Ken Berwitz

Yesterday, President Obama toured a couple of Detroit auto plants. 

At a GM plant, he sat in a "Volt", Chevy's new electric/gas hybrid car, and drove it a few feet.  He then declared it "the car of the future".

Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com (along with Edward Niedermeyer of the New York Times, believe it or not) takes this incredibly ridiculous claim apart with surgical precision.  You can read the entire blog by clicking here.  But let me give you a key excerpt:

According to Obama, the Volt is the car of the future. That might be true if we apply the model of Obamacare to the automobile industry. I doubt it otherwise. Edward Niedermeyer's New York Times op-ed column declared the Volt an electric lemon. (The Times even supplied a sarcastic illustration depicting the theme of Niedermeyer's column. What's happening here?) Niedermeyer introduces information necessary for the kind of analysis that is warranted, but which Obama spared his audience:

Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt's Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for "retooling" its plants, and you've got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.

There you go.  The Obama version of a car of the future. 

Billions upon billions of dollars we don't have, showered on everyone that had anything to do with its creation - both foreign and domestic - resulting in an inferior hunk of junk which, at $41,000, is so much more expensive than a comparable fully gas-powered car that you would have to be out of your mind to even consider it.

Great going guys.  What will the next new car of the future be?  A wind-driven sedan for $51,000? 

Just push it to the intersection and hope for a breeze.....