**Posted by Phineas
For 1896 [1], that is:
Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”
The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.
…and…
As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”
So, in return for trampling the rights of bondholders [2] and investing $50 billion [3] taxpayer dollars (1) in order to protect the UAW, President Obama (2) has shown us the “automotive future” — a car that would have impressed… President Grover Cleveland [4].
Oh, why the heck not? His economic policies are right out of the 1930s; why not go back another 40 years?
Forward… into the past!
via JustOneMinute [5] and QandO [6]
Footnotes:
(1) Of which you can assume a significant portion was borrowed from China.
(2) Oh, and you’ll be happy to know the administration ordered the purchase of 110 [7] of the marvels of Green tech.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets [8])