U.S. gives $529 million to build car with worse gas mileage than SUV

By David McElroy · October 22, 2011

The story of the Fisker Karma is the perfect picture of why politicians and bureaucrats shouldn’t pretend to be venture capitalists. They don’t know what they’re doing, so they make all the wrong decisions. Why should they care, though? It’s not their money.

You might have heard about the U.S. government giving a $529 million loan guarantee to a car company headed by Henrik Fisker, a well-connected Democratic Party donor. Al Gore is a partner at the venture capital firm that’s backing Fisker in building a luxury electric vehicle.

Well, it turns out that Fisker isn’t building those cars in the United States. He’s building them in Finland, so U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the jobs of Finnish autoworkers. And, yes, the Obama administration signed off on the deal about where to build the cars.

So let’s assume we can ignore the fact that the cars are being built overseas but financed by U.S. taxpayers. At least it will be an environmentally sound car to drive, right? Well, not really.

In a scathing article for Forbes, Warren Meyer explains why this “green” car is a sham. You see, its electric engine has a range of only 32 miles, according to the EPA test procedures. After 32 miles, you switch to its gasoline engine, which gets 20 miles per gallon. You can walk into any car showroom and get better gas mileage than that — with no taxpayer funding subsidy.

We’re not finished with its problems, though. You might that think the car at least does well on energy use when it’s running on electric power, but that’s not true, either. Although the EPA rates it at 52 MPGe (which they claim is the equivalent of MPG for electric vehicles), the Forbes article shows that by realistic calculations — not the ones designed to make an electric vehicle look good — the Karma get the equivalent of 19 miles per gallon on its electric engine. (The article explains why there’s controversy over the testing standards.)

Since the base model costs only $95,900, it’s a great bargain, huh? You can also pay $109 850 for the top-of-the-line model, but that would pay for a cheap house in many places.

So who is this turkey for? It doesn’t generate U.S. manufacturing jobs. It doesn’t save energy. It’s a risky company on which taxpayers seem likely to lose half a billion dollars. There must be a pony in here somewhere. Right? Actually, it’s closer to a pig in a poke than a pony.

My guess is that there’s only one reason this turkey — or pig — is being built. It’s for rich celebrities who want to flaunt their “green” credentials, but don’t want to be stuck in a cheap Prius econobox anymore. So when you see some Hollywood star rolling at someplace talking about how he’s saving the environment, remember what it’s really all about. It’s all about his ego and comfort — and our tax money.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts