The new DeLorean is here!

Something about Elon Musk makes me uncomfortable … he’s the Al Gore of technology, a moron in a silk suit. He’s a frontispiece for others with hidden agendas. When I saw his SpaceX rockets landing after launching, I thought any idiot could spot a video run backwards. Not so. People eat that crap up.

Now he has reinvented the pickup truck, replacing the standard model with a DeLorean, the car used in Back to the Future. This is technology in reverse, the pickup truck as re-imagined by a five-year-old. Again, I need to think about getting off of this whackadoo planet.

We own a Toyota Tacoma, orange inferno the color, as seen above (not ours, which has a roof rack). It’s a masterpiece of technology with an internal combustion engine that runs on regular gasoline. It has four-wheel drive, which we need up here in the mountains. You might ask why an old fart like me drives such a young vehicle? One word: Grandson. He works for a car dealership. I was set to buy a staid conservative Honda Ridgeline, and was busy removing features so we could afford it. As a favor to the grandson, we agreed, before we made our move, to drive the Taco. The rest is, as they say …

(We were coming out of a restaurant one evening, and parked nose-to-nose with ours was another orange inferno Taco. There were two people sitting in it, so I knocked on the passenger window, and an older woman sheepishly opened the door a crack. “Orange inferno?” I asked. The driver, her husband, lit up, and we talked Taco, as we Toyota owners are sold on the brand. (Our other vehicle is an ’05 4Runner, still going strong at over 190,000 miles.)

I told them the story of how our grandson had sold it to us, and she laughed and said “I know what you mean. I own a Kirby vacuum.”)

Anyway, back to Tesla and Musk, Miles Mathis has written about him, saying he’s a gay Jewish actor. I won’t try to undermine any of that, as I don’t know enough about the guy to have a strong opinion. But I do know bullshit when I see it, and below is bullshit:

When this fake event happened, I put this photo on my Facebook page with the comment that “Americans seem to lack bullshit detectors.” It drew no comments, no likes – I only have 40-some-odd “friends” there, and when I say something offensive like that, I think they “unfollow” me.

But hey – the photo above was on TV news. It’s real.

The Tesla Truck might be a DeLorean, or it might take off, so to speak. We are going ga-ga over electrified vehicles, which I regard as backward technology, right up there with medieval windmills. We already conquered most of the automotive problems of our time, and now ride comfortably in vehicles that burn gasoline and exhale water vapor and CO2, no problems associated with that except the fake ones. The safety features on newer vehicles are remarkable. There will come a time when we improve on this technology, but it is yet to arrive (self-guided cars are seemingly upon us).

In the meantime, please, ask yourself one question: Where does electricity come from? If electric vehicles are going to depend on windmills and solar panels to function, then we have solved another problem. The truck will stand still, maybe will be used as a movie prop.

(I do like the extendable tailgate.)