Friday, March 09, 2012

"Apparently, not all his crooked friends have been paid off..."

...that's Don Surber, reacting to this:

Another week, another car talk. Barack Obama stopped by a North Carolina truck factory on Wednesday to announce $1bn in tax credits and grants for alternative-energy cars and trucks. It was Obama’s third speech on cars and fuel in an election battleground state in three weeks.


And in a very, very related story from - gulp! - Consumer Reports:

Bad Karma: Our Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid breaks down

Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken...We have owned our car for just a few days; it has less than 200 miles on its odometer.

...the dashboard flashed a message and sounded a “bing“ showing a major fault. Our technician got the car off the track and put it into Park to go through the owner’s manual to interpret the warning. At that point, the transmission went into Neutral and wouldn’t engage any gear through its electronic shifter except Park and Neutral.

We let the car sit for about an hour and restarted it. We could now engage Drive and the same error message disappeared. After moving it only a few feet the error message reappeared and when we tried to engage Reverse the transmission went straight to Park and again no motion gear could be engaged.





We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.

We encountered other problems with a Karma press car that visited the track for a few hours, and we have heard of problems at press events. In addition, we see that some owners are experiencing a variety of issues, as evidenced by forums such as FiskerBuzz.com.



Barack Obama invested $529 million dollars of your money into Fisker Automotive - a California based company with an Al Gore venture capital firm connection - as part of his "green initiative", or whatever he calls his redistribution scheme these days. But here's the punch line: These high-tech, 1%-er green Edsel's are actually built...in Finland:

Why Finland?

Here is the answer provided by Fisker Automotive company founder Henri Fisker. “There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle,” he told ABC News “They don’t exist here
.”


So why would Barack Obama invest so much American money into a product that can't even be built here - or apparently, built at all?

Maybe there really is a sucker born every minute.

Or perhaps, for a more likely answer, you might want to glance again at the title of this post...

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