OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WANTS "END OF THE WORLD" FOR V8 & HIGH-PERFORMANCE

By Cammie

Fox Business is reporting:

Passenger cars would have to achieve fuel efficiency of up to 62 miles a gallon by 2025 under an initiative the Obama administration is rolling out Friday in its newest push to control greenhouse-gas emissions.

As if the draconian 2016 35.5 m.p.g. CAFE wasn't bad enough. They've already jacked up the standard high enough to likely kill off high-performance V8 power for ordinary working folks. But 62 m.p.g. will kill off high-performance for everyone. Even the dangerous little rolling golf-cart cars will have to be neutered to pull that kind of average.

This is the kind of wimp cars that Obama apparently wants to force us into:

I'm counting the days until these power-mad, freedom-hating chumps are thrown out of office! Too bad Rahm can't take'em all back to "sweet home Chicago."

SAY IT AIN'T SO! '60s BAT MOBILE (R) REPLICA: POWERED BY CHEVY.

By Cammie

A company named "Fiberglass Freaks" in Logansport, Indiana is building licensed Batmobile (r) replicas, according to an eBay listing and a news report.

The Fox News NY report claims that the nearly nineteen-foot-long replicas are based on a "1970s Lincoln Town Car." The eBay listing says that at least "1966 BATMOBILE® Replica DC001" will be poweredby a "GM 350 crate engine."

Of course the campy original 1960s "batsled" was George Barris' reinterpretation of Lincoln's Futura showcar. It packed a massive Lincoln V8. Studio duplicates were reportedly based on then-late-model Ford Galaxies.

To waste the dwindling supply of 1970s Town Cars and then defile them with uber-boring, belly-button-common small block Chevy engines is just plain wrong.

However, at an M.S.R.P. of a reported $150,000.00, there's probably not very many people that will be styling like Adam West anytime soon. And we can all be thankful for that!

And before everybody gets in a clinch and starts suing us, Batmobile (r) is a registered trademark of DC Comics. It and all of the other trade and service marks appearing in this blog are the property of their owners. They are not affiliated in any way with "Truth with Hydra and Cammie" and are used herein under the "fair use doctrine." (At least that's the way that grouchy legal aid lawyer scribbled it down on the Post-it (tm) Note).

HAWAII FIVE-0 MISFIRES WITH MCGARRETT CAMARO
By Cammie
It didn’t take long for CBS’s new HAWAII FIVE-0 to "jump the shark."

To be fair, I joined "Five-0" in progress. The bureaucratic British Broadcasting Company’s BBC America has finally seen fit to allow us "Yanks" to see "Top Gear" in its original sixty-minutes of glory (eighty minutes when all of the American advertising and BBC America promos are added in). That meant I didn’t "surf" in to CBS until twenty minutes past the hour.

And now I wished I hadn’t.

The new Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin) may not own a suit and subscribes to the plan for shaving twice-a-week, whether he needs it or not. And he apparently learned the Bill of Rights, interrogation techniques, and police procedure from Mark Furman and Jack Bauer.

But what’s really bad is that the scruffy "McGarrett lite" drives a CHEVROLET CAMARO.

A CAMARO?

Yep. In a triumph of product placement over tradition and good taste, the "rebooters" have shoveled the latter-day Five-0 boss into the cartoonish new "Government Motors" Camaro.

And according to the bow-tie wonks who actually care about new Camaros, it’s a V6 . . . .

Now the new McGarrett has fully joined the "metrosexual" ranks of such sloppy wimps as NASCAR’s Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and your local methamphetamine dealer. Who knows? Maybe next week they’ll show the new McGarrett’s pad (which, because he’s a Camaro driver, is probably a decrepit mobile home).




And it’s a good thing that Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim) is pocket-sized, because they crammed him in the back of the claustrophobic Chevy coupe for a good part of the shark-jumping second episode.

(If the "rebooters" ever decide to reshoot the classic "Hawaii Five-O" episode "Cocoon",
they can just have Wo Fat trap the new McGarrett in the back seat of his car to save on production costs! No need for a sensory deprivation chamber . . . .)

Mercury may have been killed, but that’s no excuse for McGarrett to completely change teams.

Next week? Maybe I’ll just watch the "Top Gear" encore . . . .

GM'S LIMITED RETURN TO RWD PUTS FORD & LINCOLN FURTHER BEHIND
By Cammie


As Ford is killing off its only remaining North American RWD sedan platform (the beloved Panther . . . Just imagine how awesome a Coyote V8-powered Panther would have been) and moving everything but the Mustang and F/E-Series into too-small-for-V8s FWD platforms, "Government Motors" is apparently regaining a little "mojo."

According to the Automotive News:

GM revives rear-wheel sedans for Chevy, Cadillac
DETROIT -- Plans for a sporty, rear-wheel drive Chevrolet sedan have been revived at General Motors Co., Motor Trend reports in its upcoming November issue. The program had been mothballed over a year ago as GM was heading into bankruptcy.
Additionally, a low volume, rear-wheel sedan planned for Cadillac is expected to carry a price of around $130,000 . . . .

That's bad news for Ford. For a time in the 1990s, Ford was the only Detroiter to offer RWD in anything other than sporty cars and trucks. And Ford has been the only American OEM to continuously offer RWD.

But after the idiotic decision to kill off Ford's Panther takes effect in 2011, Ford will be the only American company NOT to offer a RWD sedan in America. Even Hyundai is going to have more RWD competitiveness than Ford!

That's just bone-headed.

In light of Cadillac's agressive moves (including the incredible the 556 h.p. CTS-V, with a blistering 0-60 time of 3.9 seconds and a Nürburgring laptime of 7:59.32) Lincoln is becoming less and less relevant as a luxury marque.

How long will Ford sit back and let GM steal the American RWD market?