Green Cars Won’t Grow Money

Barack Obama and the Democrats think they know more about making cars than the people who’ve actually been making them for the past century.  It would be worth noting that Senate Democrats couldn’t even run their cafeteria without going millions of dollars into the red.

Barack Obama talks about the future in “Brave New World” terms, but one troubling thing about the future is that we don’t know for sure what will happen

As we contemplate bailout out the automakers to the tune of billions of dollars – which will surely require subsequent bailouts of tens of billions of dollars more in the near future – we should at least briefly contemplate the sheer idiocy of the Democratic plan to require automakers to go green even as they continue to force them to subsidize massive UAW compensation inequities.

The Washington Post had a story  by Steven Mufson titled “The car of the future–but at what cost?” that begins:

Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like.

“A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week. “We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”

But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part of a “sustainable U.S. auto industry” that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.

That’s because car manufacturers still haven’t figured out how to produce hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them. After a decade of relative success with its hybrid Prius, Toyota has sold about a million of the cars and is still widely believed by analysts to be losing money on each one sold. General Motors has touted plans for a plug-in hybrid vehicle called the Volt, but the costly battery will prevent it from turning a profit on the vehicle for several years, at least.

“In 10 years are they [at GM] going to solve the technological problems with respect to the Volt? Sure,” says Maryann Keller, an automotive analyst and author of a book on GM. “But are they going to be able to stake their survival, which is really more of a now to five-year proposition, on it? I’d say they can’t. They have to stake their future on Malibus, the Chevy Cruze, and much more conventional technologies.”

U.S. automakers faced a barrage of demands last week that they provide evidence and assurance that they would use federal bailout money to transform their companies to produce automobiles of the future, using advanced technologies and featuring hybrid or plug-in vehicles. And in his “60 Minutes” interview on Nov. 16, Obama said that before backing a big loan package he wanted to be sure “that we are creating a bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere.”

But there’s no guarantee that the new business model would be any more viable than the current one. Automobile experts estimate that the battery in a plug-in vehicle could add at least $8,000 to the cost of a car, maybe considerably more. Most Americans will be unwilling to pay the extra price, especially if gasoline prices languish around $2 a gallon.

Barack Obama has talked about subsidizing the new technology to make it reasonable enough for Americans to buy (which is another way to say, “socialize one thing to make it cheaper than something that ACTUALLY IS cheaper”).  But the Post story continues:

Eager to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Obama proposed a $7,500-a-vehicle tax credit for plug-in vehicles during his presidential campaign. Roughly half of Americans don’t earn enough to take advantage of such a big tax credit. (A head of household would need to earn almost $50,000 to have a federal tax liability that large.) Many others don’t have the cash to purchase an expensive vehicle then wait for a federal refund. To spur sales of new vehicles, the price must be reasonable at the point of sale, say many industry experts.

In other words, the government subsidies WILL bring the cost of cars down (by socializing the REAL cost), but most Americans STILL won’t be able to afford them.

It has been noted that one could paint string yellow and sell it to the government as gold.

Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but environmentalists have played exactly that trick on Democrats with the green agenda.

The saddest thing of all is that the whole “Global Warming” thing is increasingly being revealed to an even bigger joke:

The killer frost for global warming

What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming

What You Never Hear About Global Warming

Voters don’t want anything to do with expensive global warming measures when they actually get a chance to vote on them.  But they rarely ever DO get to vote directly for them.  And Democrats don’t have to worry about their policies blowing up because the media continually produces disinformation to protect the liberal agenda.

Green cars don’t grow money.  But liberalism does seem to grow plenty of suckers.