And as for the early 911s, lift-off oversteer FTL! I’ve driven on in simulation, and that was scary enough.

As to your point about the Corvair, compare and contrast with the early Porsche 356 and 911. Nader was full of shit.

Nader’s efforts to improve auto safety have betrayed a complete lack of knowledge of cars and a condescending attitude towards those who drive them. For instance, his push for mandatory airbags resulted in airbags being widely deployed before they were technologically mature, causing hundreds if not thousands of deaths. This was because he did not believe that the US driving public could be convinced to use seatbelts. US seat belt usage rates hit 83% nationwide last year according to the NHTSA, with Michigan hitting 97.3% and American Samoa bringing up the rear at 55.7%. The fight for airbags drained political capital and cash that could have been used for more effective safety measures, such as mandating four-wheel ABS disk brakes or improved driver training.

About the Corvair, my brothers HS grad gift was a beautiful red Corvair. The first day he had it he took a friend out for a spin in it. He came home with a smashed up car because he rolled it. Lucky he and his friend lived through it. It was a dangerous car.

and for what reason? to force the populace to purchase automobiles. and all those replacement parts[tires, etc].

who killed the railroads? and promoted eisenhower’s interstate highway system? the system that killed most cities and divided the populace by race and income.

the same entities.

let us consider the crimes in greater detail. i have written about this previously on this site. as i recall, it wasn’t relished. but i care to reiterate the crimes that were the divestitutes made by GM that resulted in delphi, the divestitures made by ford that resulted in visteon.

both of these pseudo corp[ses] are now in bankruptcy. why?

well, rick wagoner and the GM board of directors saw that they could make GM become profitable if it threw-off a number of critical “in-house” operations.

the illustrative story is the AC spark plug operations in flint, mi. the figures i am going to quote appeared in a wsj article[A18, 31/03/06] entitled SHOWDOWN ON COSTS LOOM AS DELPHI GOES TO COURT.

suffice it to say, when AC was a part of GM, GM had to bear the average variable cost of a spark plug when it manufactured an engine. reportedly, that was $2.05 in 2006. but, GM required Delphi to sell that same spark plug to it for $1.70.

so, if the WSJ article is accurate[and as a long-time observer of the automotive industry, i think it is] Delphi took a loss on every spark plug it supplied GM.

and those losses were not confined to spark plugs. virtually every component GM spun-off to Delphi were then sold back to GM at a price lower than the average variable cost.

in the short term, this allowed the GM board to shout how it had reduced its costs. note who were officers and directors of GM while this fraud was being perpetrated.

and the management of Delphi was hardly a “hands-off” circumstance. JT Battenberg had been an officer and director[?] of GM when he was sent downstream to be the ceo of delphi. he was very conversant with what the bloodletting he was supposed to perform. after all, he had run AC-Delco.

this story goes undiscussed in the financial air[wsj, ft, cnbc]but the GM board looted the investors in delphi. a grotesque economic crime.

after the delphi bankruptcy filing, and delphi remains in bankruptcy, many of the divested assets were secretly restored to GM ownership by order of the bankruptcy court. i think that those bankruptcy court decisions reveal that a bandruptcy court judge recognized the fraud of those delphi divestituures. sometime last year, GM had to absorb those average variable costs. such as spark plugs.

of course, none of this gets covered by the whoreson media.

after GM pulled this divestiture stunt, ford did the same thing. created an entity known as VISTEON. into which they threw a lot of their parts making entities. and then they forced visteon to sell those parts back to ford at below average variable cost prices.

it should come as no surprise that visteon, like delphi, was finally forced to file for bankruptcy last week.

so, let us consider this history, now.

GM delayed its demise by the Delphi deception. but in that process it swindled all the stockholders, bondholders of delphi. do you read where this economic crime is being pursued by any law enforcement agency?

similarly, the stockholders and bondholders of ford’s delphi facsimile, visteon, have been defrauded. do you know of any law enforcement agency going after ford?

and then we must consider the icons of the purportedly progressives in the usa, the UAW. i must tell you that you must recognize the fact that the UAW was knowledgeable of these scams. and that knowledge should inform you that the UAW was an accomplice to those crimes[in the law, this is known as misprision of a felony].

in my view, this history is the stellar incident in contemporary fascism: big labor, big business, big government establishing a totalitarianism that destroys any semblance of the precepts of the constitution, the bill of rights.

I tried to get a 283 when the old mill crashed but the only short block I could get was a 350! I like the look of the big window but the hot Georgia sun slammin off the chrome toolbox can be a killer.

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.