Cadillac Panders

There have been a number of truly awful and stupid things going on in the world, but I think I’m going to pick on a very particular piece of stupid.

In case it was overshadowed by other, larger economic news, we just bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler to the tune of 25 *billion* dollars. I’d like to believe that it’s all due to horrible economic conditions — but I’m starting to think it might have a bit more to due with having their heads up their asses. We love putting out big, pointless gas guzzling crapboxes like the Excursion, Humvee, and the Navigator.

Then I catch a television commericial from Cadillac regarding a hybrid version of their fuel sucking Escalade line. Small print indicates that it gets less than 14 MPG… but the real kick in the nuggets comes from GM’s site on it … [is that it costs at least $71,000][7].

[7]: http://www.gmfleet.com/pages/submodelOverview/2009_Cadillac_Escalade Hybrid_Hybrid.jsp

I should start by saying that no one needs one of those. It’s a serious “check out my shiny silver-rimmed penis” thing, and that particular mentality is a great deal of why we have no damn public transportation industry, and indeed why we bend over for at least 10% of our paychecks to fund some pretty awful people halfway around the world.

My question to the auto industy is this: are you fucking kidding me? You know we’re in an awful economic climate where new car sales are down because no one has any credit nor cash on hand to buy these overpriced turkeys outright, and you insist on created expensive luxury vehicles which shore up our gas prices (basic supply and demand going on here, no PhD required) and then tack on the word “hybrid” so the rich fuckers who can buy these things can go back to sniffing their own farts and pretending that they’re doing something positive in the world?

Hybrids are, by design, a horrible kludge to keep us all using gasoline, even if it’s only to a lesser degree, because Americans don’t want to transition away from their shiny metal wangs. I mean, we kinda killed our train lines, and have a really sorry excuse for busses and shuttles in all but our most populated areas. Europe has been trying to transition to solar and geothermal power with some distributed charging stations ; still avoiding the issue of people still thinking that everyone needs a car, but at least not requiring petrol.

We’re addicted to oil, and until shitheads start thinking about things other than trying to juice people for more money for large, pointless vehicles, we’re kinda stuck with this stuff. Let’s hope super capacitor technology picks up, and maybe we we’ll see long range EVs for less than 20k$.