A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.
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If you look at the top ten most reliable cars, as reported by thousands of people in all kinds of independent testing, there's only one American car in the top ten. It's the Buick.
In Australia’s biggest cities, public transport is generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still hideous drain on the public purse. Part of the problem is inefficient, overmanned, union-dominated government run train and bus systems. Mostly though, …there just aren’t enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads.
The reason American cars don't sell anymore is that they have forgotten how to design the American Dream. What does it matter if you buy a car today or six months from now, because cars are not beautiful. That's why the American auto industry is in trouble: no design, no desire.
The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of 'Knight Rider' in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don't even notice them. But in real life, they still don't exist. What if you could buy one today?
There are not a ton of people buying cars - cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize.
I used to think that, by the 21st century, cars would run on electricity rather than gasoline and would have guidance systems so that they actually drove themselves. Specially equipped roadways would transmit instructions to the cars, telling them where to go and how fast. I figured this would be in the lines painted on the roads.
Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.
How we fund transportation in this country is broken. You all pay a gasoline tax, right? Well, cars go farther, we get electric cars, and so on. And then we do more with the money than just build roads. We do bike lanes and mass transit.
I grew up in Texas, and people love their American-made muscle cars there. I grew up around people who loved cars and took care of cars and my dad's a big car nut, so I learned a little bit about cars - how to love them, most importantly. I think that from the time I could remember, I've always envisioned myself in a vintage muscle car.
Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening - these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country's market.
My colleague Senator John Ensign of Nevada told me a story that epitomizes the selfishness of our culture: When I was a teenager, I had a sticker in my car with a picture of a bear scratching himself on the tree, and under it was the saying, 'If it feels good, do it!' That was the motto of the '60s and the '70s, and certainly it is the motto today. The image of the bear scratching himself highlights a view of human beings as animals, and that people should do what pleases them at the moment without a thought to the broader long-term consequences of their actions.
Everybody has a gas-guzzling car because people like SUVs. They would like SUVs if they were hybrid vehicles that had the same horsepower and used less gasoline. Instead, what the auto manufacturers are doing is building SUVs that are hybrid vehicles that use the same amount of gasoline because they up the horsepower. That's a decision that they make to market irresponsible economic behavior. The American people like the SUVs, they have kids, they, they need them, they get around in them, but we have options.
My family achieved success not in spite of, but because of the American system of taxation. After all, without reliable and safe roads there’d have been no Disneyland; without high functioning legal systems and a well regulated business environment there would have been no copyright protection for Mickey Mouse.
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
When Saddam Hussein was eliminated, the Iraqi statehood and thousands of people from the former Baath party were also eliminated. Thousands of Iraqi servicemen, who were part of the state's Sunni elite, found themselves thrown out into the street. No one gave a thought about them, and today they end up in the ISIS army.
After years of training [as astronaut], you have great confidence in the technology. When you get in your car, you probably feel safe too, even though thousands of people die in car crashes every year.
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