Barack Obama has quietly garaged his Chrysler 300C and bought a Ford Escape Hybrid.
Senator Barack Obama has tossed aside the keys to his Chrysler 300C in favor of a new Ford Escape Hybrid. According to the Detroit Free Press, the senator from Illinois was lambasted for driving the a V8 300C after chastising Detroit in a May 7 speech for failing to anticipate rising oil prices that have changed consumers' buying habits.
John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Chris Dodds and Bill Richardson all scrambled for automotive cover and bought politically-correct vehicles. Now that most of these politicos are out of the race, it would be interesting to surveil their daily rides. The real irony is that Clinton and Obama are travelling the country in private jets and being ferried to events in limousines.
I don't have anything against hybrids except the fact that the political class is trying to dismiss the economic realities of this vehicle--are regular people going to buy a car which after five years, requires that the entire battery pack be replaced at very substantial cost?
I like to buy a car new and then drive it for a dozen years or so. The reason is pretty simple--my largest cost is not the fuel, not insurance, not property tax, but the actual cost of the car itself. The longer I have it with the least amount of repairs, the better value I get. As a result I perhaps counter-intuitively have a 1999 Jeep Cherokee with an eight cylinder engine. I bought it cheap, replaced the engine with a rebuilt unit and I expect I'll have it for decades since its so easy to repair and/or replace parts--and so useful to have a four-wheel drive vehicle in these parts.
The mileage isn't great, but I done about the greenest thing you can do these days--I work at home for the most part, which means that the Cherokee mostly sits--cheap standby transportation.
My point is that its entirely too simplistic to condemn SUVs and exalt hybrids--economic and other circumstances sometimes make a superficially bad choice and extreme good one, or conversely, a superficially good choice, a really terrible one.
What Barack is not telling you, because he almost certainly doesn't know, is that the resources needed to make Hybrids are rather exotic--rare earths used to make high-performance magnets. Virtually the entire supply comes from China, whose burgeoning domestic electronics industry is consuming 60% of its supply and is projected to utilize the entire production by 2012.
Democrats have been putting the kibosh on petroleum resource development and refining for decades at this point, and now they want to increase demand for a type of vehicle whose availability is going to be squeezed by the global shortage of a necessary resource.
As usual, I'm faced with the prospect of attributing their actions to muddy thinking or a conspiracy of massive proportions.
Posted by Mick Stockinger on May 20, 2008 9:26 AM
| Permalink
