A Piece of Tape Works – For Now

By Eric Peters For NMA First came ASS – the acronym that stands for Automatic Stop/Start, the system that automatically shuts off the vehicle’s engine every time the vehicle stops moving, then automatically restarts it when the driver lifts his foot off the brake. At first – when ASS began to mysteriously appear in new […]

Missing the 1 Million Mark…

By Eric Peters For NMA GM’s CEO, Mary Barra, predicted it would be producing (and presumably, selling) one meeeeeellion – cue Dr. Evil voice – battery powered devices by the end of next year. How many devices has GM emitted so far? 75,386 during all of last year. Only about 925,000 devices to go! Barra […]

The Safety Fallacy

By Eric Peters For NMA It wasn’t the government that made cars safer to drive. It was the free market that made them less likely to crash. Which made them safer to drive. As opposed to “safer” to crash. The latter is what we get from government, which has also made cars more likely to […]

Speed Limiters Will Kill Driving

By Eric Peters For NMA You’ve probably heard about what is being marketed as “speed limit assistance technology.” The italics to make a point of the fact about what is – as opposed to what they’re trying to get you to believe it is. It is not about “assisting” you – just as you are […]

A Casualty of Revenue Collection

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist They say “speed kills.” Here is a case-in-point. A cop driving at very high speed struck and killed a motorcycle rider who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — that place and time being in the path of the […]

Speeding in the Rearview

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist The country saying goes, Let’s you and him fight. The government deploys a variation of the logic underlying this saying when someone else does something stupid or criminal to impose restrictions and punishments  . . . on you and me. Who didn’t do it. A drug-addled maniac […]

The Last V6 Standing

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist In less-than-a-year-from-now, you will never again be able to buy a new mid-sized sedan with a six-cylinder engine. At least, not for less than $60,000 or so. Dodge has already stopped making the 2023 Charger — which used to come standard with a V6 (and for $33,200 […]

A Metric of Desperation

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist The other day, we got what lots of people are getting in the mail: A letter from a new car dealer pleading with us to sell them a car: “Due to severe supply chain disruptions in new vehicle production, we are desperate for inventory,” the letter begins. […]

Return of the Stout

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist If something doesn’t sell, don’t keep making it. If something does sell, make more of it. This used to be understood by people in the business of selling things — until the people running things decided that pushing things was a better business model. Of course, this […]

“Driver Performance”

By Eric Peters, NMA Member and Syndicated Columnist You may have heard that about two years from now — less than that, actually — new cars will be required to be outfitted with “technology” to thwart “impaired” driving. What you ought to read is the language of the edicts, which states that the “technology” will […]