The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW: GreatReset of Transportation is Failing

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Eric Peters, EPautos.com joins. Will we let them strong-arm us into a future that doesn't work? "Assisted driving", insurance scams, confiscation of cars, France in chaos over massive fuel shortages, every single Rivian EV recalled over steering issues while Subaru sees demand soar for manual transmissionsFind 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-show Or you can send a donation throughZelle: @[e-mail] App at:  $davidknightshowBTC to:  bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambitions. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like

yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. We have Eric Peters, epautos.com joining us. It's always a pleasure to talk to Eric. Both of us share a common interest in cars and liberty, and those two things are related quite a bit. Thank you for joining us, Eric. Always great having you. Thanks for having me back, Dave. Are you ready to be intelligently assisted? Yeah, you asked me that question when we were on the phone. I said, that's why I have you on.

I need intelligent assistance. That's why I get Eric Peters when we were on the phone. I said, that's why I have you on. I need intelligent assistance. That's why I get Eric Peters when I come on the show. Boy, where to begin? Okay, basically what we're talking about here are speed limiters. But they use these insipid, clawing terms every single time. Intelligent speed limit assist is if you're somehow an idiot that needs assistance. You're a cripple that can't walk. You have to put in a wheelchair and help along. as if you're somehow an idiot that needs assistance. You're a cripple that can't walk.

You have to be put in a wheelchair and helped along. And then also serve the purpose of tamping down any objection because how could you object to something that's intelligent, right? Oh, yeah. When we were coming out here, let me just insert this. When we were coming out, the truck that we rented, we rented a really big truck and it had intelligent assist on the steering except that it was constantly uh scaring me to death grabbing the steering wheel and making this big rumbling noise in this on this big rider truck you know it's a big diesel with air brakes and stuff like that and and uh and it was you know

i'm used to driving a miata so i felt kind of out of place. This thing seemed really high and very wide. But if I got too close to, you know, when somebody would start coming to me, I'd get over to the right a little bit. I wasn't about to run off the road, but they thought I was too close to the right-hand side painted line, and it would start threatening me. Yeah, that's what they call lane keep assistance technology. Yeah, I love it.

Yeah, that's great. So essentially what they're doing here, to explain the point to people, the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, is going to try to incentivize the car manufacturers to put speed limiters in all cars that will make it impossible to speed, to go faster than whatever the speed limit is. And I find this fascinating on a number of levels. But I think the big one is with regard to EVs, which we talk about often, because the biggest selling point for EVs is that they are ludicrously speedy.

So what's the point of a ludicrously speedy EV that you can't speed in? Exactly. Yeah, so you can zip right up to that 30 mile an hour speed limit so they may you know and i ride there's an irony here they may be shooting themselves in the foot if this goes forward because it will utterly defeat anything that's appealing about an ev okay so now i'm going to pay 30 to 50 percent more for this vehicle that that only goes half as far and takes five times as long to get going again that i can't even speed in. What's the point? Well, you know, it is their agenda and they tried to force this in Wyoming and the people in Wyoming said, no, we don't want your money.

They actually tried to bribe them. They said, well, here's $26 million and we're going to give this to you to put in charging stations throughout Wyoming. It's like, are you kidding me? I mean, the towns are few and far between. It's like Texas, where they say, never have I seen so much of so little so far between. Well, that's the way it is in Montana. You don't want to have something that you've got great distances that you've got to cover, not to mention the fact that it gets super cold up there.

It's going to reduce the battery life. And then you're going to sit there in Montana charging. Yeah. You're going to sit there in the winter charging up, you know, charging your car while you're freezing to death. And they said, no, even with the bribe, they said, no. Yeah. You know, I've driven in places like that where it's extremely cold. You know, sometimes you're talking about 20 or 30 degrees below zero, and you can imagine the effect that that would have on an EV, particularly if, you know, let's say that you're a farmer or a rancher, and you're pulling a trailer, and you need to get your stuff to where it needs to be,

and maybe that's, you know, 75 or 100 miles down the road. It's absurd. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You've got an article. Now, your article about intelligent assist, you just put that up today. But you had an article about what happened in Florida with a hurricane. And I've talked about that briefly a couple of times. The fact that, you know, these cars got flooded, but even got flooded with salt water.

And, you know, and the fires that they're having. Can you imagine if this had happened in California, where they got a lot more electric cars to catch fire as the batteries are corroding out from saltwater? Yeah, it's another of the compounding problems with these electric cars. Everybody knows that when a hurricane rolls through a place like Florida, cars get flooded out, and there's this problem with them then being shipped to other states, the titles get washed, and some poor mark ends up buying a flood-damaged car, and that there's this problem with them and being shipped to other states titles get washington some poor mark ends up buying a flood damaged car and that stinks but now reading this additional element of danger to it

because when that saltwater or briney brackish water gets to the battery it forms tendrils within the battery it enhances the the chances of there being a short circuit in a fire and a number of these electric cars down there did catch fire, and probably a lot more are going to catch fire, because it'll take a little time for the damage to the battery to manifest, and then, poop, it just lights up. And you won't have any warning of this. It's not like with a gas engine car where you have to have a spark.

You know, it's very hard for a gas engine car to just spontaneously combust. That almost never happens. There has to be an impact, and there has to be a spark. With these electric cars, they just spontaneously combust. That almost never happens. There has to be an impact, and then there has to be a spark. With these electric cars, they can spontaneously combust, and it's a really sound policy to not park one anywhere near your house or in your garage, let's say, which is ironic, because that's probably where you're going to have to plug the thing in. And when it starts, it is a very rapid, you point out, a runaway thing because, you know, once part of the battery explodes and gets hot, that just, it's a chain reaction with all the

rest of the different components that are there. Yeah, it's a cascading thing and it's a chemical fire. People should understand that as well. It burns much faster and much hotter than an ordinary fire or gas fire, much more difficult to put out. And even when it's put out, it can spontaneously reignite. And that's why a number of the salvage yards out there that receive wrecked EVs have these dunk tanks. Can you imagine that?

A dunk tank. They have to immerse the thing in water because they don't want their whole place going up in smoke. And you can imagine ultimately who's going to pay for all of this. And the answer is you and me. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be pushed out through the insurance rates. I've talked about these EV fires, these battery, lithium battery fires.

Uh, and it said, you know, it's, it's like, uh, one of these, uh, joke birthday candles. It keeps relighting, you know, you really do have to submerge, submerge it in water is the only way that you can keep the thing from reigniting. Uh, but you know, they're going to, um, I don't imagine they're going to make the insurance do have to submerge it in water is the only way that you can keep the thing from reigniting. But, you know, they're going to, I don't imagine they're going to make the insurance rates just apply to electric vehicles because that'd be politically incorrect. So we've all got to have that. Politically incorrect and I think also financially untenable. You know, if the rates were adjusted to reflect the risk, then the people who buy these EVs would be paying exorbitant insurance, and it would be a disincentive to own an EV, and they can't have that.

So they'll do what they always do, which is spread the costs out onto the people who haven't incurred the loss and who aren't posing the risk. It's kind of interesting to see what's happening in the U.K., and I do go to look to see what they're doing, because typically you see this kind of stuff happening first in the UK, then in California, then in the rest of the country, they try to impose that. And what is happening in UK is really, you're talking about the insurance business, it really has been escalating there. They've had about a half a million uninsured cars taken off of Britain's road since 2018.

And it escalated through COVID since the police didn't have anything to do in this make-believe pandemic. They went around confiscating cars that used to be insured. They had their registration and their address or whatever, and they're parked there because nobody's going anywhere with a lockdown. So they knew the car would be there. And they went around and started confiscating these cars. Already this year, they've confiscated about 65,000 cars in the UK because people were

behind on their insurance. I mean, this is an unholy alliance. When you look at the automobile and transportation, the car industry, you see this kind of alliance between the insurance companies and the government the same way that when you look at social media censorship you see this alliance with the technocracy and government they are partners in crime aren't they yeah it's all part of an effort to systematically make personal vehicle ownership so onerously expensive as well as unappealing that most people are just going to say you know the heck with it and that what they want. They want to reduce us to a state wherein we simply are allowed transportation

as a service. That's the term that they use. And of course, provided you're a good, socially obedient widget and you wear your face diaper and you get your vaccine and all of these other things. Yeah. And they've even, you know, Ford wants to call itself a mobility company now. You know, they don't want to call themselves a car company anymore. And they were doing very well in terms of profitability. A few years ago, we talked about this at the time. They got rid of their CEO there because he was just too focused on automobiles and especially on SUVs and trucks, which were profitable. No, we're not about making profit. And that was before they came out openly talking about ESG, but that's really what was done at Ford. They said, no, we want you pushing our social agenda. We want you pushing environmentalism and we want you doing it for the government. And so they kicked out the guy who was making them a lot of money and put somebody in who was going to make it a, you know, you're going to rent by the ride and you're going to get a battery operated electric cars and that's it, you know, pushing that. But the good news is, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say a really fascinating to me aspect of this is that there was a time when the left distrusted and criticized big corporations. But of course, now that the left controls and owns these big corporations, it's not a problem. That's right. There is some good news. Last time we talked about the fact that, you know, the guy that's running Ford right now decided that at least for the next generation or next iteration, I should say, they're going to do the traditional Mustang with a V8. So I don't know what happened to their corporate leadership. Did they pull back from the mobility thing or what's going on with the politics there? But that's good news in the short term, isn't it?

It is. I think things hang in the balance. You know, I'm going to be really cynical here. I think that they aren't sure yet the way things are going to go. You know, it still could be that this EV thing flops badly, and maybe they're hedging their bets, and they want to have some real vehicles that actually have some market desire behind them in production so that they don't go out of business, and they're just waiting to see what's going to happen. I hope that the truth about these EVs will come out in time to prevent a complete collapse of, you know, what was the,

you know, the American car business. Well, you know, Toyota, which is now the biggest car company out there, has said, well, you know, they've been very reluctant to get into the lithium battery electric vehicles. They listened to the government. The government said, well, we want you to cut emissions. They said, well, we can do that. We can do a zero emission electric car. But they came up with the hydrogen fuel cell type of approach. And there's no infrastructure for that. You know, there's, you know, a couple of dozen filling stations for that throughout the United

States, including a couple in Hawaii and the rest of them are in California. And so they've been basically coerced into, they're now coming up with a lithium battery car because they just can't fight against it. And, you know, there's not going to be any infrastructure for anything other than the battery car. So they're kind of being coerced into it, even though they're skeptical, they don't believe that it's going to work.

And one of the things that the Toyota CEO said was, you don't even have the infrastructure to power the grid for all the stuff that you want to put on it. I mean, it's not even about putting the charging stations. That's where Boudigay is focused. And it isn't about that at all. Where are you going to get the electricity to pump through these stations? That's just a symbolic surface thing to put up charging stations when you're shutting down the power

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about what constitutes a so-called zero-emissions vehicle. That's right. As a matter of fact, it was several years ago that they were saying that the power generation grid in India was allowed to be so dirty because, you know, both China and India are allowed to build as many power plants, coal power plants or whatever they want. They can build whatever they want, unlimited, and they don't have to try to make them clean at all. And so they make them very cheap and dirty and they do a lot of them. And a lot of the people who bought into this whole climate change stuff are very upset about that because they say, well, this is a global problem. How do you give the two biggest countries on earth a pass on this stuff?

Sure, because it's a political agenda. Exactly. And so they even pointed out, they said, this is about nothing other than a transfer of wealth. I mean, that's really what this is. But in India, the grid is so dirty that if you had a car that got about 34 miles per gallon, you would be using less emissions than an electric car that was charging off of that dirty grid. You know, that's the reality of it. And the same thing is starting to happen in the West as well.

You're starting to see the fact that as they get the cars cleaner and cleaner, they're closing that gap so that it's really going to be negligible in a few years if they wouldn't ban internal combustion engines. And that's why they're banning them in California. Now New York has announced that they're going to ban them as well. Sure. And I'd like to, you know to further dissect this whole business of emissions, which has gotten horribly confused because they have conflated the things

that were historically understood to be emissions, meaning the unburned hydrocarbons and particulates and so on, things that caused smog and created respiratory problems in people and so on, with carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is not a a pollutant as as understood historically you know people will claim that are to play it's changing the climate and then i i'll ask them well okay do you happen to tell me what the percentage of carbon dioxide is in the earth's atmosphere

and every single time i've asked a question half the question one of these people they don't know the answer and then i tell them it's zero point oh four percent that's how much of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. And you're really going to tell me that some fractional increase in that fraction amounts to an existential threat to the climate that we're all going to die if it increases by however many fractions of a percent. It's just absurd. It is. It is. And plants need it. And what are they doing? They're spending massive amounts of money to pump CO2 into the ground and store it. They call it sequestering. Spending billions of dollars to set up this infrastructure to do this.

It's the most ludicrous thing I've ever seen in my life. It's a natural gas. It is a part of a symbiotic relationship designed by God. The animals breathe it out and the plants breathe it in and give us, you know, what we need. And yet, it's not just CO2, but they're also now coming for nitrogen in various forms and got to shut that down. The majority of the air is nitrogen. And so, you know. The reason, you know, it's exactly what you said.

It's because these gases are life-enhancing and life-affirming. Being warmer is better than being colder. And having more plants to eat and more plants for the animals that we eat to eat, these are good things. You know, how do we keep warm in the winter? We do it through these gases. These are affirmatively good things. They're not bad things. And what they're trying to do is starve us out and freeze us out and get us to accept our own diminishment by guilt-tripping us about this climate crisis that doesn't exist. And they do it by relentless, continuous propaganda. And now, you know,

banning anybody that disagrees with them about whatever the MacGuffin of the day is. And that is how they've been able to do this. Just look at the COVID thing, right? They've talked about for the longest time, well, you know, it's going to be some kind of a respiratory thing. It's going to be some kind of a flu thing when they're wargaming this, when they're doing their germ games for two decades. And so they take the most common thing, the flu or a cold,

and then they demonize that as if that was the most dangerous disease that we had ever had. And now they're saying, well, how do you tell COVID from the flu? Well, it's difficult, but you know,

and you can't always tell that now they're admitting it. Right. And so they take something that's common, like the flu, and then make that the emergency. They take something that's CO2 or nitrogen. That's very common and ubiquitous. And they make that the thing that has to be eliminated. And everybody's got to play this game of Simon Says with it.

Yeah, and no apologies for when they're caught in a bald-faced lie or an egregiously wrong thing that perhaps benignly could be attributed to just incompetence. There's never any acknowledgment of error. There's only demonization of those who point it out. Yeah, that's right you got an article on a lot of people have talked about this picture of biden in his classic corvette stingray convertible a picture is worth a thousand words get in folks are building a better america it's like yeah i think it would be a better america if we were all allowed to have a

classic uh corvetteingray convertible. It's a great thing, isn't it, that Biden's PR flacks are this incompetent? You know, here you've got a guy who's telling us that we must give up our cars to drive an EV, telling us as he's sitting in his classic Corvette with a carbureted V8 engine that has no emissions controls, no airbags, no safety equipment whatsoever. It's astonishing to me that somebody got paid to make that picture. You know, it'd be kind of interesting to go through and make a list of everything that's in that 1967 Corvette that makes it so great that has now been subsequently banned. You know, I think about the hideaway headlights.

Oh, no, those are banned. Yeah, I got into that in my article. You know, like one of the things that made cars of that era, not just the Corvettes, so aesthetically appealing, was that the designers could do things like put those really pretty and, you know, mostly ornamental and decorative little bumperettes that they had back in those days. And those got outlawed by the government.

Beginning, I think, in 1974, they all had to be built with these horrendous five-mile-an-hour bumpers that ended up putting several hundred pounds of dead weight hanging off the front and rear end of cars. Made them that much heavier, made them use that much more fuel, go through tires and brakes that much faster in the name of putatively safety. You mentioned that was 1973, last year that somebody could buy it without the five mile an hour bumpers. I bought a 1974 Triumph Spitfire and they retroactively put like these two big rubber baby bumper things on the front and back, right? Two front and two back, right?

And I looked at this and I thought that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life because that car is so low that when Karen and I pulled out of the dealership, it's going to go under whatever you hit. Exactly. It's like, there's no, my bumper won't even touch their bumper. We pulled out of the parking lot when we bought the car and I stopped at the light and a bus pulls up on the left. And I look over to the left and I could see everything under the bus. I could see the muffler and all the rest of the stuff. And I said, look at this.

We can see under the car now. We're so low that we're under the bus i could see the muffler and all the rest of the stuff and i said look at this so you can see under the car now we're we're so low that we're under the bus here and uh there's absolutely no way that five mile an hour bumper was going to work but you know it was that way with everybody uh eric they put the five mile an hour bumper uh thing on there but all the bumpers were different heights and none of them lined up you know if you're going to mandate a bumper mandate uh you know a particular height that it's got to be otherwise it's anything though exactly the reason why the cars from that era are are you know looked at so fondly and and are collectible and desirable and continue to appreciate and value is precisely because they had this emotional appeal they were beautiful they were individual they were art on wheels. Now we've got these homogenized plastic boxes that look as if they were extruded from the same

factory that different badges slapped on them. And, you know, they're appliances. And none of these vehicles, 20 or 30 years from now, you're not going to see them at car shows. They're going to be long since in a landfill somewhere. That's right. Yeah, exactly. They shouldn't have been mandating that in the first place. But again, it's the unholy alliance with the insurance companies and the government, number one. Number two, when they do decide that they're going to put something out there with the purported idea that it's going to save the insurance company's money, they only go halfway

even. I mean, it doesn't even have any pragmatic, you can't even make a pragmatic argument for what they're doing. It's just an arbitrary exercise of brain dead power. And a conflict too. You know, on the one hand, they'll, they'll warble about safety. You know, they'll insist that your car have to have the five mile an hour bumpers. And on the other, they'll start whining about fuel economy.

Well, you just added 300 pounds of dead weight to the car. You know, it's just, it makes my teeth want to fall out of my head sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if I was to go back, I would have told my 1974 self, go somewhere to a body shop, take those bumpers off, and get last year's model and put those bumpers on because I hadn't changed the car other than that, you know? Sure. Yeah.

But you know, looking at Biden, you know, there's something, it's so exasperating because he's, he clearly loves his Corvette, you know, but yet he has contempt for us, you know, who might want to have something similar. Yes. Yes, exactly. Well, that's a, that, that is a standard that they have. You know, we're talking about intelligent assist. That's where you began and the article that you put up today.

So what do we say then if they're going to talk about how they're going to drive the car, they're going to intelligently assist us? And you just had Rivian, one of the electric car manufacturers, had to recall every single one of their cars because of steering failure. I mean, we just saw this last week with a 18-wheeler company. They had done some self-driving trucks or something, but they had to recall all of their trucks because they had some kind of a seatbelt issue that wasn't really theirs. Somebody, a subcontractor, had put it in there. But, I mean, we're talking about the steering not working on these rivian cars yeah and i you know i don't know offhand whether uh it is

mechanically disconnected in other words whether it's steer by wire in those trucks but they're headed in that direction so if there's a software glitch you don't have a mechanical connection anywhere no mechanical way to control the steering if the electric steering fritzes out. And that should alarm people, you know? The idea that these vital vehicle controls are not mechanically controllable by the person who happens to be sitting in the driver's seat. I would never want a car like that. I don't see it in the article here whether that was drive-by-wire or not, but I would have a hard time believing that it wasn't with Rivian. And, and the very fact that if it wasn't, if it was mechanically hooked up, uh, it probably

wouldn't be, you know, I mean, you could have some kind of a, you know, you had rack and pinion, you could have some kind of a bad bolt bolt or something like that. That was going to cause the whole thing to fail. But it seems to me as much more likely there would be some kind of a software error or something like that in a steer-by-wire is probably what is happening. Yeah, and you know, it's a problem that is compounded by drive-by-wire throttle and transmission control, which a number of new cars have. In fact, I think the majority of them have, meaning you have no way really to control the engine RPM and potentially to even put the transmission out of a drive range to put it into neutral.

If the engine starts to race, uh, I don't like that. You know, I mean, maybe I'm just erring on the side of caution, but I'd like the idea that if something goes haywire with the car, that I can shut the engine off,

that I can put the transmission in neutral, uh, and just roll the thing to the side of the road instead of being taken, uh, on a ride that may lead to my death. Yeah, yeah. I had that issue with some mods, just a cosmetic mod that I had done on my Mustang, 68 Mustang V8. And I sped up, I floored it to go around a car after I just put on this thing on my accelerator pedal, and it got stuck.

It was just this stupid, I was in high school school and it was this stupid thing that I put on there. It looked like a hang 10 thing or something on my, uh, on my accelerator pedal nearly killed me because it got stuck on the carpet and it wouldn't come back up. And so I'm excited. I'm coming up to an exit turn and the thing is, is roaring. It's still accelerating. And so I was able to put it in neutral and then steer with one hand and reach down there and pull the thing up, you know.

But yeah, just drive by wire with everything under software control. You got an article, who wants a stick? At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing.

Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie And it looks like it's starting to make a little bit of a comeback, as we've talked about. Yeah, it was

actually really interesting. I caught a news blurb in one of the industry trade publications about Subaru, and in particular about one of their models, the Crosstrek, sales of which were up almost 40%. Wow. And it occurred to me, the light went off in my head, and I wonder why that could be. Could it possibly be because the Crosstrek, sales of which were up almost 40%. Wow. And it occurred to me, the light went off in my head, and I wonder why that could be. Could it possibly be because the Crosstrek is the last mainstream model that Subaru makes that's still available with a manual transmission?

Hmm. Apparently, a lot of people really want to get one of those, particularly since Subaru says that 2023, the model year, will be the last year that you can get it with the manual transmission. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I think it's not, you know, people will say to me, well, you know, people don't want manuals. Manuals are, that's why manuals aren't available.

But it's, you can put it the other way around. You know, the reason that they don't get them is because they're not available. And the reason that they're not available isn't because people don't want them. It's because the government has de facto outlawed them via these regulations that make it very difficult for any car company to build a vehicle with a manual and get through the gantlet of miles per gallon requirements and the carbon dioxide emissions requirements because it's harder to program a vehicle that has a manual transmission.

The automatic transmission is something that's programmable, so you can program it to pass the test. And that's desirable from the standpoint of the car manufacturers. And so they just give up on the manual, put the automatics in. I'd like to see what would happen in a market kind of environment if the car companies were free once again to offer manual transmissions. I have a feeling a lot of people would buy them. Yeah, we've got a 2012 Mazda 5, and one of the reasons that we tried to get that car

was because we wanted to get a manual transmission, but we eventually gave up because we couldn't. They were making so few of them, shipping so few of them with a manual transmission that we eventually gave up. But we still have it, still drive it, and the automatic, they have put a a a you know it's not a real powerful engine in terms of acceleration by any means but they exacerbated the weakness of the engine by putting by adjusting the uh the shifting points to try to maximize the fuel economy on

these epa tests and so you know when you get get out of the shift between second and third is so long that it doesn't have any power there. And so whenever I have to, you know, get on to the interstate or something like that, always manually shift it and, um, you know, just to get past that, but that, you know, that's exactly what they do. They, they game it so they can look better with the EPA numbers. And that's why they're pushing towards automatic, you know, just to comply with regulations and to comply with this arbitrary benchmark that they put out, which really doesn't make much sense anyway. I mean, you look at this, you know, the city and the highway mileage

that they figure that they've got out there. I mean, everybody is playing games with it in terms of the shifting points and all the rest of the stuff. It really is pretty meaningless. Yeah, it's standards of learning for cars. All that matters is that the car company can say, yep, we achieved whatever the figure is. Let's say 36.5 miles per gallon.

We got that or we got close to it. And then they can advertise it on the window sticker that it gets 28 city and 35 highway or whatever the number is. But out in the real world, you find just because of the factors that you described, the car's lugging, it doesn't feel right. So you push down harder on the accelerator to get the thing to accelerate. And boom, the supposed three-mile-per-gallon-or-so advantage that was touted on the window sticker goes right out the window. That's right. It's a window sticker. Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about gas prices. You've got an article, low gas prices for maybe another month, maybe, right? Because the election's over, and now we can let it go, right? Well, yeah. Where do we begin with this? Obviously, the reason that gas prices have gone up is because of the very deliberate and specific policies of the Biden regime that imposed a scarcity on the supply of oil. That had some political consequences, though, as the price of gas doubled and then almost tripled.

The proletariat was getting a little bit discombobulated about that. that, and I think Biden, in one of the most cynical moves imaginable, dumped open the spigot of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to flood the market temporarily with enough oil to get the prices to go down to only twice as much as they were before he became El Presidente. Somebody called it his campaign credit card. I think that's a good description of what he's done with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Yeah, in the hope that it would tamp down prices enough to distract people for long enough, meaning to the midterms, that maybe they wouldn't suffer the electoral route that everybody seems to think is coming.

But the point is, the take-home point here is it is temporary. It is artificial. There's a finite amount of oil in the strategic petroleum reserve. And now that the Saudis have said, nope, we're not going to increase capacity to you, just to benefit you. And once the election is over with and they don't have to worry about the consequences anymore, they're going to go right back to their policy of energy starvation. And I wouldn't be surprised if gas costs $5 a gallon again by December. Just think of the many different levels of cynical hypocrisy from the Biden administration.

I mean, on day one, he's shutting down extraction. He's shutting down the pipeline, all the rest of this stuff. Now they are out there blaming the oil companies. They're blaming especially the retailers. Retailers don't make much money off of this at all. I mean, they've got a very, very narrow margin there. And most of them are now underwater, according to the trade group. You know, they're losing money on the gas that they sell because they have to, you know, it's just kind of like the movie theaters.

They have to sell popcorn in order to, that's where they make their money. They don't, they make virtually nothing off of the actual ticket sale. And so they kind of use the gasoline to get people in there. Typically, they'll make a little bit off of each gallon that you buy. But for the most part, it's the other stuff that you're going to buy while you're there. But the Biden administration is ruthlessly attacking these people. Meanwhile, he exacerbated all of these artificial scarcities that he forced on us day one. He exacerbated that with the sanctions against Russia.

So what does he do? He goes to Venezuela where they've got sanctions. And so, I mean, all of this, none of this stuff is so amazing how hypocritical it is. It's just amazing to me that, I don't know, we'll have to see if they get away with it. I think the American public has got to see through this, but they're working pretty hard to make sure we don't. Well, absolutely. And the take-home point here is that they need for oil and gas and diesel to be expensive in order to force off this electrification transition that they constantly tout.

It's vital. Nobody is going to spend $50,000 on an electric car when they can still buy a $25,000 gas engine car that they can fill up for $30 or $40 even. It's just it's not going to pencil out. And that's the bottom line, and that's why I think when we look at Gavin Newsom, I call it the Newsom World Order because they know, because you can kind of, they telegraph what they're going to do there. When you look at how out of sync California is with everybody else, uh, you know, you look at the number two most expensive, uh, uh, average per state, you know,

gasoline, and they do it on a per state basis because it's highly dependent on the state taxes. That's why it varies so much, but it's a state type of thing. But you look at Oregon, they're way below the price in California. California has never been more expensive than all of the rest of the states in reference to them. And it's not even because of their taxes, it's because of the special blend that they are forcing on there. And that's the path that I think Biden and the rest of these people are going to follow. They're going to follow Gavin into the Newsom world order. And they're going to start doing that type of thing to artificially inflate the price of stuff.

I remember when they did that with diesel. I had a diesel car at the time. And they artificially put in this new special blend of diesel, and all of a sudden, it had been cheaper than regular gas. All of a sudden, it was right up there with premium gas once they did that. Yeah, sure. And a lot of people will remember that. There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when diesel fuel cost substantially less

than gasoline, and now it's absolutely the opposite of that. And in addition to that, the diesel vehicles, the new ones, are extraordinarily expensive and not particularly efficient. So there's really not a lot of reason to buy a diesel-powered vehicle anymore, which was precisely what they intended. That's right. And it should be cheaper than a regular because it's not refined as much. except for the artificial interference of the government and their mandates, and again, I think we need to stop calling them mandates. I'm doing it myself out of habit.

I think we need to call them dictates because we need to understand they're coming from dictators, right? Exactly right. And I think that really ties it in better than mandate does. But yeah, it's just their mandates, their dictates. A diesel engine is an inherently simpler kind of engine than a spark ignition engine. It doesn't have as many parts. It doesn't need as much to operate. In fact, all it really needs is a starter to crank it over, and once it's running, it continues to run on its own.

But they've made them much more complicated, at least as complicated as spark ignition engines, using this pretext of emissions control. And the reason that they're doing it is deliberate, because diesels, much more so than gas engines, represent, in my opinion, an existential threat to this electrification agenda. I believe it's why Volkswagen was practically crucified over this pedantic, meaningless, in the real world, so-called cheating on federal emission certification tests, because they could not abide a manufacturer like Volkswagen having an entire roster, a lineup, not just one car, but a whole lineup of highly efficient and very affordable, very practical, very durable diesel-powered vehicles. Nobody is going to buy a $50,000 EV when they could buy a

$22,000 diesel-powered Golf or Jetta that gets 50-something miles per gallon and is going to buy a $50,000 EV when they could buy a $22,000 diesel-powered Golf or Jetta that gets 50-something miles per gallon and is going to go for 300,000 miles. And you and I talked about this. I don't know. When did they put those fines on there, the EPA did, for the quote-unquote cheating on the emissions test? I mean, we're just talking about how they— That all blew up around 2016, and I don't think it's coincidental because that is right around the time when this whole EV push really began in earnest.

And that's right after they said, okay, 2030 is the date, right? Prior to that, the UN had its Agenda 21, and then in 2015, the UN and Davos said, okay, it's 2030, and we're going to have the smart cities and have all the rest of the stuff. And they immediately come after a Volkswagen. And we were just talking about how they all cheat on their mission standards by the way they adjust the transmission shifting points and stuff. Right. So they came after VW because as you pointed out at the time, uh, they were about ready to pull out a 100 mile per gallon diesel engine.

That was really on a blow things away. And so they had to be shut down. They gave them fines that of like $4 billion. And you, we, you and I compared that to Luke. What did they do when they had the exploding Pintos? I mean,

you know, all of these different things with the Takata airbags, nobody had ever gotten a fine anywhere close to that. They really made an example. People were actually killed in those cases. Yes. Yeah. I mean,

no, no harm was ever established. No specific actual harm was adduced and laid at the feet of Volkswagen over these diesels. You know, it was purely this legalistic pedantic argument about cheating on an emissions certification test. That's it. And they made a point of it, too. They brought these people to heel. They were floating around the idea, we're going to criminally prosecute some of the CEO class of people, some of the officers of Volkswagen, and threatened to do that.

They didn't do that to my knowledge, but they were talking about doing that, and then hit them with a $4 billion fine. So then VW became one of the biggest cheerleaders of electric vehicles, and all of a sudden you didn't hear any more about it. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10

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Big Brother. You know, a lot of people are unaware of the fact that just as this as that scandal broke, Volkswagen was working on this diesel electric hybrid. And that diesel-electric hybrid that you used, the model that you just referenced a moment ago, would have gotten probably between 80, and depending on the driving conditions,

80 and 150 miles on a gallon of diesel. Wow. They're going to use it as a generator, right? Yeah, exactly. Now, you can imagine, you know, what would that have done to this electrification agenda? If, you know, if you could have gone out and bought a little diesel electric commuter car that would get even 80 miles per gallon, you know, effectively eliminate your fuel costs. Yeah. Well, what we're talking about eliminating fuel costs, one way you do that is to eliminate the fuel, right? And that seems to be what they're doing.

That's what they're doing. And, you know. And then look at it from the environmental point of view. If you're only using a gallon of diesel to go 80 miles, you're hardly emitting anything, you know, leaving aside whether this whole climate so-called crisis is another one of these amped-up, hyped, over-exaggerated frauds. Even if you just accept for the sake

of discussion that there's something going on, well, wouldn't you want a vehicle that uses practically no gas because it emits no gas almost? That's right. And they can make them very, very clean. But the diesel has been the poster child for banning stuff for a long time. They used to talk about fine particulate matter.

And it was a decade ago that some people that I was working with right there where I was in North Carolina, Research Triangle Park. They had the EPA there. And Mark Malloy of Junkscience.com noticed that they started having, they were doing something at the EPA and they're sending people to the hospital. And so he started digging on it. And they had searched for people who had respiratory and heart issues and they exposed them to more than 70 times what the EPA said was safe. And they're trying to blame it, you know, to use that as an excuse to completely ban diesel. I mean, they had their crosshairs on that more than a decade ago. Working at that in the same time, you had Lisa Jackson, who was Obama's head of the EPA, was saying, yeah, I'm not talking about people getting sick from fine particulate matter from diesel.

I'm talking about more people dying from that than die from cancer and heart disease. You know, just like they said about COVID two years ago. You know, just flat out lies for whatever their MacGuffin is for the day. Yeah. Well, it's tragic that they're able to get away with this because the media has become complicit with it. There's essentially no mainstream journalism anymore. There's simply an amen chorus PR organ for whatever the shibboleths of these governments, of the government-corporate nexus happens to be. Let's talk about what's going on in France,

because, you know, the next thing, besides making gasoline very expensive, besides making it very rare and shutting down our sources, This is happening right now in France. They've got 11,000 filling stations in France total. Out of those, 2,100 had no fuel whatsoever, and another 1,100 had run out of one type of fuel or the other. I've got a short clip here. I'm going to play this. You can hear this. This is from irish journalist who is there in france warning people about it's like if you're going to

go to france bring your own fuel with you but here's what he had to say seemingly unending tailback early on saturday morning in paris some motorists spent hours in their cars in the hope of filling their tank i got up at up at 4am to go looking for petrol. After a long wait, there was relief, even if stocks were limited. 30 euros for everyone, no more. It's not petrol, but time I'm putting into the car. The hunt continued throughout the day. Shortages caused by strikes at refineries

have hit one in five filling stations in France. The north of the country is particularly affected, like here in Arras, where entry is being screened. It says I'm three quarters full. Three quarters? Nope. Can't get any more gas. It's appalling, isn't it? You know, and I caught something in the news the other day about the Swedish government advising people in Sweden to build huts inside their homes using blankets, you know, like throw blankets over their dining room table so that the family can huddle underneath it and not freeze to death this winter.

You know, it's amazing, isn't it, Eric? You know, I remember when we had the OPEC oil embargo, right? And the politicians were all about, we're going to make sure this never happens again. You know, we're going to find other sources of energy. You know, if we've got to get off of oil and all the rest of this stuff. They were talking that way. And yet nobody is saying, let's figure out what we can do to fill in the gap here. You know, whether you're talking about in California, they've got a city that's going to run out of water in two months.

The almond trees are dying. They're not talking about how can we get more water? How can we set up some desalination plans or anything? Nobody wants to solve the problem. They want to manage the crisis. They want to manage the chaos that they created. It's an opportunity. The problem is one of abundance.

Yeah. You know, you and I can remember when for decades they kept intoning and telling us that it's peak oil. You know, we're going to run out of abundance. You and I can remember when, for decades, they kept intoning and telling us that it's peak oil. We're going to run out of oil, and that's why we've got to come up with alternatives to oil. Well, as it turns out, there's plenty of oil. There's so much oil, we don't know what to do with it. And if the market were able to extract it, we'd probably be paying 50 cents a gallon for gas.

And that's what they can't abide. It's the prospect of the proletariat of ordinary people having access to cheap, abundant energy, which translates into common wealth for pretty much everybody. That's what they don't want. Well, I remember, you know, when all this stuff happened, and, you know, it was back in 1979, I saved copies, and I show them from time to time on the show, of Time and Newsweek. And they were both saying, and they even did a really nice graphic, I think it was on Time magazine, showing that by the mid-1980s, we were going to be completely out of oil. And then by the late 1980s, we're going to be completely out of gas.

But at the time, we had 666 years of coal, they said. So the first thing that had to go was coal. And then the rest of the stuff was going to take care of itself. But, you know, I saved that because I knew it was ludicrous. And I knew it would be something I could laugh at for the rest of my life. And so I do pull it out every once in a while and laugh at it. But, you know, they're still giving us these dire predictions. They still love to call fuel fossil fuel and still promote that dinosaur thing.

You know, it was the CIA who put out peak oil. They were the ones who were pushing that idea because it served their purposes of control. And it's all a lie. I mean, you know, this is organic material that is renewable. You can find more of it the problem is the politicians who are trying to use it as a point of control absolutely you know what you said about having those those old time magazines prompted something in my mind that scene in orals 1984 where winston has the uh the piece of the scrap of paper that that contradicts with the current orthodoxy of the party is.

He has to burn it quickly so the big brother doesn't see that he has it. And that's exactly it. As soon as one of their rationalizations is dissipated by fact, well, they come up with a new reason to continue the crisis. So when they could no longer claim that we're going to run out of oil, because it was clear we weren't running out of oil, along came the climate crisis yeah that's right yeah i was just playing that clip there and you notice that uh one of the guys there was saying look you know forget about the fuel look at how much time i'm investing in this right they got to show up and they got to wait in line

and they're sleeping in their cars and all the rest of the stuff and then they got to get past the gendarmes who are going to say well how much fuel fuel do you i'm sorry you got three quarters of a tank no you can't buy any gas, all this kind of stuff. You've got an article called The Time Tax. Talk about that. Well, yeah, I think it's one of the aspects or facets of this whole electric car thing that people should take into account. It's not just that they cost you money and that they cost the environment as well,

but think about how much time you're going to end up having to spend dealing with an electric car. And time, unlike money, is something that you can never replace. So that half hour to 45 minutes that you're going to be spending at a so-called fast charger, not including the time you spend getting there and then the time you spend getting back to wherever you came from, that's the time tax that you're going to pay for owning an electric car.

Yeah, time is money. Time is money. And that's the thing that they're robbing us of. But of course, as I said, I like to look and see what is happening in Europe because they're ahead of us. And in London, you have Sadiq Khan has set in as they're gradually banning cars, getting to the point where they have their full-on ban. But even before they get to that point, they're setting up what they call ultra-low emission zones. And so you can't go into these certain areas or certain places like, you know, London's got several of them. And this is something that's becoming quite common throughout the UK, throughout the EU, to set these areas where you can't drive unless you have a zero emissions car. So this is kind of the, you know, as Fauci said about the vaccines, we've got to do it from the inside. We've got to do it with disruption.

And we have to do it iteratively. So here's the iterative part of it, you know, these ultra low emission zones. And I fully expect to see that as part of their rollout here in the United States as well. But we've already had two states jump in and say, we're just going to outright ban cars at such and such a time. But I imagine in the interim, they're going to start moving people into that Overton window with these ultra low emission zones. Sure, they will, and it will always be, as it has been in the past, rules for thee but not for me. Yes. You know, the time tax, all of the other things that are associated

with this transition to electrification will not affect the ruling apparatchiks. You know, they will continue to have access to combustion engine vehicles because they work and they get them where they need to go, just as they'll never have to worry about the cost of anything because they can make us pay for it. That's right. Yeah. When do you think they're going to have the president's beast fully electrified?

Right. It's preposterous. It will never happen. You know, Air Force One, the presidential helicopter, all of these things burn hydrocarbon fuels and, uh, they work and they're, uh, there's no time tax when he needs to go somewhere. He can go there right now. He's not going to sit there and wait for a charge. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Well, how are things going in terms of your, um, uh, of your, uh, I know that you've had some raids on your chickens and ducks. Um, have you recovered from that? Have you secured that? What's some raids on your chickens and ducks. Have you recovered from that? Have you secured that? What's going on with your move towards self-sufficiency? I have. Well, I finally did the thing.

I did the thing that I should have done from the get-go. And, you know, the wise farmers who live around me, of course, will say I told you so. But I put up an electric fence. Yeah, the electric fence has everything it needs to deter everything, including bear. You get zapped with one of those things and you're going to head for Z Hills. So there have been no more raids on the poultry. I just wish that I had, you know, learned to do that from the get-go. But I guess you have to learn from experience.

That's the nature of these things. Well, that's good. That's a useful tip for a lot of people. I mean, uh, certainly for us, because we we've lost a couple of batches of chickens back in Texas. We haven't tried it yet, uh, since we relocated here. Uh, but we had, uh, a couple of batches of them that were lost to predators who got in and, um, they're really neat because, uh, you don't have to have grid power. If you go to a rural king or a tractor supplier, any place that sells livestock, farm stuff, you'll be able to find these things.

And you have a head unit that's solar-powered. And you put it on a post, it soaks up the sun, it stores up the jewels, and then you run wire around whatever you'd like to protect. And anything that touches that wire is going to get zapped. That's great. Yeah, the bear thinks that he's just, he's hopping across a big bunch of bees or something like that, right? Yeah, you know, and I experimented on myself inadvertently. So, yeah, I found out exactly what it does, and I think it's more than ample to keep a

bear headed in the opposite direction. That's great. That's great. Any other tips that you want to pass on to people trying to get more self-sufficient as winter is approaching and we never know what these idiots in charge are going to pull on us next, especially after the election? Yeah, a lot of it depends on your particular situation. To those who have the ability to heat their homes with wood, I think it's a really solid idea to buy a load or chop some wood and have that on hand because once you have it, you've got it. And that means that if the power goes off or if the propane truck doesn't show up, you'll still have the ability to heat your home, to boil water if you need to, which could

be very important. It's good to have alternatives. Something else that I do, I've got a little camp stove, and it's a multi-fuel stove. It can burn regular unleaded. It can burn diesel. It can burn alcohol, practically anything. And I keep that ready to go at any time because I can use that to cook on should the need arise and I can use it to boil water should the need arise. So having these backups and alternatives

is sound policy in my opinion. That's fantastic. Yeah, we need to, we have a fireplace, but we need to get more serious about it and get a wood stove. That's one of our first things that we've got to do in terms of prepping because we have tons of wood around here. So it'd be a, yeah, we don't want to be hunkered underneath the table with blankets over it. Do we go full Sweden experiment? Uh, well, it's great talking to you. Uh, Eric always is. And, uh, folks, if you want to get some, um, uh, very thoughtful, entertaining writing, go to epautos.com.

A focuses on practical aspects of transportation, practical car reviews. I mean, you're not going to find reviews of a $3 million hypercar that you're never even going to see. But you'll find real stuff about real cars there, especially how it impacts our freedom. epautos.com. Thank you, Eric. It was great talking to you. Appreciate it. Thanks, David. Appreciate you having me on.