 This weekend we welcome Eric Peters, an automotive fanatic who reviews new cars for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and Investors Business Daily. But Eric is no ordinary car guy, he's a dedicated anarcho-capitalist and founder of EricPetersAutoes.com which blends car and bike talk with his high-octane defense of liberty. Eric and I discuss the automobile as a symbol of libertarian autonomy by status-loved public transportation, how moronic government regulations make all cars look the same, and why you should go buy an old V8 or an old motorcycle while you still can. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises Weekend. We're very pleased to be joined by Eric Peters from EricPetersAutoes.com. Eric, how are you today? I'm good. We gave listeners a little introduction and biographical sketch of you in the intro. So let me just throw this out as kind of a general idea. From my perspective, the state, the status, they hate individual autonomy. And as a result, I think they have always had a distaste for or been suspicious of the combustion engine and the individual actor driving where he wants to go in his own car. It seems like the state hates cars. Oh, certainly. I think you can go back through the years and find multiple things in support of that contention. And after all, what could be more horrifying to a status than somebody being able to go where they like, when they like, and in particular at whatever speed they deem appropriate. God help us all. Well, it also ties into their urban planning schemes, right? They want to force us into cities and onto public transportation. That too. They'd like that because it's regimented. You know, if you're in public transport, you go someplace when they tell you you're going to go. You stand at the platform and wait for the train or you wait for the bus. And the bus goes at its own pace and it takes you in its own sweet time and your autonomy is greatly diminished there by, you know, the chaos to the status of people just electing to go, come and go as they please, again, is horrifying. That's the word that I use. They seem to have a real psychological problem with just, you know, atomized individuals being able to go where they please when they, when they please. There is sort of one type of car that status like, and that is of course electric cars. I'm reading the other day how depending on how you tweak the gap accounting rules, Tesla may or may not be profitable for the first quarter of 2014. But I'm reading about their, their much-vaunted Model S and this car has a 300 mile range, which seems preposterously small to me. Well, 300 miles is grossly optimistic. You know, they have to, you have to put that into context. Theoretically, I suppose it could go 300 miles if you get along at about 45 to 50 miles an hour on a nice warm summer day and did not use the accessories. The Tesla is, the Tesla S is very quick a couple of times and very briefly. If you, if you use its performance, the battery will very quickly be depleted. And even with the supercharger, which goes into a 240 volt recharging system, it still takes about 45 minutes to juice the thing back up. And if you haven't got access to the supercharger, a supercharging system, you're looking at, you know, 10 hours or so to recharge the thing. The analogy that I draw, it's like, it's similar to owning a BMW M5 with a gas tank that holds half a gallon of gas and that you have to refill with a syringe. The other interesting thing I noticed was that their putative profitability was based in part on their ability to sell this California scheme of zero emission vehicle credits to other car manufacturers who make gasoline cars. Exactly. And there are also myriad subsidies at federal and state level both to the company and to the individual. I think the current tax rebate per car at the retail level to the individual is, I think, $7,500. And I know that in California, they've also got a state tax credit. Mind you, this is a car with a base price of $70,000, that's the base price. And it goes up from there to over six figures. So your tax dollars are going to help somebody, like to put help in quotes, who can already afford a $70,000 car, sensibly in the name of, you know, efficient transportation. Wow, $70,000. It's crazy. Well, I had an interesting experience over the weekend. I had the good fortune to rent an Infiniti Q50. And I will say that this car was absolutely phenomenal, eight up the road. You know, I took a look at the MSRP after I reluctantly turned it back into the rental car place. And it's about $40,000 with decent options. And I was thinking to myself, you know, if we had honest money, if we didn't have the Fed in this country, in other words, if people had to either write a check for $40,000 or they had to borrow $40,000 at natural interest rates, you know, can you imagine what cars might look like in America today? Oh, absolutely. You know, in fact, if you, I often complain about the add-on cost of government. If you took away just the mandates relating to the safety equipment that cars have to have, probably the, you know, you'd be able to go out and buy a brand new car, a really nice car for around $89,000. In fact, they have such cars in export overseas market. Yeah, I've noticed that, especially in India, there's some very sort of affordable Econobox cars. And of course, you've pointed out on your own website, you know, if you want a car that gets 40 or 50 miles to the gallon, well, we already used to have that. It was, it was a, a light way to Econobox like the Honda CRX. Right. Or you can go back far better. You know, the much maligned K car of the early 80s, it was a simple little car and it had, by today's standards, very primitive and crude technology. It did not have fuel injection. It did not have an overdrive transmission. It did not have low rolling resistance tires, bearings and so on, and notwithstanding all of that, the things still got more than 40 miles per gallon. And if you could imagine taking a platform like that, the basic car and making a few key upgrades, giving it fuel injection, for example, giving it a modern overdrive transmission, probably that car would be capable of getting 65 miles per gallon on the highway. Well, I just wonder when we talk about how much cars cost today, whether people realize that some of the things we now take for granted, add a lot of weight to the car and cost to the car and reduce mileage, things like airbags. And I noticed that the Infiniti are rented like most new cars today has the rear backup camera. Yeah, that's been mandated now. I think people think of these things as options or accoutrements that evolved as result of consumer preferences and they don't necessarily see the role that the state played in forcing all these on us, whether we want to or not, especially if we're a person who's perhaps less affluent. Well, it's worse than that. The premise of it isn't even questioned anymore. It's assumed that it's the right and proper role of the federal government to dictate the equivalent of the potential purchase in their cars. At least in the past, there was some debate about that and there was some input from the market and from consumers, but that's completely gone by the wayside now. You know, there are people within the DOT and MTSA and some of the lobbying groups, the backup cameras and simply state, well, we are getting unto themselves the right to speak for everybody else and well, boom, it gets mandated and we all have to pay for it. And one of the things about these cameras I'd like to mention is that while the initial cost may not be huge, but down the road cost might very well be and you'll be forced to pay for it because since it's a mandated piece of the vehicle safety equipment in most states that have an annual or biannual safety inspection, you have to have all of the factory original equipment on the vehicle intact and operational and if not, you can't get your plates removed. And that might entail having to have that flat screen, the display thing in the car replaced or other components replaced and the cost could be very considerable. I just wonder what's going to happen when especially younger drivers just use those exclusively and no longer look over their shoulder when they're backing up and the thing malfunctions and someone's killed behind them. It seems like we are creating a new generation of sort of helpless drivers. Well, there's that, but if it is, you know, you often hear this, the refrain, if it saves even one life, it's worth it, right? Well, the other side of the safety devices is that indeed sometimes they do result in injury and death airbags being a good example. It's a fact that airbags have killed people. It's a fact that airbags continue to injure people, but apparently the deaths and injuries of those people don't matter. The same is true of seat belts. There are accidents where if you're wearing a seat belt, you might be killed whereas you might not have been killed and granted, you know, it's a question of relative risk, but the key point as I see it is it's your life that ought to be up to you to delay those risks and make the decision that you're comfortable with rather than having somebody you don't even know dictating these choices to you. Well, it's interesting how as we move further down the road with some form of state controlled medicine, the Obamacare bill being the latest example of that, that as we devolve into this mentality, well, hey, we're all in this together. We all share healthcare costs. Then, of course, that's harming our argument as libertarians that whether I wear a seat belt, whether I wear a helmet on my motorcycle is my own damn business. Right. There's no limit to that. You know, once that premise has been accepted, I wrote an article about this recently. If that premise is accepted, then it goes way beyond things like wearing a seat belt or wearing a helmet when you ride your motorcycle. You could make the same argument about exercise, for example, and certainly it's a social cost if a person is sedentary and overweight, doesn't exercise carrying 20 pounds of beef around their belly. You know, they might impose additional costs for heart disease or diabetes and what have you. There is no limit, no aspect of your life that could not be subject to micromanagement by government goons based on this idea of social cost. It's incredibly dangerous. It is dangerous, but I would argue that there is more than just a social cost involved with all the safety equipment and all the added weight on new vehicles. There's also Infinity Q 50 aside, there's sort of Erica depressing sameness to cars today. They're not aspirational. I mean, when I, when I, a Camry looks like an Impala, which looks like a beamer. Is the state somehow part of the reason that cars have become so depressingly uniform? Certainly there is for, for, I guess the term I would use as a template, the, the totality of all of the regulations, for example, having to do with bumper impact, crash wordiness, a rollover and so on. De facto impose constraints on how a car is going to look, you know, you can only design the front clip of a car within certain parameters if you're going to pass the federal standards. So that is why you're seeing this, this, this kind of gloomy pervasive sameness, this homogeneity that is, is distinctly different from the way cars once were. I'm in my 40s, so I can remember the cars from the 60s and the 70s where they were just, you know, sometimes wildly, wildly different cars from brand to brand and make to make. And that has largely gone out the window. Now, there are some exceptions, but it's very difficult and also very expensive for a manufacturer to go outside that template. And that's why you only see the really interesting lines on cars that are really expensive because they can factor the cost into that and pass it along to the consumer. Given sort of the regulatory environment and the potential price of oil, I'm tempted to go out and buy an eight cylinder, an old eight cylinder and just sort of stick it in my garage to have it while I still can. Not a bad idea or get a bike, you know, I've got five. That's a great way to end run the gas thing and it's also a great way to end run the government, particularly with the older bikes, which are largely free of a lot of the fold roll that new cars are afflicted with. And you don't have to go so far back in the past, you know, with cars on board diagnostics, the in car computers, all of that came online around 1995. So anything that's newer than 1995 is going to have an ECU, electronic brain and all of that stuff. But with motorcycles, they only recently transitioned to fuel injection over the past few years and very few of them to the state have things like anti lock brakes, attraction control, a few of the high end bikes do, but most of them still don't. For now, Eric, I'd like your take on the future of the manual transmission. From my perspective, it was it was an integral part of growing up. All of my first few cars were stick shifts. I intend to teach my own children how to drive a stick shift car, but it seems to be a vanishing skill. And I fear on some level, it's part of the sort of emasculation of America. Well, there certainly has that effect and I would agree with you, but the practical reason for the disappearance of the manual is twofold. The first is the ever-increasing pressure imposed by Washington to eke out a bit more gas mileage out of the vehicle. And ironically, counterintuitively, in a modern car, modern automatics, which are now seven, eight and nine speeds are more fuel efficient, all else being equal than the manual. Just because we can program program them in such a way to optimize the fuel efficiency, it's obviously not that good necessarily for performance. But if you look at the stats and you compare a car, you know, same model, one with and one with one with manual and one with an automatic, you'll find that the automatic version of that car will typically get around three miles or so per gallon better than the stick shift version of that car. And because of the federal cafe fuel economy requirements, that matters, you know, writ large over over their fleet averages. It's extremely important for them to get even a couple miles per gallon better out of a car. So that's the first driver. The second is that, you know, most people live in an urban environment, a suburban environment, and they just don't want to deal with pushing the clutch in, pushing the clutch out, pushing the clutch in. They prefer the automatic. So there's been a big cultural shift away from the manual transmission, which of course used to be called the standard transmission, because typically it was the standard transmission in a car. Now you have to really look around to find a car with a manual, even among sporty cars. Enthusiast people will know that, for example, the high end, high performance cars, for example, of Porsche GT3 911, only comes with their seven speed dual clutch automated manual. Same is true of Lamborghinis and a lot of the other high end cars. As somebody who spent a lot of time in the DC Beltway sitting in traffic, I can certainly relate to this desire and maybe not to be stuck in a stick shift. But you know, Eric, when I was sitting in that traffic, I was surrounded by folks that you have termed clovers. And last week we had the good fortune to talk with Jim Bovard and we discussed Mankin's concept of a buboise amongst the American public. And to me, you've coined this this concept of a clover who is not only a clueless driver, but also sort of an overly credulous status who tends to think government is benevolent and tends to believe what the political class tells us. Yeah. And well, the key element to the third element to that is they're also control freaks. They can't abide anybody doing other than they would do. And they they get very, very, very upset when somebody, for example, drives faster than they deem to be appropriate. And they will be the ones who will screech that there ought to be along. And they're the ones who screech and scream for the state's costumes goons to come in and teach people a lesson if they they don't submit and obey. And it's it's a tragedy. You know, I don't know how old you are, but people in my generation, we grew up washing bugs Bonnie and we grew up with this cultural meme of being suspicious of authority, being suspicious of the state and of showing initiative and being independent. And that seems to just be being being stamped out all across the land. I certainly agree with that. Ladies and gentlemen, don't be a clover, be a libertarian. Check out Eric Peters, Autos.com and Eric, we thank you for your time this weekend. I was certainly happy to do it.