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An automotive outlook fueled on foolishness

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Tom Jackson

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: May 22, 2009

In our endless desire to put the happiest possible face on otherwise bleak tidings, This Space is pleased to report there is at least one automobile being produced by Detroit that the Nature Coast's largest Chevrolet dealer - to name one - cannot keep in his showroom.

That would be the new, re-imagined, yet delightfully retro Camaro, the crouching pony car lured back into production by the counterintuitive success of another back-to-the-future project, the head-turning, neck-snapping, gas-gulping Ford Mustang.

On a Wednesday afternoon that found him fretting about the whereabouts of tractor-trailer combos carrying his clients' new favorite ride, Tom Castriota, bona fide American hero and car dealer with shops in Hudson and Port Richey, conceded the gloominess of the domestic automobile industry.

President Barack Obama's latest declaration of war on American sensibilities (my words, not Castriota's) sparked no hope that things soon would get, and remain, better. Gazing out over a gleaming sea of pickups, crew cabs, SUVs and crossovers that Americans adore when gas prices don't prompt heart failure, Castriota wondered what his countrymen would be squeezing themselves, their 2.2 children and a weekend's worth of soccer gear into when the president's ramped-up CAFE standards arrive in 2016 - instructively, just in time for the so-long-suckers tour of a second Obama term.

For the moment, Castriota says, with gas recently surging toward $2.50 a gallon, he's selling more pickups than cars, and he's selling them to families. Families that pull boats or trailers or campers and attend the sorts of weekend sports tournaments Pasco County hopes will become the meat of its tourist business.

Well. Given engineering concessions necessary to achieve Obama's magical 30 mph, "I don't know what the new trucks will be able to pull," Castriota says. "Certainly not that 25-foot boat."

Globe-saving, oil-dependant nonsense

Ah, but the loftier callings - save the planet; import less Middle East oil - don't just require sacrifice, they deserve it ... right? Yes, but only in the event two pivotal points can be established.

First, that there is a cost-benefit advantage to living with radically higher corporate average fuel economy standards. On this, the jury is deadlocked because the evidence has been hopelessly politicized. If the data are tilting in any direction lately, however, it is tilting against the idea that climate change has been, is, or can be affected in any meaningful way by human activity.

Second, that the supply of crude oil worldwide is so limited that buying from the extremist-funding Saudis is necessary so long as our energy strategy is petroleum-dependent. This is demonstrably false, as the folks at the Minerals Management Agency of the federal Department of the Interior have established. More than a trillion barrels of economically recoverable crude lurk in Mountain West shale oil deposits. Untold dozens of billions of barrels of crude wait in offshore locations. Both resources are either snarled in government red tape or are utterly forbidden to exploration.

When Detroit ruled the road

All the while, Detroit gets clobbered for producing cars Americans don't want to buy. Nonsense. Americans very well want to buy Camaros and Mustangs and Challengers. And Tahoes and Expeditions and Acadias and Durangos and Dakotas. And Explorers and Navigators and Rangers.

The cars on which we are less keen are the compacts and eco-boxes their Japanese counterparts do so well - cars Detroit would produce in far fewer numbers (because it produces them at a loss), but for the feds' unwarranted, budget-busting CAFE standards.

"Our cars are a statement of who we are as Americans," Castriota says, marveling at the idea that Chevrolet can squeeze 26 mpg from a 400 horsepower V8, as it does in the new Camaro. Not because it must so much as because it can, because Americans find value in the combination.

Left again to the devices - style, performance and luxury - that once allowed Detroit to stand astride the automotive globe, the domestic auto industry would right itself in two model cycles. That, however, would require acknowledging the foolishness of our current environmental and energy strategies.

All of which leaves businessmen such as Castriota anticipating an America that defines itself as a sardine can on wheels, and doubting that it will be content to do so much beyond the ensuing Election Day.

Hear Tom Jackson's "The Jax Files Weekend" at 11 a.m. Saturdays on WGUL, 860 AM.

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