The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Eric Peters Fun (and Freedom) with Junk Cars

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Eric Peters, EricPetersAutos.comJeremy Clarkson is right - cars today ARE garbage.  When they were LITERALLY garbage they were A LOT MORE FUN as we reminisce about good ol' days and bad ol' carsRemembering the pioneer in Radar Detectors, Mike Valentine of the the Valentine One (and now 2nd generation)High tech, luxury power-everything — death trapsThe problem with hybrids (besides pretending there's a climate issue)Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

it's always great to have eric on we've been talking about elon musk and these the digital millennium copyright act and all these other scams for the longest time and of course his site epautos.com a great site for all things about liberty and mobility because you can't have one without the other actually quite frankly and they're trying to restrict both of those things uh free speech is something that they really have everybody on both sides are really targeting free speech it's truly amazing but joining us now is eric peters good to have you eric thanks for joining us thank you david it's exasperating isn't it to have to just constantly construct the language i was listening

to you a little bit before about while we were waiting to go on and you were talking about this business with the strike and the unions and it occurred to me that there's sort of a rough analogy there between the way we're represented by senators and congressmen, right? I mean you don't have the option to say no and that makes it an oxymoron because you know if you don't have the proxy power to tell your so-called representative do this and only this and do not do that and by the way i only want you to do it if i say okay then he's not representing you he's presuming to represent you and that's a distinction yeah that i think is important today oh yeah it's very much like politics you know i didn't have any he never asked me are you okay down there you know you want to change any of this stuff i hated the

way that they had this stuff structured and it wasn't even just the the wage levels uh it was also uh you know the ways that they would uh how they would mandate how the the fees were supposed to be split up within the band and that's one of the ways that they would get the band leader uh who actually owned the band to sign up with the union because he'd get a double share, you know, and all this other kind of stuff. They give these little incentives to people to work with them, to join with them. And then you either, you know, you either do that or you can't have a job. And so, yeah, it is a very rigged process that we see with all that stuff. It's like a mafia, you know, and I've been covering this stuff for 30 years in the car

industry. It's the same thing. I don't necessarily have an issue with unions per se, provided that they are voluntary. If you wish to join a union, that's fine. That's your prerogative. You should certainly have that right. But there's something just surreal almost about, like you said, if you want to have this job, you must join this union. You must hand over money to these people who then presume to be your representative somehow.

I mean, it's doubly obnoxious because they are presuming to represent you, and then they're taking money out of your pocket, and they're using threats of extortion that if you don't do this, we're going to just kick you out of here and you're not going to have a job. That's right. Yeah, we have some right-to-work states where you are not required to. They can't require you to join a union to have a job but then we have some states where that's not there and in the situation that i was in in the music union you were really required to do it because uh if um they didn't hire all union

people then that uh restaurant or whatever that club would get blackballed by the union and they couldn't get anyway so it's just this coercive collectivist thing you know in every level uh the way they would twist people's arms i really really did hate it when i started my career back in the print days uh the uh the people who were in the composing room which was the place for back in the day they would physically put the pages of the newspaper together they would the machine would spit out uh you're familiar with that and one time I happened to be down there and I happened to glance at something on the editorial page of the dummy

for the morning's paper, and I noticed that there was something missing, that somehow a sentence had been cut out. So on my own, I went ahead and spat out the machine, a new piece of the thing, and I put it in, and there was practically a tactical nuclear explosion that I, you know, who was supposed to be upstairs in the editorial offices, dared to trespass upon the you know the the fiefdoms of these human people i mean it was a big deal oh it was a huge big deal instead of hey okay great thank you for fixing that for us oh yeah and they do that with uh conventions still to this day you know people would come in and they would have booths to set up and i've been involved on both sides of that both as an attendee of the conventions and somebody setting up.

You don't do certain things. You've got to wait for the particular union representative to come there and give you an extension cord. And you better not do anything else without calling one of these electrical union representatives. It weren't so tragic because we're all paying for this. One of the reasons why the cost of everything is going through the roof is because you've got all of this dead weight and all of this inertia and bureaucracy that has to be overcome before anything can get done. Yeah, that's right. Well, it absolutely is crazy. I sent you this clip of a Tesla charging station that is submerged. They got all these Tesla chargers and they're standing in water

and the caption says you thought smoking it the gas pump was risky you want to go you know boy we can attack this from so many different angles uh one of them is that when those uh when there's a danger of a flood they will shut off the high voltage electricity to things like electric chargers because the obvious danger that that presents so now you've got the problem of well i've got my electric vehicle how am i going to get out of the path of the hurricane before you know before i get killed and you can't because they've shut the current off to it oh and and that hasn't happened yet so you're sitting there waiting while the water is rising rising rising uh you know and if you wait there too long then your electric car is going to go up and smoke i just published an article about it they're all videos coming out of the the areas that were affected by the the aftermath of the hurricane that show

electric cars erupting in flames there's one in florida there's another one that i've got in this uh in the article on the site and the reason for that i i thought of a really clever at least i thought it was a way to understand this remember the original star wars where uh destroys the death star uh by exploiting the death star's weakness. There's a ventilation duct and he fires the missile and it goes into the ventilation duct and it goes to the very core of the Death Star and blows it up. EVs are kind of like that. They have a vent for that battery. And if the water reaches the vent and gets in there, then boom, there goes the Death Star.

The last thing you hear is uh r2d2 and then a pop yeah it is i mean it's funny when we look at this stuff but it absolutely is crazy and um uh and and yet you know when you when you look at this one of the things that you talk about all the time is electric power windows and And it made me think about this. I've got a friend who's got a Tesla. He loves it. I've driven the Tesla. I enjoy driving it.

I wouldn't want to own one because of charging issues, expense issues, and things like that. But I really did enjoy driving it. It was a very different experience because, you know, with a Miata, it's a momentum car, right? You don't have a whole lot of horsepower. So you want to keep that momentum through the curves and all the rest of stuff right uh but with that car you know it's just like you step on the gas it's like it's like when you would run the electric slot cars when i was a kid right you move the lever and it's you know and then when you pull the lever back it

immediately stops and that's the way this thing is so it's really kind of a strange thing but he got stuck in his tesla because he couldn't get the doors to open because everything is under control and he was stuck in this car and uh had to get uh had to call tesla and get them to sign into his car whatever and fix his car remotely so he could get out of it but you know it's not even and that's a worst case scenario we're talking about a flood or something like that. Can you imagine, you know, it gets, everything is under software control. All of a sudden you got some water there. Now the computer is not working. You can't get out of the door. And then it's, and then even in other cars, not even in a Tesla or an EV, you've got a situation where now almost all cars have electric

windows. And I think about that with a flight years ago we used to do product videos for a company that did promotional products and it was a very big thing especially in europe and germany people would want to have these little things they would be like maybe a you know a bottle opener and a thing to smash your window or a flashlight and a thing to smash your window but it was always it always had this uh you know pointed metal tip so you could use it to break the window and get out in case your car went into water because everybody had electric windows. And it really is crazy when we make ourselves with the complexity, we put ourselves at the mercy of these types of things. It wasn't until my fifth car that I had electric windows. They were all manual cranks.

But now it's standard. Even a cheap car has got electric windows. Well, and they've compounded the problem on Tesla. And it's not just Tesla. Some other manufacturers are doing this too. They are laminating the side glass. Now, you know, windshield glass is laminated because you don't want the glass to shatter in the event that you have an accident.

The problem with laminated side glass is you can't break it. You know, now your car, that poor woman, what was she, the sister-in-law of the Secretary of Transportation? I can't remember, Cho is, I think, what her name was. This happened a few months ago. She was leaving a party, I guess, in her Tesla, and she inadvertently backed up into a pond. You remember this? No. And she ended up drowning.

And it was slow motion. She would have had plenty of time to get out of the car ordinarily, but she couldn't because, A, the windows wouldn't go down, and apparently the side glass is laminated. So the people who were trying to get her out of there couldn't smash the glass, and she ended up drowning and dying. Wow. And because the door is under software control, that type of thing. It truly is amazing when we see this and and again it's it's part of the cost uh that we have to pay because everybody's got uh the electric windows it's absolutely insane uh you know what you said there is i'm sorry to interrupt i just wanted to because i do think it's important there is a subtle cost that we're all paying in the form of increased insurance costs for all of this stuff.

And I don't have an issue with somebody who has the money and wants to go out and buy a $50,000 or $70,000 vehicle that has all of these electronics and power accessories and so on. But they ought to pay the full cost for covering that. I don't have a vehicle like that. And I don't see why I ought to help, as they say, shoulder the cost of that. But yet we are. We're also paying for the costs incurred by all of these EVs and the fires that are happening. When an EV burns down in a garage and takes the house out along with it, now not only do you have to replace a $50,000 or $60,000 electric car, you have to replace a half a million dollars worth of property damage on top of that. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, absolutely. And when you talk about insurance companies looking for excuses to raise the rates and everything the stuff that's out i'd reported on it but it was a far more extensive uh video talking about the way uh that the um the car manufacturers have uh spied on us in so many different ways and how they're constantly sending reports to the insurance companies people are like how come my insurance rates doubled and how they're constantly sending reports to the insurance companies. People are like, how come my insurance rates doubled and everything? They got to the bottom of it and they found that there was this dossier that was compiled

and sent to the insurance company about all this stuff. And of course, the automobile companies are making a lot of money by collecting that data and then selling it to the insurance companies because insurance companies can then raise your rates for any kind of arbitrary thing well you you stop too quickly well maybe i stopped quickly because the car in front of me stopped quickly uh you know it's they don't even they can't even validate um the reason for doing this but they just have to have a pretense and so they have insurance costs are going through the roof the the cars are actually surveillance devices now they're not just

as you and i've been talking about for a long time uh it's like a giant smartphone it's got all these bells and whistles and gadgets on it and everything but just like a smartphone it's constantly surveilling and reporting on you and that that also is incredibly um disgusting what these people are i look at another way too it's it's a metric of the decline of civilization I mean in the sense of Civility in that there's something really barbarous about your privacy being invaded in the affrontery and the arrogance of the car companies that will do that to you you know and they do it brazenly and and they they do it uh you know in a way that this is really greasy and they don't tell you

there's no informed consent they don't say hey by the way your car is equipped with cameras and microphones would you mind would it be okay with you you know if we if we collected this data because it might be helpful to us and to you yada yada yada you don't have that opportunity they just do it i mean it's in my mind no different than somebody just marching into your house and having to look around, you know, just because they can. Or they conceal it in this massive terms of service type of thing, right? And change it, you know, by the way, you didn't notice this, but you clicked okay on this. You got an article talking about hybrids. Don't buy a hybrid, you said.

And this is the thing that people are kind of, you know, the car companies are really pushing this because nobody wants to buy a car that they have to, that they only have the option of charging it. It takes a long time. It's expensive. But, you know, they're moving towards the hybrids because it's like, well, all right, it's a little bit less. But that's not going to satisfy the regulators. It only keeps the can down the road just a little bit because people will not attack this lie at its foundation which is the co2 stuff because of that everybody is trying to ignore the elephant in the room the massive lie and they're trying to comply with it one way or

the other without really rocking the boat but talk about why um uh you say uh hybrids are not a a great thing for people well let's start with what you just said in that essentially they're not addressing the fundamental issue. They're hoping that they can comply their way out of this, like the people who continue to wear the face masks during the pandemic. They'll just comply our way out of this, right? No, they won't because eventually it's not going to be good enough and they'll come up with yet another reason to outlaw the hybrids. Hybrids, and I don't have an issue with them as such but they are fundamentally compliance cars what do i mean by that well they are the only realistic way to achieve high gas mileage at this point because

the government has issued regulations that have increased the weight of cars to such a degree that it's almost unbelievable uh compact cars now are typically close to 3 000 pounds and that's the reason why they get relatively speaking pretty poor gas mileage most of them get maybe 35 maybe 40 miles per gallon on the highway maybe that's pretty awful when you reflect and go back 40 years and find that cars were doing better than that 40 years ago and the reason they were doing better than that without all the technology that we have today is because they were light simple you know it's just that simple so hybrids are a way to uh to advertise higher gas mileage but of course

you're paying for that when you buy the hybrid uh you know price a toyota prius starts at around 28 000 bucks so great you know it gets 56 miles per gallon but you're paying 10 000 more roughly than you would have to pay for uh let's say an entry-level economy car if it were light and if that entry-level economy car got 50 or 60 miles per gallon you just saved ten thousand dollars and a lot of money down the road in gas too so and you're the other thing that i get into in the article is the sort of subtle and hit more hidden cost in the just like an electric car eventually it'll take longer but eventually the battery in the electric car is going to wear out and it's a battery in the hybrid is going to wear out and eventually you will have to replace that if you keep the car beyond the point when that battery is no longer serviced

and you're looking at potentially two thousand dollars for the battery plus the cost of labor so there goes whatever you saved in gas right there too no it's it's it's just it's just all of this artificiality all of these uh these solutions to problems that are created by government it's like that old saw about uh the guy who breaks your legs and then gives you some crutches so that you can hobble down the road a little bit and i think probably a good analogy for the hybrids is um hybrids are like preferred pronouns yes that's a really good way to put it if you play along with it they're only going to come up with something else so just stop it right now and call it for

what it is it's insanity it's lunacy i'm not playing along with this game i'm not playing your preferred hybrid uh your preferred hybrids uh your preferred pronouns either i love what you put in your article because those who rationalize this loss of time or range your pick are like the parsons the character in the in orwell's 1984 who eagerly tout how big brother has increased the chocolate ration while everybody knows that has actually been reduced right yeah yeah yeah i mean it's it is a form of derangement uh you know i have to deal with this on an almost daily basis the evie apologists uh say things like oh well i don't have to wait because I'm at home doing other things while my electric car charges. Well, that's like saying, you know, I've got a contractor who said he's going to come sometime between 12 and 6 today,

but I guess I'll do something else around the house while I'm waiting for this guy to show up. You're still waiting. I mean, the fact that you're doing something else while you wait doesn't change the fact that you're waiting. When you go to the dentist and you're sitting in the waiting room reading the magazine you're waiting for the dentist yeah yeah when we look at this and and where this is all going um you and i have talked about for the longest time they're going to get everybody loaded up with evs and then they're going to shut down the power grid well that's already happening we've talked about that for years and now they're rolling it out because now the epa is setting its sights on the power grid well that's already happening we've talked about that for years and now they're rolling it out because now the epa is setting its sights on the power companies that can be relied

on the power companies that are cheap we'll be able to have some unreliable power that is going to be four to ten times more expensive than what we're paying each month uh you got 150 bill how about a 1500 a month bill because that's what you're going to get if we keep going down this road of this renewable grift. And that's what it is. It's nothing other than a grift. You're going to wind up with something between $1,000 and $2,000 every month just for electricity. And you're going to have brownouts and rationing and all the rest of the stuff. And they want everybody to put everything on the grid.

But they're not going to put their critical systems on the grid their critical systems artificial intelligence to surveil us to propagandize us to censor us they're going to have their own separate power grid for that but we're already seeing what you and i knew was going to happen move everybody over to the one preferred the only allowed solution quote unquote to imagined problem, just like with a vaccine, and then shut that down. And that's what's already happening now. I think it's even worse than a mere grift, which would be bad, but it's of a piece with some scam guy who takes your money and all you've lost is your money. This is more significant because it's not just our money that they're after uh they're they're after not only our freedom uh they're after our basic quality of

life you know things that we have taken for granted in this country for a very long time like a refrigerator that works like hot water in the house it's not just the cars it's energy all this stuff has to do ultimately with rationing energy. It's not just the cars. It's everything. They want to insurf us by reducing the availability of energy, either through outright rationing or through prices that are so high that most people just can't afford it anymore. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've got a comment here from Radis Bro. And thank you for the tip.

I appreciate that. It says, I've delivered more than 700 Amazon packages in three days. I don't work for Amazon. make 1983 uh the post office is still out of contract no one is being paid fairly who does a real job that's right uh they're just going to use people you know it's the same type of thing eric that i said for the longest time when i talk to talk about Travis Kalalnik, who is the founder and CEO of Uber. And he said the reason that Uber is expensive for you is because of that other guy in the car. You know, the guy who owns the car, the guy who pays all of the maintenance and the gas and all the rest of the stuff. That guy is making your ride expensive. No, Travis Kalalnik and that corporation was getting largely a free ride off of this guy

while they were working to set up their own cars and eliminate all drivers. It's just amazing how they manipulate people like that. It's absolutely despicable. Most of the people who are trying to scrape out a living doing Ubering and that sort of thing are doing just that, just barely scraping out a living. Whereas in the past, if you called up a taxi driver, the taxi driver probably made a pretty decent living, you know, because the car was provided by the company, you know, he's working for the company and the company took care of all the fleet maintenance stuff,

not your personal vehicle. It's really a bad deal to use your personal car for something like that, because you're putting miles on it, you're wearing, carrying it, you're paying for the fuel, the insurance and everything else. And, you know, you're paying for the fuel, the insurance, and everything else, and you're making $15, $20 an hour, and it's going to end up not being a really good deal once you do the math. That's right. Well, you have people who, it was actually a small business. It was a small business like somebody would open up a barbershop or a hair salon or a nail salon or something like that.

That's the kind of stuff that's left for us because Wall Street and China have taken over manufacturing and other things like that even most of the retail stores so service businesses are kind of what's left and so you had a lot of people who invested money into a taxi medallion a license that was sold by the city i remember doing a report i was taking a taxi in in washington and i was talking to a guy about that it was maybe about eight or nine years ago. And he just started ranting. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me get my phone.

And I let him rant about what was happening. And he was furious in Washington, D.C. He said, yeah, they've got their own inspectors who come around and give a white glove inspection to your car. And he goes, and if that isn't bad enough that we got our own special police ticketing agency that is there he said if that's not bad enough they're now going to require that uh you can't have a car that's got that's older than this number of years or has more than this number of miles and this is before gavin newsom started doing that to diesel uh to semi trailers uh out in california that were going to the ports. But they said, you're going to require that we have a new car.

And he goes, I take care of this. He goes, yeah, I've got a couple hundred thousand miles on it. But he says, this thing is running fine. I don't want to spend, and I can't spend the money to buy a new taxi. And so they're seeing the value of their medallion. These people invested a lot of money in this to get a license. That was their overhead cost to start their business. And now that is eviscerated. Absolutely.

Sure. And why should there be a license for such things? I mean, across. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if I want to provide a service to people and people are willing to pay me, that should be a legal activity. The fact that that is an illegal activity as such, because we're not talking about any abuse. We're not talking about anybody being ripped off or any harms being caused.

We're talking about a voluntary transaction between two ruling parties. Why is the government involved in these things? That's right. Yeah, that's a taxi license scam in and of itself, which is already decades old. You go back to when there was a vibrant black middle class in the cities. And one of the things that was helping them with that was the taxis would say, well, we're not going to go in the black sections of town. So quickly you started having people start providing the taxi service to their neighbors.

And all of a sudden you had this jitney taxi service type of thing. And then the cities come swooping in and say, well, you better pay a license for that kind of stuff and shut all that stuff down. It was a classic case of entrepreneurism and of a vibrant middle class that was you know working within the community they can't have that everybody's got to pay them you know render to caesar whatever caesar demands this is it's like a it's literally a revivification of feudalism in which you had to be part of the guild in order to practice whatever the trade was that you had and if you didn't if you operated

outside of the guild that was an offense and you could be you could be attacked and prosecuted for that yeah and really it's a crazy thing when you think about it you've got i've got a service i've got a skill i can do something i'm i'm saying hey would you like me to do this for you and you say yeah that sounds good i'll pay you that's between us it shouldn't be between anybody else period yeah you know especially if nobody neither party is alleging that anybody's been defrauded or harmed in any way that's right and of course you know um 50 60 years ago that was where the fight was now the fight is over our food because now they're doing that to the amos millers the amish farmers and stuff no you can't have raw milk you can't have your own cows and you can't give that to

people we're going to come in you got a voluntary market here nobody's sick we're not saying anything has happened anybody but uh we're not going to allow that and and so this is going to be because we've allowed them to do this in these other areas and to set these precedents now they're doing the same thing they're going to do the same thing to farms and for our food supply. It never ends. If you let these people establish these precedents, they never stop. Absolutely. It's extremely important to challenge the fundamental underlying principle and say, no, we're not going to comply with that. Period. Hard stop.

That's it. There's no quibbling about whose plan is better. There should be no plan. That's right. There should be no plan. That's the other thing. Everybody's like, well, where's the economic plan from Trump and Lala? And it's like, neither one of them are going to say,

I don't do centrally planned economies. I'm an American. They're not going to say that. It seems chaotic. I was listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this a couple of days ago. And I think part of the lure of leftism, and also the same thing on the right, frankly, is that some people fear what they perceive to be the chaos of leftism and also on the same thing on the on the right frankly is that some

people fear what they perceive to be the chaos of decentralization yeah you know they they like the idea of this rigid centralized control apparatus which they and i'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're not necessarily evil that they think that that's just the better way to do things but it really isn't decentralization works better because you've got all of these individuals making their own individual choices and and that is a way to sort of flesh out which choices actually are the better ones because they succeed whereas the bad ones fail you know failure becomes evident at a smaller scale further down the pyramid and so collectively you end up with something much better which was why america was such a successful and prosperous country for so long and particularly for working-class people you could be a working-class guy and you could afford

a single family home maybe not a mcmansion but you could afford your own single family home your wife didn't have to work she could stay home to raise your kids you could afford two new cars every three years yeah i mean it's astounding to think that we had that once in this country and bit by bit and piece by piece it's just been taken away from us that's right you had a home you had a new car at your point every three years you take a family vacation you do not with one family income while um you know the mother actually uh was a mother and took care of the kids and that type of stuff uh now we've got uh both parents working and they got to farm the kids out now to have the government do daycare for them.

And so that has to be a right. It's amazing how we get trapped into this. One of the things that really concerns me about the MAGA cult, the fact that they are looking for a savior. This used to always be the hallmark of the Democrats. It used to be one of the distinguishing features between the Democrats and Republicans. They're looking for everything to be solved by government and especially by Washington. It used to be, well, don't make a federal case out of it. Well, now everything is a federal case.

And now the conservatives want to make everything a federal case. Whatever is important to them, they want it solved in Washington, just like the liberals do. And you hear everybody saying stuff like, well, there ought to be a law against that and everything. It's like, no. But what you never hear anybody say is, well, it's a free country, isn't it? Because we all understand that it no longer is. I think that's very revelatory. Trump the other day said something.

He tweeted out something about how if he's elected, he's going to slash the cost of car insurance by executive fiat or by opposing price controls. And all the red hats cheered and clapped like seals. And I said, so now we're clapping for price controls through the federal government, you know, as opposed to simply getting the government out of this thing and saying, okay, look, if a person wants to buy insurance, they have the right to choose to buy insurance. And that's the most effective way to deal with the cost of insurance. Because if you can't make me buy what you're selling then you can't force me to pay an exorbitant price it's such a simple thing and people have lost sight of that fundamental elemental truth yeah that's absolutely right well let's talk a little bit about the good old days i like this when you do this uh at

ep autos ericpetersautos.com uh some things that you can't do in a new car where do we begin you want to pick yeah sure well i like the way you introduced that he's like just like you can't board a commercial airplane anymore without first being subjected to some sort of obedience training uh that you used to have to uh break a law and get arrested before this kind of stuff happened to you and by the way the reason i put that in, and I italicized it to emphasize it, and then later on in the article, I explain why I did that. And I think it's a really important thing because it's such a revelatory thing about the truth about what's going on.

If you fly privately, you don't have to go through obedience training. So it's only for the human cattle, the bipedal cattle that go to the airport to fly commercially they're subjected to this ostensibly they're told well you got to do this because that's how we prevent the terrorists from you know getting an airplane and crashing it into a building yet somehow these same terrorists are too poor to charter an airplane if they wanted to you know it's just again it's just a way to give the lie to what they're telling us just the same as they tell us that it's it's a it's imperative that everybody drive an electric car because there's this existential threat of climate change. And yet, we're not allowed to have the sub $10,000 EVs that are readily available all over the rest of the world, which actually would be good for first-time people, older people who just need a basic little A to B kind of a car.

Why can't they have that? Oh, yeah. Instead, we can have a $40, little a to B kind of a car. Why can't they have that? Oh yeah. Instead we can have a $40,000, uh, uh, high performance electric cars. Well, if there's an existential threat, then isn't high performance and all of that kind of superfluous. It just, again, it shows the disingenuousness and the maliciousness behind these people. Oh yeah. Now to get back to, I'm sorry, I drifted about. Well, no, I mean, I've talked about my audience has heard it many times i don't know i've probably never told you eric you know we we

came across uh there was a lawsuit when they rolled out these body scanners and the did the pat downs and body scanning and so there was a pushback in texas at the time uh and um a state representative there got it unanimously passed in texas that they weren't going to allow that kind of stuff to happen and so then they came back and said well if you don't allow that we're going to make texas a no-fly zone and so the lieutenant governor who was head of the senate he was a former cia guy who they set up in the oil business and became a multi-millionaire and he bought his office he paid more for his office than anybody had ever paid to get elected to state office in texas he stopped in the Senate. They went through that exercise twice.

Well, while all that was going on, there was a lawsuit that came a couple years later from an engineer who came after them. And during discovery, he got them to show some documents. Now, when they posted this up on the government website where they show the lawsuits, PACER.gov, they accidentally put up for a couple of hours the unredacted lawsuit and then they caught their mistake and they put up the redacted lawsuit so we could see what they didn't want us to see and what they didn't want us to see was at the same time all this fight was going on in texas they said the tsa said in their

internal documents there is no threat to airports or airplanes. They know it. We know it. They know it. We all play along with this game. It's like George Orwell time. It's amazing. I mean, the only upside to this, once you realize it, is that the scales fall from your eyes and you understand what you're dealing with.

And that, if anything is positive about what's occurred over the last five years in particular, it's that. I think that the naive trust that a lot of people have had in the institutions has been shaken profoundly. And these people no longer just implicitly trust what they're told. And that's healthy. And we may actually manage to pull ourselves out of that if enough people begin to take that point of view. Yeah. Actually, earlier in the show, when I was talking about what was happening in North Carolina and in Tennessee, there was a North Carolina legislator, a realtor who said, this is what's happening, folks. And there's a lot of looting that's happening. And a sheriff's officer told me that you need to have your gun and keep the safety off because

he says it's really dangerous. And she said, yeah said yeah people are getting desperate but she was talking about how people needed help and she said you can't trust any of these institutions you certainly can't trust the government to help you and um and you can't trust most of these charitable institutions so find somebody who's actually going to distribute this locally you know find churches or other things like that and give them your money because nobody trusts the institutions anymore for a very good reason. But the good part of it is that many people have awakened to this. And so there is some hope in all of that. But let's talk about some of the things that you can't do in a car. And you mentioned not being able to spin the tires.

Yeah, because all cars now have traction control and you can't lock up the tires anymore either because of ABS. And paradoxically, interestingly to me, because it it's about it's kind of a demonstration case in point of the law of unintended consequences abs has been with us now for what 30 something 40 years even um and tailgating is now worse than ever and i think that there's a direct relationship between the ubiquity of anti-lock brakes and tailgating because people now feel confident that they can tailgate because, oh, I've got ABS. So I'm not going to lose control of my car. It's not going to go into a skid and run right into the car ahead of me. So, you know,

in the past when a car didn't have ABS and you and I learned to drive on cars that didn't have ABS, it was out of pure self-interest intelligent to maintain an adequate following distance between your car and the vehicle ahead of you because you knew if you didn't you were not going to be able to stop the car in time probably yeah now people have this point of view that well the car is going to keep me safe and so in fact fatalities are going up ironically even though we have all of this safety technology that's being embedded in all the vehicles that's right yeah people see that and then they say well i you know i can slack off in this yeah i uh grew up uh spinning the tires uh i was a 16 year old with a with a couple of buddies in high school and we they used to egg

me on to spin the tires and mustang all the time so i went through another thing if you grow up with those kinds of vehicles you really do learn about vehicle dynamics and how to control a car. Whereas now they're so anesthetized, these new cars. They're deceptive in a way because they feel so very controllable, and they are. But the problem with that is that they tend to encourage people who don't have the skills to push the limit in the car. So now they're driving it considerably faster and maybe more aggressively in a corner when they don't really have the skills to deal with it if they get to the point in the car where the safety systems are not going to be a sufficient safety net to get them out of trouble if it happens that's right yeah yeah i i went to the limit and beyond many

times sure me too i had my guardian angel was working overtime i'm sure he's gonna have to sit down and talk to me about that at some point in time but uh we had a lot of experiences with my buddies in high school we did all kinds of crazy stuff but and you can't do jay turns anymore either you can't do rockford's right no no this is all an art back now that you can watch on retro tv but there's some other more prosaic things that you can't do anymore that i feel like we've been kind of gypped in a way from, you know, in the past, I'll give you an example because, you know, I'm a Firebird guy and I've been into these cars for a long time. I have a Trans Am, but let's say that I hadn't been able to afford to get a Trans Am and I just got the base Firebird. Well, I could always go to a junkyard and I could get the neat formula

steering wheel from our junk Trans Am and I could get the neat formula steering wheel from our junk Trans Am. And I could get the upgraded seats from that car if I wanted to. And I could just literally physically unbolt them from one car and bolt them into the other car. You can't do that anymore. These cars are now an integrated package of components that are all tied into one another. So basically, whatever you bought when you bought the car, that's it. There's very little that you can do at all in terms of altering the car once you bought it yeah oh that's true yeah i uh although i did you know that's one of the nice things i like about a miata there's a big after

market for it uh a parts and everything maybe more so than anything else and so you know all these things you're talking about steering wheel made me think I swapped out my steering wheel. I had to get rid of the airbag. But there are places that you can find out how to do that. It can be done, but it gets progressively harder and harder and harder. Exactly. Now, I think pretty much every new car now has airbags embedded in the seat. And now, of course, because of that, the seat is now part of the safety system. And it's all wired in and plugged in.

And if you meddle with any of that, you're going to end up causing yourself all kinds of problems. It's just not worth even trying to do it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. In my particular case, it was because I wanted to go to a smaller diameter wheel because I just like that better. You know, I thought the other one was a bit big so i want a smaller diameter wheel but yeah you can it is increasingly uh more difficult as a matter of fact you go back and you look at uh the people who would put in big engines into miata which i

was never really interested in because it's just not the character of the car right uh but they got a company that's out in colorado called flyingata, and they would cram in Corvette engines and do the small Miatas. Those things are crazy. But then, you know, that creates all other kinds of problems because now you've got to put in a transmission that doesn't shift as nicely as the Miata thing did and stuff. But they did that with the first and second generation. They were even able to do it with a little bit more difficulty in the third generation. But when they got to the fourth generation, it was so computerized, it took them a very long time to get it. And they still had a lot of bugs in it.

And they had to hire people who were computer experts to get around all of the computerized stuff. So it is getting impossible to modify the cars, truly is. Yeah, and getting back to the thing we were talking about earlier with regard to insurance costs um a friend of mine who lives down the road from me has a late model subaru and uh she dinged the driver's side door and you look at it and think well no big deal you know just pull out that dent and and you know uh and and touch it up and good to go turns out she got a couple of estimates from various body shops and they wanted on the low end twenty two hundred dollars. Yeah. And the reason why is because they don't bother with trying to fix the doors anymore.

They just replace them and you have to replace everything because of the body control units, modules and all of the electronics and everything. So, again, we pay for this. You know, what used to be a minor impact and a minor repair cost and a fender bender kind of a situation now can entail thousands of dollars of damages to the vehicle. And, you know, the insurance mafia knows that. And so they're not going to pay. You are. I am. Everybody else is going to pay for it. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You've got an article up at EP Autos or EricPetersAutos.com. Clarkson is right. Talking about Jeremy Clarkson uh tell us what he's talking about and of course i i hate to see the fact that you know they don't do uh top gear anymore i guess it's completely dead now uh they got into so much trouble the bbc and finally they picked up by amazon but um you know nobody wants to to do anything about cars anymore so he's got clarkson's farm and now he's opened up a pub and everything but what what did he do right yeah well clarkson was one of the last of the car guy journalists uh you know he he was um of a piece with brock gates that i you know a guy that i admired when i was a kid

and kind of got me along the on the road to becoming a car journalist myself and they actually had some interest in cars as other than appliances and were interested in things besides how safe and compliant they were with whatever the latest regulations are. And he's become kind of cynical, which is understandable because his career goes back 30 something years and he can remember what we like to call the before times, you know, when cars were actually interesting and fun. And he said, and I, and I hope it's okay to use a little profanity in this context. He said,

new cars are SH, you know what? And the reason that he said that, I kind of, I took that and ran with it a little bit. And I think what he meant was they become so homogenous, ironically, in part because they used to be SH whatever. They had the personality. They had quirks. You know, sometimes you had to kick it or you had to do some special thing to get it to work right or it had to be filled with it had personality you know now they are literally appliances and toasters and now i understand that from the standpoint of uh you want something reliable that gets you from a to b without trouble and hassle and that's important

but the emotional attachment that we've had to our cars is being severed. And people no longer care about cars. They view them as just these disposable things like a toaster. And that's insidious because they are using that to disconnect people from personal mobility. Why bother? Who needs one of these things? It's just a hassle. It's just a big expense. I'll use my app and I'll call up an Uber, you know, or I'll get my automated electric car to come pick me up.

And they don't understand that by doing that, what they are doing is giving total control over their ability to go anywhere they want to go on their own time, their own schedule, whenever they feel like it. They're giving that up to these centralized control structures. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. control structures oh yeah oh absolutely yeah as rowan atkinson another uh brit comedian mr bean said you don't so much drive these new cars as you manage them and uh you know he he's got really expensive cars because he's very very wealthy uh but yeah the car has become very anodyne as you're talking about that i'm thinking about um uh the spitfire that i had and um and how uh you know top gear used to be about doing car reviews and things like that and they would do a lot of hyper cars and stuff and it's

like okay that's kind of interesting but uh not really that's why i like about the the cars that you do you actually do uh uh reviews of real cars and uh but you know they they would have some hyper car stuff anything but then when they started doing the Amazon series, it was all about adventure. Right. They would try to take the cars into some area where they didn't really have roads or bridges or this. And they've got to navigate through this jungle or through the Arctic or or whatever. And it became kind of an adventure. Right. And the car was there. They get old cars and modify them. And it was an adventure. And it made me think as i'm

looking at your article here made me think about my life with my um triumph spitfire which was uh not anodyne at all it was every trip was an adventure you didn't know if you're going to complete it or not because we all have stories don't we i mentioned some of them uh some of them in the article one of my fondest memories was of my 74 Beetle, which I used to commute into D.C. with when I first started working in D.C. at the Washington Times before I started getting new cars to test drive. And every drive was an adventure, particularly in the wintertime. I used to keep an old Exxon gas card in the glove box because when it was cold out, you'd get frost on the inside windshield. And so I'd use the card to scrape a little hole so I could, a portal so i could see

and then in the summertime when it got hot you know the humidity would result in essentially the same thing except it was still moist not frozen so i had a rag that i would use you know to do that and it's looking back on that it's fun and it makes me smile and you're smiling and we have these stories of these cars that we remember affectionately you know from 30 years ago oh yeah who remembers whatever appliance they drove five years ago? Nobody cares. Yeah. Oh, exactly. Yeah. You know, again, it was, it was one of these things, you know, it was both a love and hate relationship that I had with a Spitfire is like,

I imagine if you had a, you know, a girlfriend that you really like, but she's constantly creating problems. I never had that problem. Karen's doing the board, never had a girlfriend like that, but i didn't have a car like that and you know so he loved it and you hated it it was a raw experience as in florida and so you know it's hot and humid and and then it would rain in the afternoons and when it rained you just had the single thickness of a roof there so it was like you were in a tent and and it's leaking in through the windows and all the rest of the stuff you're driving down the road and everything is shaking but it was a blast you know it really was a blast and and so it was also empowering yeah it was empowering in a way this is something i think

that's important to convey to young people who don't have any direct experience with this yeah it broke down but you know what you could usually fix it of course you know with these these modern computer controlled devices essentially cell phones they're fine until they stop working. And once they stop working, that's it. You know, you just helplessly stand there by the side of the road waiting for the tow truck. That's kind of emasculating, you know, in a very real way. It was great to be able to deal with the problem by the side of the road. You know, you had to band-aid it with whatever, literally duct tape, dealing wire, whatever.

But you got the thing back on the road, and that made you feel really good, particularly when you're young. You're like, wow, I can deal with this. I can handle a problem myself, as opposed to having to pick up the phone and call somebody who can help me. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and with that car, you know, the Spitfire, the whole front half of the car was one piece. So you'd lift up the front, which was both fenders as well as the hood and everything. And you can step inside the chassis and work on the engine you know i mean it's just right there it's this little tiny engine and uh there was plenty of room to stand inside the engine bay with the engine that reminds me another thing i talked about in that article about what you can't

do anymore is see the engine yeah because you know the manufacturers almost all of them now they put these black plastic they call them acoustic or sound deadening uh covers on top of the engine which has the effect of making all the engines look exactly the same there was a time when your new car dealers would proudly pop the hoods of their new vehicles and that way people who were interested in a car could go and marvel at you know what was under the hood look at that wow that's neat i love to pop the hood of old cars like my trans am because it's just neat to look at the engine you know they made it interesting to look at now they all look the same and whether it's delivered or delivered or not uh i i feel as though it serves the purpose of of fading any

distinction that's meaningful between cars with engines and electric cars you pop the hood versus piece of black plastic who cares it all looks the same that's right it's all sealed up so you don't see anything uh i've got a couple of comments here uh one of them is from seth landrigan uh thank you for the tip seth appreciate he says eric peters one of my favorite night show guests great job as always david agree yeah uh one of my favorite guests as well we've been talking for many years i love talking to eric uh and uh this is also from jason barker the one time i trusted abs and kept my foot on the brakes i slid halfway down the road with zero control uh cola cole almost says airbags in the seat like a russian videos and launched their friends 50 feet in the air yeah that's right i've seen

that video and that brings up another point If I might want a quick little rant about how the cost benefit and risk reward equation has been taken away from us. You know, people will say, but airbags save lives. That's true, but they can also hurt and even kill you and you don't have the choice. And it doesn't matter whether somebody else says, well, it's more likely that it will help you rather than hurt you. So what? It's not their business. It's not their right to take that choice away from you. You have the right as an empowered adult to make those decisions for yourself. But they want to treat us as if we were idiot children in perpetuity.

At least parents in the normal sense, the goal is to raise their children to become empowered adults. Whereas with these people in government who want to parent us, the goal is to keep us in a state of childlike idiocy forever. That's right. They treat adults like children and they treat children like adults now in the schools. But, you know, talk about airbags. When they first came out, remember, they had set these things up and tweaked them for typical men, right? And it was injuring women and killing children.

And remember the fight about, can't I just have the ability to turn this thing off? No, you can't turn it off. I'm not going to let you turn it off. That was the most amazing thing to me. Now, we've had this admitted. The government acknowledges the massive debacle with the uh the takata airbags which affects billions of vehicles yeah they would not even allow people who had the misfortune to buy one of these things and have that thing staring at them in the face to temporarily have the thing turned off until the dealers can clear the backlog of

people who are waiting to get the you know the replacement airbags they they just it tells you again what they really care about isn't your safety it's about their authority and their control yes that's absolutely right um and i talked about that earlier in the program a helicopter pilot trying to go in and help people and and when he landed he had this little barney fife come up to him you're going to get arrested if you go and do this again you got to get out of here and all this is my authority he doesn't care about the people who can't get out there's no government helicopters taking them out he's just going to shut it down you and i talked about the takata airbags many many times we talked about it in the context of this nonsense about the

volkswagen emissions problems and all the rest of this stuff uh and said look you know they've killed um you know 16 people worldwide and they have these recalls of these things. If these things go off, it's like getting shot in the chest with a shotgun or something like that. And yet, they're not doing the same thing to Dakota that they did to Volkswagen. Because with Volkswagen, that was part of their agenda. They had to shut everything down for their agenda, for their green agenda that they're running through. Just amazing. Yeah, the contrast between Volkswagen'swagens uh very high mileage very high efficiency diesel powered cars and the

electric cars was something that could not be abided you know you could as recently as 20 what 2015 i think when they were still available you could buy a brand new jetta mid-sized sedan with a diesel engine that got 50 miles per gallon for 22 000 uh it kind of makes a 40 000 tesla look silly yes absolutely by the way uh jason barker thank you for this and to remind everybody said everybody's on twitter please go find eric and leave a comment on one of his posts he's being shadow banned there and we can break that if we interact with his posts. And again, his Twitter handle is LibertarianCarG. Yeah, I sound like a mobster, and that's not intentional.

It's just they wouldn't let me have the additional characters to say LibertarianCarG. Let's talk about a friend who has passed, Mike Valentine, the Valentine radar detectors. And again, this is something that we're going to look back already, probably on as we got the insurance companies and the car companies are snitching on you, uh, telling, um,

the, the insurance companies he's driving too fast. It's just a matter of time before they start sending that into the police and everything. But, you know, for the time being as the old smoking, the bandit gang,

where you've got radar and radar detectors and this going back and forth, he was a real pioneer in the Valentine radar detectors. And, of course, they're a sponsor on your website. I see them all the time. So if somebody's going to get one of these excellent radar detectors, click through at ericpetersautos.com. That'll help Eric. And it's a great radar detector tell us a little bit about your perspective yeah well mike you know i i know mike personally i first interviewed mike back in the 90s when i was working at the washington times

really good guy and for those who are not aware of mike uh he was the guy who developed one of the first really effective multi-band radar radar detectors that detected all of the various bands of police radar. And more than just that, he was very, very directly and enthusiastically involved against the fight to repeal the federal 55 mile an hour speed limit, which people who are in their 20s today won't remember uh this was something that lasted for almost 20 years that i think was imposed in 1974 and lasted for about 94 if i'm remembering my numbers correctly and during that time let me let me say it would have been to his advantage to cheer that on because i would have helped his sales right you'd think yeah but no you know he was again he was just a good guy a regular american guy who thought it was outrageous yeah that the federal government would just arbitrarily declare literally just like that that that highway speeds that had been perfectly legal and presumably safe you know it's safe to drive 70 miles an hour in 1973

and all of a sudden it is illegal speeding you know the day after this thing gets it's changed and you know he probably saved millions of americans many millions of dollars i know he saved me many thousands of dollars uh in extortionate fines particularly when i was a young guy because the nmsl the national maximum speed limit was still in force when i was in college so i was doing a lot of driving back then uh and if i hadn't had a radar detector my driving rap sheet would have been longer than a phone book. And he had the best one. I mean, he had great.

It was angled over to the side. Yeah, he just came out with the second generation a couple of years ago, I think. I still got the first generation. I actually, if anybody's got a Valentine detector, there is a great app that's for free. It's a guy from Ralealeigh i think uh because in his examples all the maps and everything are there in raleigh but it's an app called jbv1 as in valentine one but it's jb as in john boy and he just does an amazing job combining uh the the functions of your phone in terms of gps location and other things like that uh to uh and giving you um you control to mute it or to, you know, added a whole bunch of features to the old Valentine radar detectors that then got added in in

the second generation. But it's just a great app, and it's out there for free. This guy does it again because of just kind of a passion. You know, it was a business for Mike Valentine, but as you point out, he had a passion to help people not get ticketed yeah it is a shame to see that that passing away and it's a shame to see the um ability of us to play smoking the bandit going away too i know well and think about the v1 detector too uh that people should know about um there is now a lot of what you might call electronic clutter on the road because almost all new cars are

actively emitting signals because they have they have their own laser and radar systems built in as part of the safety technology so it can be pointless to run one of the other detectors because they're constantly going off because they're picking up these signals and you know after a while you just can't deal with the thing beeping at you and flashing lights all the time the latest generation v1 from valentine uh has filtered out that stuff so now when you get an alert it is a police radar it's not uh some other car coming at you that has some driver safety technology that's causing the thing to trigger yeah and that's really the key thing now that's one of the things i like when i use my uh the the app the jb1 uh the JB1, I've got a convertible.

So where do I put my radar detector, right? It's like a big red flag. It's not illegal like it is in Virginia where you live, but it's a big red flag for cops if they see it there. So what I do is I mount it onto, I stick it onto a turbulence deflector that's behind me. And I've got a suction cup mount on it. And my son 3d printed a black box so nobody can see the, the display and everything gets sent to my phone, which, you know, a lot of people have a phone mounted so that they can get navigation. It's got a map on it and all that kind of stuff. And, but it also does that.

It does a good job of remembering certain uh signals and muting those out and that's really where the the uh the rubber meets the road today in radar detectors is getting rid of false signals and you know things that belong to hondas and things like they're really bad about that uh but um and also locations that you're going to drive by where there's some kind of a burglar alarm so it remembers all that stuff and and it shuts it down and uh and that really is now being incorporated into the second generation of the radar detectors it was always interesting to me it was like this you know measures and countermeasures and counter countermeasures it was always a spy versus spy remember that old cartoon it's exactly what it was uh but that's kind of the world that we live in now and it's now everything is becoming like that,

you know, whether you're particularly important, you know, it was, it was always a mulcting and always an annoyance, but now it has gotten to be outright extortionate. You know, you get a simple speeding ticket and in many States,

it's a hundred, several hundred dollars fine. Oh, just a trivial speeding ticket, but that's not the worst of it. The worst of it will come a few months later when you get your adjustment from the insurance. And they'll continue to adjust you for the next three years at least until that ticket finally drops off of your record so you know people look at the cost of

a radar detector my god it's 500 bucks i can't afford to spend 500 bucks yes you can yeah compare that to the cost of even one ticket that's right i put in the same category too as uh you know having a camera there so you can tell that you were not at fault in the accident that type of thing always great talking to you eric peters ericpetersautos.com very interesting articles about real cars about liberty and about mobility thank you so much eric and thank you all of you for joining us today. Have a good day. Thank you, David. I appreciate it. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you've been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight Show. Please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show

causes this dangerous information to spread farther. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science. Wear your mask. Take your vaccine. Don't ask questions. Using free speech to free minds. It's the David Knight Show.