Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Cadillac ELR: More Foolishnees from Government Motors

We all know the phrase "a fool and his money are soon parted". Few things illustrate this better that the 2014 Cadillac ELR. Think of it as a fancy -- really fancy -- Chevy Volt. As you may or may not know, the Volt is a dog -- it doesn't sell worth crap, people don't want it even when you give them nearly $10,000 in incentives to buy it. It's a huge money loser even at the bloated price of $40,000 for a mediocre medium-sized four door sedan. Which to Government Motors, naturally meant that we need to make a bigger, fancier, more expensive version of this dog that will presumable sell every bit as well as the smaller, less fancy, cheaper verion.

It's not that the Cadillac ELR is a bad-looking vehicle:



It's just that it's a dumb vehicle. Dumber than the Volt. And the few folks who will buy it ain't all that bright either. The Volt is arguably way overpriced at $40,000. Consider that the rich fools who buy the ELR will pay $65.000 for it. That's more than the base price of the finest Cadillac money can buy -- the fastest production sedan on the planet, the 556 horsepower Cadillac CTS-V, a true automotive work of art. Granted, we're talking about two different (albiet both rich) customers. The buyer of a CTS-V is an someone who appreciates a fine vehicle, an auto enthusiast. The ELR buyer is a moron -- someone looking to spend $65,000 to make their own special enviro/political statement. One could see Alec Baldwin buying an ELR.

Like the Volt, this fancy Caddy is billed as an electric car. It ain't an electric car unless you have eight hours to sit around every 40 miles and wait for it to charge. It's a battery-driven gas car. Rather than the gas engine driving the wheels, it powers a generator which charges the battery that powers the car. It's a Rube Goldberg contraption that makes absolutely no sense. It's design is an admission that the concept doesn't work. All you have to do to understand that t
his concept doesn't work is think about how the normal family uses their car and consider how the expensive contrapition pictured above would work if it didn't use gas. Want to take it on a cross-country vacation? You would be stopping to plug it in to charge for eight hours every time you drove 40 miles. Many true electric cars -- the Nissan Leaf for example -- can't take Joe and Sally blow and their kids on a cross-country vacation, not only because they are too small, but because they have to have a full charge every 50 miles. Although the Volt and ELR actually use gas to get them beyond their 40-mile electric range, you ain't gonna get four normal-sized people and all their luggage in either one of them.

Despite what Barack the Terrible would have you believe, oil is not the "energy of the past" and electric cars aren't the future of transportation in this country. They don't fit the way Americans use their cars. Our cars are a symbol of our freedom and liberty in our huge expansive country. If you take a notion, you can pile your kids in the car somewhere in Iowa, hit the interstate highway system and be putting your toes in the sand on a West Coast beach in a matter of a couple of days. You can't fit your whole family in a true electric car let alone expect to drive it thousands of miles to either coast from the Midwest in a couple of days. Our cars are an expression of our freedom. The only expression an electric car makes is "hey everybody, look at how PC I am!" It's a political statement, not a viable form of transportation in the freest country God gave man.

Regardless of this, commie libs like Barry will continue to insist that electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and all the other envrio-rot are viable. The strategy is simple here: Just like "global warming", now "climate change", liberal enviro-Nazis figure that if they solemnly state that "alternative fuels" are viable, that they will somehow will it to be. Global warming or "climate change" is complete bunk but it has become so much a part of the political lexicon over the last 25 years that liberals have asserted for years that the false science of man-made global warming is "settled" and most people beleive the rot. Ten to 15 years from now, the notion that electric vehicles are as viable as gas vehicles will be as "settled" as the man-made global warming garbage is today. Because liberals don't care about your freedom, they don't care about your liberty and they don't care about how most of us use our cars. It's about "fundemental transformation" of how we as Americans view our transportation options and, therefore their freedom to move about the country as we please -- a direct assault on our liberty.

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