
Yes.
I wonder whether, rather like the oil industry, that the motoring industry has painted itself into a corner by allowing the enemy to dictate the terms and sucking up to the enemy and giving Dane guilt to the Danes and then suddenly discovered that actually the Danes aren't going to go away.
They're actually there to destroy you.
Yeah.
It is.
Well, also a lot of car companies, Ford in particular, have invested a lot in ride-sharing and Uber-type services and apps and so forth because they are scrabbling around because they're just thinking, well, yeah, cars are going to go, aren't they?
So they're looking into transport solutions.
In fact, one of the wackiest things that a lot of manufacturers are doing now is electric scooters.
So, you know, if you go to Europe these days, they're not over here yet, or they may be very soon.
Everybody's doing on those park and ride scooters and they just sort of dump them on one side.
I've seen these a lot around European cities.
So a lot of car manufacturers invested in them or make them.
Audi announced that they were making one the other day.
I mean, again, if you're talking about the regression in engineering, there you go.
It's right there.
Volkswagen are quite involved in that.
And so what they're doing, it's to offset their carbon.
They're saying, well, we're making loads of these zero-emission scooters.
No.
Yeah.
So that's their vision of the future.
They want the last mile of the journey to be you on your scooter.
It's all about playing the game, isn't it?
It's all about finding dodges.
Exactly.
To eke out their business model, their doomed business model, for a couple more years.
Yeah.
In a way, it's very hard to feel sorry for these people.
I mean, get woke, go broke.
They are the worst of the worst, but I don't know whether they are going broke.
I mean, just look at some of the car ads.
I mean, I've written about them.
I'm one of the few people who've written about this.
And I did an article once...
About a year ago, why does, I think it was Mercedes, hate their customers?
And it was an American advert, and it was a dad dressing up as a woman to keep his daughter happy.
He was dressed as a fairy to go to her.
And it was just so bizarre.
You just thought, really?
And it was all very woke, and it was just dreadful.
But they're not the only ones.
It's a bit like now.
You have the Renault adverts with lesbianism and Vauxhall as well.
Yeah, I bet it's not fun lesbianism.
No, because at the end of the day, you know, anyone wants to be a lesbian, I couldn't, mostly we couldn't care less, but why is that part of your marketing?
You know, it doesn't bother me, because if you're thinking, well, I'll market this to lesbians, the percentage of lesbians who buy cars is really, really tiny, isn't it?
You know, the percentage, it's a few percent, whereas the majority percent...
Blokes, hello!
Yeah, well...
Yeah, but that's the point.
I'm not a 40-year-old watching the ad getting excited.
I'm an old bloke thinking, eh, what's the point of that?
You just don't get it.
And this is the thing.
And again, people aren't pulling them up about it.
People aren't saying.
I mean, there's something I can't mention to you, which I will mention off-air about it, because it will get me into trouble.
Where I did say to the manufacturer, are you serious about this?
Because it was so woke, it was off the scale.
And they said, OK, we'll speak to you privately.
But, yeah, so they are the worst of the world.
I don't think they've got any clue.
And I'm not quite sure whether they will go broke.
Right.
Well, you can now whisper.
When we turn off the magical recording device, you can whisper the dark secret about the motoring industry.
Well, James, I think we've covered a lot of miles there.
James Ruppert, author of Demotorized, which is...
I'm going to be depressed if they're not, because it's a world we've lost.
Unfortunately, yes.
I mean, we were alive when things were great.
I mean, I was fully operational in the 70s and 80s, and I can't think of a better time to be alive.
The music was great.
Well, the kids think that as well.
The kids actually envy us for having lived through the 80s, like we envied people who'd lived through the 60s.
Yeah.
You know, what were the doors really like?
And were the drugs really as good?
Yeah.
Actually, I think they were just talking rubbish.
I think.
And actually, most of the people who lived through the 60s didn't live through the 60s as portrayed in things like Easy Rider.
They were the exception, I think, rather than the rule.
No, that's right.
Well, not someone living in Kidderminster.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Right.
Well, that was pretty much where my parents did not far.
And they definitely didn't see any of that.
Definitely, definitely, definitely not.
So we had to do it for them, their kids.
Anyway, thank you, James Ruppert.
And thank you everyone for listening.
Bye-bye.
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