Casey Putsch’s Omega car—100+ MPG, 0-60 in under 5 seconds, and diesel-powered—exposes the U.S. auto industry’s stagnation since the 1990s, where profit-driven regulations and disposable designs replaced durability. He blames EPA overreach for stifling innovation, like his ignored diesel breakthrough, while warning that connected cars risk corporate surveillance and lost autonomy. Comparing repairable 1996 Rolls-Royces to today’s proprietary junk, Putsch ties the decline to Frankfurt School aesthetics and the death of vocational training, advocating grassroots manufacturing over government mandates. Tucker Carlson amplifies the critique, linking it to broader cultural decay—from black-painted houses to YouTube censorship—before Putsch offers custom builds as a rebellion against corporate control. [Automatically generated summary]
The death of the U.S. auto industry was a bigger deal than, I think we realized, maybe a harbinger, hopefully not, but perhaps a harbinger of what happens to the country going forward.
So Detroit dies, and people are like, oh, Detroit's such a mess.
My wife is from there, so I've been there a lot.
But you never thought that would happen to the rest of the country.
So, I guess the question is if we want to prevent I would say largely regulation and the nature of trying to find more profit and where you ship things.
So, I mean, getting older is a process of realizing how many of the lies you've internalized and believed.
And I guess if you had asked me when I woke up this morning what destroyed Detroit, I would say, I mean, I'm not actually even that against unions, to be honest with you, but I would say, well, everyone says the unions and EPA and safety.
So, it's a deeper discussion that led to when I built what I called the Omega car, which I built that high-efficiency diesel car that I thought would be more recyclable, lower environment impact, affordable, and a good car and a direction to go.
And if I make...
Can I just...
Back up a second, kind of what I saw.
So, you know, in my teens and 20s, I'm just a normal car guy.
I liked fast cars and going on dates with pretty girls.
And so I'm listening, get to the point, and he goes, and I'll help Detroit retool so the energy-efficient cars of tomorrow will build here for the sake of the nation and world.
I'm like, bullshit.
You're not gonna.
You're not doing a Kennedy speech like we're going to the moon before the decade is out.
You're not gonna do it.
It just ticked me off, and I've remembered it to this day.
No, you know, and I can think of some, you know, military leaders and such saying things that I'll be a little kinder about.
We don't want to take advice from, you know...
Pantsuits in Washington.
It's like, what do they know about it?
Respectfully. But things like that go across the board.
So I'm thinking, he's not doing anything.
Well, the other thing that interesting happened was the financial crisis, 2008-2009, right?
Now, I didn't fully understand what was going on.
Again, I cared more about going on dates and fast cars than politics and things going on at the time.
But the family business we had was a small-town public golf course in the Midwest.
You know, 18 holes, worked our butt off.
My father worked seven days a week, 6 o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock at night, every day.
Throughout the entire season.
So we worked.
I know, like, being in a small town, everybody makes fun of you.
Oh, you're rich.
You just sit on a golf course all day.
I'm like, no, we're changing oil in, like, diesel tractors and back-lapping mowers and mowing and putting on banquets and doing family business, right?
So, if you mow a fairway or a green, it's not a rotary blade that cuts by kind of, like, whacking the...
It's actually...
It's a reel, which comes through and slices on a blade.
Yes. Well, they get dull.
And so you have to sharpen them, and it's dirty, and you beat up your knuckles, and that's kind of the work you actually do in the winter with the golf course.
I just kind of bring that up because that was my world at the time.
We worked hard, and we saw that.
But at that time, I started to see how it was affecting people in?
Little tiff in Ohio.
On a daily basis.
Loans. Housing loans.
Business loans.
And I also saw how that affected eventually when the family was thinking of selling the business.
You couldn't get lending for something like that.
And I started to see how that hurt everything.
But where I was going with it in relation to the overarching things with the automotive industry.
So now we're bailing out the automotive industry?
Tax dollars?
Huge amounts of money?
Okay. Huh.
Paying attention.
And I'd lived in Columbus, Ohio at the time.
Head of my little shop working on vintage race cars and things like that.
And riding my motorcycle around.
And after we were bailing out the automotive industries, I kind of remember back and I'm like, so I wonder, is Obama going to try to make everything efficient now?
Are they going to do anything?
And I see us, we just kind of doubled down on making bigger trucks and muscle cars and things, which I have to tell you.
I love big trucks and muscle cars and fast cars.
If you can afford the fuel and do what you want, don't get in my way.
You can pry my sports cars out of my cold dead hands.
I agree.
But it doesn't mean I don't necessarily want something that could be better for the daily driver.
I can't think of something that might be more efficient.
So I was noticing that.
And I'm thinking, this is wrong.
Something's wrong here.
And just in what I was doing and researching various materials and thinking of building cars, and it's kind of what I do, you know?
I started to realize there's a myriad of ways that we can mass-produce cars, automobiles, that will be less toxic, less environmental impact, cheaper, more efficient than what we're doing.
Because in a sense, all of our cars are stamped metal boxes with chairs bolted in them.
And I'll say this also, which I think you might enjoy as a history guy.
So, SR-71 Blackbird, right?
CIA spy plane, Mach 3. They came up with that in the late 1950s.
We had to go to the trouble of getting all the titanium, I think, from Russia at the time, which required a zillion shell companies and orchestration just to get the material to build it.
And we built an aircraft, effectively, in the late 1950s, 1960, that'll do Mach 3 and can map.
Hundreds of thousands of miles of the Earth's surface, and before GPS existed, be able to plot the stars through broad daylight and through clouds in the late 50s, and we're still making cars like the 1930s now?
I just put it in my garage for the better part of a decade.
Because I didn't have a voice.
But other things going on in life, I was doing my non-profit Genius Garage, which I really believed in, because we can go into some big problems with the American educational system, especially higher education.
I think we're stymieing our youth to families in the future, and I think it comes from predatory lending and loans you can't default on.
And I think the schools are creating this vacuum monster that is not the real world, with majors that are not providing jobs and creating an environment for political radicalization.
Yeah. Like, I know it sounds silly, but when you work on cars, if you spend your day pushing around cars, you start thinking about how efficient they are.
Look at a car and a SUV going down the road, or a semi.
And the reason I chose diesel is because people would understand that.
Diesel is also a very flexible fuel.
We can make biodiesel.
You can make...
Diesel, effectively, out of what's left over from the meatpacking industry, the wine-making industry, agriculture, you name it.
And this is fascinating, too, because, and I've got to get into why I talked about the car, but since that time, I got word back from people kind of more in traditional automotive media and whatnot, no one would talk about it or write about it.
And it kind of pissed me off.
Because back when I was in a concept, and I just talked about it a little bit on my YouTube channel, some places would report about it.
But why is it when it was just a concept and a YouTuber was trying to do something efficient and maybe eco-friendly and whatnot, they'd write about it, but then when it actually did what I said it was going to do, they wouldn't.
Right. But for generations, the federal agencies, including EPA, but all of them from the Department of Education to the Department of Defense, have come out with regulations that have the force of law that no one ever voted for.
And that no elected official had a hand in, so it's anti-democratic, right?
So the next day, I'm coming right back to this point on the math.
The next day after I did the initial mile-per-gallon testing on my car, I did zero to 60 times with it.
So I put accelerometers and GPS in this car, also my 93 Dodge Viper RT-10, C7 Corvette Grand Sport, and my neighbor's Tesla Model 3 rear-wheel drive with the full charge.
My car, the 104 miles a gallon, beat the Dodge Viper by two-tenths of a second and exactly matched the Corvette Grand Sport and the Tesla.
I probably could have done better, but honestly the tires are over a decade old now, because I built the car a while ago and such, but that was real-world driving.
My car would actually probably beat it if I gave it some clever traction control and such in it, to be honest.
But that's not the point.
The point of it is, so I'm like, I'm going to run some numbers.
Just out of curiosity, what is the carbon footprint of burning one gallon of diesel?
Oh, interesting.
Okay, EPA's got numbers for that.
Okay. What's the carbon footprint on average, the United States electrical generation, whether it's nuclear, wind, coal, whatever, national average of the carbon footprint of a kilowatt hour of electricity?
Say like you're in a perfect world charging your electric vehicle at home.
And then I just did the basic math on, okay, what's the carbon footprint of my car on diesel getting over 100 miles a gallon versus the electric car charged at home, national average, over 100 miles.
My car beat the electric car at a lower carbon footprint.
And it has a much lower one to manufacture, and it's easier to fix.
But... And that's the other thing about the electric car.
So when I look at it, all the governmental control and what it appears to me globally is going on with much of that and the push.
And the other thing that doesn't make any sense.
So the Biden administration doing the big electric vehicle mandates and such and push, but excluding Tesla from their meetings at the White House and summit and all that?
Really? So what you're telling me is the thing that you want to do with industry and cars and transportation is super important, but not as important as the...
I think a lot of my grandmother, who's married to my World War II vet granddad, of course, she always said, give him a fair trial and hang him in the morning.
And that phrase has been ringing in my mind a lot lately.
At that point, it's like if you invent something that is truly useful, And that, you know, at $20,000-ish, a new Suburban is, like, pushing $100,000 right now.
So the engine's within the wheelbase but behind the cockpit.
It's two-seat.
It has butterfly doors similar to a McLaren F1 in that regard.
It's efficient.
It has something of an open tail because it was very important the way the air flows around it but also underneath it so that I can make it highly efficient.
So the bottom of the...
It's a monocoque structure where it's not like...
A tube frame with a body stuck on it.
The whole car is itself the structure as well.
So the air, the way it flows over it through the radiator in the back, also to the heating of the motor, and the way that then intersects the trailing edge and the way the air flows around it.
And you can even use the structure of the chassis or the structure so I can even make the stereo system very small and effective and efficient because naturally, acoustically, it works out well for that too.
So it's a lot of fun with design.
I just...
Every once in a while you need somebody who looks around at the world and goes, this is wrong.
I keep it relatively under wraps because, respectfully, for as much time as it took me to build and what it represents, I consider it kind of valuable to trust out there in the wild with people on their cell phones and stuff.
So, I kind of go with a low profile, but people are definitely interested and enamored by it.
Correct. And that was the other interesting thing.
So, nobody reported on it.
Even though, you know, I got a few hundred thousand views on it when I said everything I wanted to say and show it and it did the numbers, right?
I would think if somebody builds a...
Diesel car that represents being affordable and recyclable mass-produced, that gets great fuel efficiency and has a low carbon impact, and all people would be into that.
Well, one word I got back from an automotive media was telling.
They said, we don't report on dirty diesel.
And the other was, diesel's dead.
And I thought about that, and I go, hang on.
Diesel's like one of the most used fuels there are.
This is obviously a much deeper question, but why do the worst people in the world, the most small-minded, the stupidest, the meanest, the people with the most unbalanced, unhealthy personal lives, why do they all go into journalism, do you think?
And I see the worst ones as kind of, we talk about like the dark triad personality traits, which is like, you know, psychopathy and Machiavellianism and narcissism, etc.
And just La Molle-San straight in La Molle, early 70s, Porsche flat 12 against a Ferrari V12, just singing it and like as a kid, I'm like, I love exotic cars because, for me, something like a V12 Lamborghini is like, yes, I can't be Steve McQueen at Le Mans, but I can drive this.
You know what I mean?
But nowadays, they're paddle-shifted, and anybody that wants to flex can buy them.
So if somebody ever said to me, I need you to find me the most narcissistic sociopath possible.
Yeah, I mean, everything you're saying is true, but it's just disappointing to see it in journalism, not because crappy people with weird personal lives go into journalism, and they're cowards, of course, most people are, unfortunately, but they have no curiosity.
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I mean, yeah, because I designed the things in my head.
I'll do like a drawing or an engineering drawing or something just to communicate and show somebody else, but I'll run all the simulations and design the entire structure and everything in my head.
My wife gets on my case sometimes.
We go on a date and she's like, I can see the hamster wheel turning.
But no, the journalists, I appreciate you saying that because they follow along.
They want their power within their bubble.
But the thing that's kind of crazy to me when I say they're gutless...
You would think they would actually get better views and more clicks if they broke the mold to show something interesting that maybe goes against popular narratives.
Yeah, and the other thing is, so maybe not too long ago, 10, 20, 30 years ago, we think, oh, we've discovered everything, we're brilliant, we know everything.
I really, I don't know if I'll have time or what the future will bring, but I really want to do some videos where you go to interesting places in the world to see and find these things.
And one thing I'd really like to do is motorcycles around Saudi Arabia.
Yeah. Because it is a fascinating kingdom with some really interesting history.
Yeah. And I don't know that they are, you know, focused on, like most emerging nations are not focused on archaeology.
All of the archaeological sites of significance in the Middle East and then, you know, the Near East, the Levant, were discovered by the Brits and the French.
So you said relating to your car is about control, right?
Yeah. I don't want this because they can't control it.
It's the same thing of like saying you can pry this whether it's a sports car or firearm out of my cold dead hands.
If people don't ask questions and they're not interested in their own history or culture or the past or any others and they can't relate, it's easier to keep them in one place and your thumb on them.
It still works the same as every other YouTube and human interaction and all that.
It's kind of a funny way to put it.
So I was a car guy before YouTube, right?
I built cars.
I did all that sort of thing.
A lot of people that become more prominent in the automotive region of YouTube, they weren't as big a car guy.
They kind of just rose up as an interesting character.
And they're happy to be somewhat famous, make some money, do their thing, get acknowledgement.
And as I...
I grew that, which is funny because the entirety of the reason I went on YouTube was just to try to get some exposure for the nonprofit I was doing because I couldn't get any with traditional media.
I was kind of pissed off.
So I ended up there for that reason but kept it going because it's like, okay, I have something of a voice.
This is good for the nonprofit to give it exposure or just try to have a life and go somewhere, you know?
But what I noticed is they call the people that are creating the content the influencers.
I wonder that, like, I'm sure this has occurred to you, and I'm terrible at business, so don't take my advice, but, like, since you have designed something that has inherent utility and obvious mass appeal, And I'm naive enough to think that still matters.
Like, if you make a great thing, people want it, and they'll pay for it, especially if it's cheap.
Why not just do, like, a crowdfunding situation where, like, all right, you know, I designed this vehicle.
It's 104 miles to the gallon on diesel fuel, which you can buy anywhere, and that, you know, can match an electric vehicle off the line.
Like, who wants to send in money, and let's make this thing?
So, in my thinking, if you do a crowdfunding type of thing, that's very grassroots, respectfully.
And I would have to go a different direction with the car, where they'd kind of almost be like self-assembled prototype type things, and that's cool.
But honestly, the thing I kind of worry about doing that, starting a small scale versus something else, is that I don't want to do something, in a sense, too good to where they try to change the laws and ruin the ability for people to build their own cars.
I know that sounds a little kooky, but...
The other thing is if you think of like private equity guys and such, typically they want a faster return on such.
And the problem is when you're thinking of something that frankly upsets an industry and relates to the automotive industry, how do you integrate it?
Can you use the processes to make smaller parts that can be profitable in industry?
Do you start smaller like that?
Do you want to do all big scale and create a car company from the ground up?
Because that's no small task, monetarily speaking.
And there's only so many idealistic rogue billionaires in the world, you know, and that's generally what it takes unless you have a government that wants to make something happen.
But then you get dealerships that just find new ways to not do their warranty work because that's where they make a lot of money, and that's a separate thing.
So a new car, I mean, that's nice if you can afford it, but rather than buying a new $100,000 truck or SUV, I'd rather buy this nice used one for, I don't know, $15,000 or $20,000 and spend the rest of the money.
If you got it, go buy a vintage Ferrari or a muscle car, something cool.
At least keep your money and have some fun.
But it's more than that.
Cars, I would say, in the last...
20 to 25 years.
The evolution is not for the sake of the car and the person and so much of the experience.
It's more for the sake of the nature of dealing with regulation and keeping a profit margin and building it.
And when you do that, you make things that are inherently more prone to failing in the future and less serviceable.
And that's not good for ownership in our actual lifespan.
So everything, I mean, I grew up working on a motorcycle with a carburetor and rebuilding the carburetor, adjusting the flow bowl, you know, timing light, adjust the points.
I mean, all that stuff, just like really super basic mechanics.
And, you know, there are lots of downsides to that.
They break a lot.
But you could understand it.
My feeling is the vehicles that I have had that are newer, I mean, I have no idea how they work.
Ones that are connected to the internet or a satellite in some way.
You know, OnStar kind of came about with your mirror, and I don't really know much about it, but that was kind of the first, I think, mainstream way when we saw cars were being specifically connected to something beyond yourself.
You theoretically have less wires, but everything is tied together through almost like a spinal cord of the computer, and it has to speak to each other.
And that was something else that was kind of a beginning of the end and being serviceable in the future and not creating cars with a lot of glitches.
Well, I think there was a big thing going on with John Deere tractors where farmers couldn't service their vehicles.
They have to take them to the dealership and have to plug in with the computer that only the dealership has through the company.
And forgive me if I got this wrong.
I think it was John Deere.
But that's something that's happening everywhere.
Because if manufacturers or dealerships want more money, well, they want you to service with them.
If they make it so you can only service with them no matter what, well, then they're going to, in an authoritarian way, force you to let them make the money, which is, frankly, another method of control.
And when you start adding all those things up, you just keep taking away all the power for the people before eventually you get to a point where, will you even be able to own your own car anymore?
And will you driving it be a liability to where if we have self-driving cars, it just takes you there at the most efficient time that whatever the it wants you to, wants you to.
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So I always felt that Cash for Clunkers, do you remember that program?
So the federal government basically paid clunkers, like perfectly fine cars, built before a certain date, you could redeem them for cash.
And then they just, they melted them.
And I felt like there was something pretty sinister about that, but maybe I'm just like one of those paranoid wackos who don't think Randy Weaver deserved to be killed.
No, if an industry is no longer about innovation, and it's so big that it can't fail, and it's pushed to go a certain way, well, then the best way to ensure that it succeeds is force you to buy something new, even if it's not in your own best interest.
You can look at it and know the basic principles that are going on.
It's the newer stuff that's crazy.
For instance, my father-in-law recently got my mother-in-law this nice, newer SUV.
I think it's a BMW.
I think it's a hybrid SUV.
She likes it.
And my father and I look at it and go by and we're like, there's a lot of servos and things whirring and buzzing.
And I don't want to say it, but I guess I'm saying it now.
It's kind of like, when is this thing going to break?
And how much is that going to cost?
And no, you're not going to reasonably fix that.
And then when that thing is older, that all these highly specialized little mechanisms and circuit boards and servos or whatever go bad, who's making that?
And is it worth making it anymore?
Or is it just another giant, complicated, toxic?
Wasteful thing that we go on in this vicious consumer cycle.
And sure, there's some things that are old Rolls Royce on it, but it's built differently.
It's built to where you can actually repair the part, not just be a parts-changing type of mechanic like modern things.
And people get into technology for technology's sake nowadays, but it's the philosophy of design that goes behind it.
We're locked in this consumer industrialized, only new is better, more complicated, more expensive, more regulated.
When the mentality and the know-how, should we say, of the first half of the 20th, We built things that could actually be repaired.
We built things that can be serviceable, that can last to an extent.
So why are we not still using good design and engineering mindsets and technology, you know, direction with modernity in a way that's actually useful for people and communities and a nation and rather than just an industry?
I was in another city, I won't name it, but a nice kind of tertiary city, but a growing city with a lot of nice people in it, affluent.
And I was driving through, this was last weekend, I was driving through an affluent neighborhood with one of my children who's a design person and I said, that house is black.
I think that if you don't have the technical skill to do something actually beautiful, then I don't care about your hoo-hoo abstract ideas, right?
But where I'm going with this is so-called art and design and product design has been influenced over the 20th century going back to like the Frankfurt School in Europe, which frankly was a lot of...
I ended up quitting after like a year and a half and designing my own major just to get the hell out of school because I was kind of pissed off, actually, because there was one specifically I remember in this one class we get to design something for the whole semester, right?
Strangely. But in regard to this story, I have to tell you.
So, the bathroom scale.
I thought to myself...
This is going to take a semester.
It doesn't even have to function.
And if they just want to make the simplest thing possible, okay, here, here's a round piece of glass with an LCD display on it that tells you to go eat a salad.
Like, well, I don't want to do this.
And so I met with the academic advisor and I said, I will meet all of your academic requirements for this class, but please let me design something at my level right now.
And that's a problem with the American educational system.
You know, libraries are free.
Yeah. You know, there's a lot of nice people out there that can help you learn.
But, so, I stayed around in that program for another semester.
I didn't do anything the whole semester.
The night before the exam and presentation, I just Ferris Bueller'd a bunch of stuff together and ran around.
I don't know, got a B+.
And I just design cars and things on my own.
But how insane is that?
That in college, when you're actually paying to be there, and there's supposed to be design and product design, that they won't actually let students do what they're capable of doing or push a boundary or go anywhere.
They literally keep a thumb on you like that.
I quit the program after that.
And I stopped caring.
Fortunately, when I was in high school, and hopefully people...
Have teachers that actually care that matter.
I had art teachers that made the world of difference for me and a lot of other people.
Yes. That was huge.
And people write things off now in, you know, pre-college.
Things like shop, home ec, vocational, art, engineering, drawing.
Those are some of the most important things you can possibly have.
But we got rid of all of those things to push college prep.
How, if there are other eccentric people out there who would like one of these vehicles that you've designed, would you be willing to make them to order?
And to be honest, when I look at the car and what I've done with that or with the educational nonprofit or anything else in life, I look at how do I have the biggest positive impact I possibly can?
You know, and right now the biggest impact with regard to the car is talking about it.
So people do know what's possible.
So hopefully maybe they kind of, you know, wake up for a second from the cell phone, look around and think.
That's a vastly important thing to do.
So I think it has tremendous value there.
But, you know, I want to build something.
You know, I'm an America first kind of guy.
Like, why in the heck are we not building these things here?
Yeah. Why?
We should.
You know, and I'll give you an example.
I've been around the sun, I don't know, 43 times in my life, right?
When I was younger, and we were working in a little town golf course that's a family business, and a lot of the guys that golf at our golf course were blue-collar.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
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