The Infinite Wisdom of Bob Lutz

Ho boy.

It’s on now.

Exhibit “A” is located here: http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/26/news/companies/gm_fuel.reut/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories

 Just when you think American car manufacturers couldn’t POSSIBLY get any dumber, the aforementioned whining from the once-profitable bohemoth that is General Motors is presented for your judgement.

Quote Bob Lutz in response to the new proposed legislation to help curb our additiction to oil, “…that effectively hands the truck and SUV market over to the imports, particularly the Japanese, who have earned years of accumulated credits from their fleets of formerly very small cars”.

FORMERLY small cars? That’s all you got, Bobby? “Well, you USED to make small cars, but now you make BIG cars that get better gas mileage than our piles-of-shit that we’ve been so complacent as to allow a 60+ year old man to design (gee, wonder why nobody’s buying GM?) and further allow to get crap gas mileage, so THAT gives you an unfair advantage”.
 
Come again?
 
Yeah, Bob, this whole “oil” thing really cought us off guard. For the last 20 years when other countries have been producing lighter, higher quality, more efficient and more desirable autos, combined with CONTINUOUSLY skyrocketing consumption of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels wasn’t a tip-off or anything.
 
NON-RENEWABLE means you can’t get it back, and fossil means it’s made from long dead animals and plant life. Maybe someday fuels will be made from oily auto executives.

These are the types of mentalities that will represent the slow, hard crawl towards a coherent energy policy for the US (and the world). That’s assuming we even have “energy” left over in 50 or so years to even have a policy for.

I don’t drive an electric car and I don’t recycle like I probably should. I also would like to think that if a policy were drafted to, oh, I dunno, try to save western civilization from extinction, I’d not be so self-righteous as to piss-and-moan about how such a policy puts someone else at an unfair “advantage”.
 
Christ.

–dan