Barack Obama continued his Bash Detroit tour this week, telling an Indianapolis radio station that his first car, a 1970s-era Ford Granada, “may be the worst car that Detroit ever built.”
As ever, Obama’s car comments are more revealing about him than the industry about which he pretends to be an expert:
“This thing was a tin can. It was during the ’70s when oil had just gone up, so they were trying to compete with the Japanese,” Obama continued. “They wanted to keep the cars big, so they made them out of tin foil. It would rattle and shake. You basically couldn’t go over 80 (mph) without the thing getting out of control.”
Remember, this was the age of the federal 55-mph speed limit mandate, that era’s moral equivalent of today’s twisty light bulb edicts. So what was a good lib like Obama doing driving an immoral 80 miles-per-hour? Wasn’t that fuelish? Against the law?
As for the car itself, the Granada was one of Ford’s best-selling cars (over 300,000 units sold in 1975) – a popular design positioned to compete, not against the Japanese, but against Mercedes. At least Obama gets the “tin can” quality right: the Granada was a mid-size car built to save money on a compact car chassis – but aren’t tinny compact cars exactly what green Obama wants to mandate for everyone?