Hybrid idea runs on empty

As the American auto industry zips toward oblivion with both feet planted firmly on the accelerator, solace can be found in the fact that while steering hybrids on a highway to nowhere, carmakers will get 41 miles to the gallon, or better. This soothes, like hearkening to the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee” aboard the Titanic while the Atlantic gushes over the rails: Hey, the band sounds great, pass the life preserver.

Such is the stuff of grand plans to remake the auto industry by way of peculiar business model. Leftists starting with the one inhabiting the Oval Office plan to rescue carmakers by insisting on their producing more of what consumers do not want, hybrids that plug in, which is more than can be said for those who push the idea. Liberalism specializes in smashing square pegs into round holes then wondering over the splinters.

A piece last month in the Los Angeles Times encapsulates the problem. Gas prices, thankfully, have fallen, which has resulted in a waning of buyers’ willingness to plunk down extra money for hybrids.

That has translated this way, according to the LA Times: “At the end of June, AutoNation, the country’s largest chain of new-car dealerships, had only a two-day supply of Honda Civic hybrids and a 14-day supply of the non-hybrid Civic. By year’s end, the picture had flipped, with AutoNation holding 107 days’ worth of regular Civics, compared with 148 days’ stock of the hybrid version.”

Slightly more than 15,000 hybrids sold in February, a drop of almost two-thirds from a year ago, when gas prices were still soaring, according to the Times. President Barack Obama and his leftist allies are undaunted. Damn the markets, he says, regulations will be tightened to spur carmakers to churn more hybrids off assembly lines. Worse, under existing federal law, the Big Three effectively are required to produce efficient compacts here, where union pay saps profitability, rather than overseas, increasing wage competition domestically.

The end of unjustified means is reducing foreign oil dependence. Never mind leftists’ aversion to tapping domestic crude where it can be had, off America’s coasts. What Obama’s plan will accomplish is the deeper weakening of companies already standing on cracked stilts amid red ink. He dismisses this concern if he bothers to consider it by preparing to ante up more taxpayer money, threatening to withhold it if carmakers fail to play ball.

All of this pleases Ed Begley Jr., the occasional actor and full-time environmentalist, and others among the cracked egghead set, but it sends wide fissures rippling through the president’s grand Detroit recovery scheme. Leftists are seldom sated in their thirst to subvert reality, but reality persists in existing. Extorting green cars from carmakers will not compel Americans to respond with their money. A rise in gas prices, which many leftists would welcome, no longer can be counted on to trigger that reaction, since it would further wobble the economy, which has prompted many consumers to shy away from new car buys already.

These are among the incumbent difficulties in being green that leftists ignore, along with the high union wages and choking government regulation that have the American auto industry gasping for life. Corporate mismanagement also has done damage. So now government steps in to show it can do worse. Hitting the gas on hybrids as Detroit careens toward the wall will not stop the crash.