An unexpected trial

Both cars in the incident “were equipped with similar technology, including lasers, radar, cameras and computer systems enabling the cars to drive on their own without need of human drivers,” noted the Washington Post, which added that both also put “people behind the wheel in case of an emergency.”

During the close shave in Palo Alto, the near-victim rode in an Audi Q5 equipped with Delphi Automotive’s self-driving system. “As the Delphi vehicle prepared to change lanes, a Google self-driving prototype — a Lexus RX400h crossover fitted with similar hardware and software — cut off the Audi, forcing it to abort the lane change,” Reuters reported.

“Both companies previously have reported minor collisions of self-driving cars with vehicles piloted by people. In most of those cases, the self-driving car was stopped, typically at an intersection, and was rear-ended by another vehicle,” according to Reuters. Significantly, however, as the wire service noted, neither the companies nor the California DMV has deemed any self-driving car to have been at fault.

Doubling down

Google, for one, took the episode in stride. At a recent shareholder meeting, cofounder Sergey Brin personally praised the driverless program. “I’m very proud of the record of our cars,” he said, as CIO reported. “We don’t claim cars are going to be perfect. Our goal is to beat human drivers, and nothing can be a perfect vehicle.” The company has nearly doubled its number of permits for self-driving cars, according to DMV records obtained by CIO:

“The additional 25 permits are for a new fleet of prototype cars that are undergoing testing on private roads, the company said. The cars, tiny two-seaters, are designed for neighborhood driving and have a top speed of 25 miles per hour.”

Now making their appearance on Mountain View area roads, the little autos “are still equipped with a steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal, and a qualified driver will be there to take over if things go awry,” as Discover pointed out. “The cars drive conservatively. For instance, their speed is capped at 25 miles per hour. And they pause 1.5 seconds after a stoplight turns green ‘because many accidents happen during this time.'”

Google has taken an early lead on California streets, with Mercedes and other companies rounding out the field. But competition could ramp up quickly. “In just 15 years, by 2030, the self-driving car market is expected to reach a whopping $87 billion, according to a recent report by Lux Research,” Business Insider observed. “That helps explain why, in addition to the tech giants Google and Uber, just about every car manufacturer is working on the technology.”

Dealing with humans

Ironically, tech companies have surmised, the most dangerous thing about driverless cars could well be the way humans drive around them. Self-driving vehicles lack the visual cues — such as telltale hesitation, communication, and, of course, a human driver inside — that we use to navigate through traffic situations and at intersections. Unless this challenge can be measured, analyzed, and effectively met, Google and other companies will struggle to secure regulatory support for stripping the cars down to the bare essentials.

In fact, Google’s fleet of slow-moving two-seaters was expressly designed to test human reactions to driverless cars on the road. “If all goes well, Google hopes to gain regulatory clearance to remove the steering wheel, brake pedal and emergency driver from the prototype,” according to US News. “Company executives have expressed hope that self-driving cars using its technology will be joining the flow of daily traffic by the end of this decade.”

Now Mercedes is moving its HQ from high-tax New Jersey — basically, California with bad weather and a Republican governor — for Georgia.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Wooed by lower costs, proximity to a Mercedes-Benz factory and government incentives, the German luxury car maker in July will begin moving about 1,000 U.S. personnel to a temporary facility and later move to Sandy Springs, Ga.

The operation, which includes staff working on the Sprinter van business and the Smart mini car lineup, will permanently move into a new building erected on a 10-acre site in the same city.

Of course, subsidies means everybody else in the state must take up the slack given to a favored company. But the Garden State also dangled subsidies before Mercedes’ eyes. Yet they weren’t enough to compensate for Georgia’s other advantages:

Daimler executives turned down a significant incentive package from New Jersey to keep its U.S. headquarters in Montvale, where it had been running operations since 1972….

John Boyd, principal of the Boyd Company Inc., a Princeton, N.J.-based site selection consultant, said that New Jersey has the country’s most appealing incentives policy in his assessment, but it was outweighed by the cost-savings and convenience of moving to the U.S. South. He said that the move would reduce Mercedes-Benz’s costs, including real estate, energy and property taxes, by about 20%.

California, of course, was in contention for the Mercedes HQ move about as much as North Korea. Energy costs here are high and going much higher because of Gov. Jerry Brown’s push for 50 percent renewable energy by 2020.

Property taxes here generally are low at 1 percent of assessed value, because of Proposition 13. But numerous state and local restrictions on construction have boosted land values to prohibitive levels.

Mercedes still sells a lot of cars out here. We still have the Silicon Valley digital elite, the $100K Pension Club of retired government workers and others who are in the money and can afford an S-Class Sedan or SL65 AMG Roadster.

But otherwise the company, like so many others, shuns our state, depriving us of thousands of middle-class jobs.

Now the Big Boys are getting into the act of producing luxury electric cars. According to Automobile magazine:

Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche are about to invest a combined 6 billion euros (about $7.5 billion) in new high-end electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids due out between 2018 and 2021. Their target: the American upstart from Silicon Valley.

Part of Tesla’s appeal is its string of showrooms run by the company, not local dealers. That has enraged some dealer organizations, who even has pushed legislation banning Tesla’s sales model. In October, Michigan even passed a law officially banning car sales without a dealer.

The German makers, of course, already have large dealer networks across the country. They also have long experience of the kinds of luxury cars people buy.

This is good because competition is good. Even if Tesla, and the other companies as well, get numerous tax and other breaks. It’s hard to find a product in any field that isn’t given some kind of advantage by governments. Too bad, but that’s just the way it is.

By John Seiler

Ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used to give an inspiring stock speech about how he grew up loving America’s freedom, and longed to live here. He contrasted that with the stultifying ways of Austria, where he grew up and opportunity was scarce. I heard the speech at least five times, beginning with a Reason Foundation dinner around 1989.

The speech obviously worked, because he kept giving the same one and it catapulted him into the governorship. The best known version was the one he gave at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, when he was riding high in the first year of his governorship.

Now he’s changed his tune.

It turns out that his upbringing in austere Austria made him a green fanatic:

“(Reuters) – Arnold Schwarzenegger credited his simple upbringing amid the lakes and hills of Austria for a recent conversion to fully fledged green activism, the latest stage in his varied career.

“The former body-builder, star of the “Terminator” action films and governor of California grew up in Thal, a small village in the Austrian province of Styria, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 21.

“‘Growing up in my house, we knew about sustainability before it was hip. We called it ‘necessity’,'” Schwarzenegger told an environmental conference he hosted in Vienna this week.

“‘We didn’t have video games, televisions or iPhones. We had the rolling hills, the castles, the ruins, and the beautiful lakes,'” he said. “‘Even after I made it big and became governor of California, I held on to this love of nature.'”

What a chameleon and hypocrite. Arnold lives in a massive compound in Malibu. He tools around town in a massive Mercedes (picture at right as he was given a parking ticket) and another massive Bentley (picture above).

Echoing his stock speech, Arnold just said:

“When I was a little boy in Austria, all I could think about was moving to America, to become the greatest bodybuilder champion in the world and make millions of dollars and be an action hero.

“My dream became reality. Who knew my greatest achievement would be in the real world fighting for a green energy future? Green energy wasn’t even in my vocabulary.”

In other words, he used America’s free-enterprise system to make $700 million. Now he’s using his money and political clout to make sure Americans no longer have that opportunity, but are reduced to the socialist poverty of Austria in the 1950s.

He also didn’t point out that, after about 32 years of socialism beginning with Hitler’s National Socialist Anschluss in 1938, Austria in the early 1970s (after Arnold had left) switched to capitalism and now is rich.

Austria’s per capita GDP now is $49,668, above the $48,328 for the United States. Austria is fortunate that Arnold exited to promote socialism elsewhere. Not so fortunate have been America, especially California.

By John Seiler

Sometimes the left-leaning California Budget Project produces worthy studies. Its new analysis of Proposition 30 isn’t one of them.

Being pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the state’s powerful government-worker unions, Prop. 30 would increase sales and income taxes taxes by from $6 billion to $8.5 billion a year. Supposedly the money would preclude cuts in K-12 and college education. But there’s no guarantee the higher taxes wouldn’t go toward the state’s burgeoning pension costs for retired government workers. All government money is fungible. These increases would allow cuts in other areas; which in turn would free money for the lucrative pensions.

The CBP analysis blithely ignores most of these problems. But the main problem is an economic one: It does not acknowledge that $8.5 billion siphoned from the private economy would severely slam the private sector, killing businesses and jobs.

The study does print one opposing argument, but only in a brief section at the end. And the arguments are not answered. It notes:

“Opponents of Proposition 30, including the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, Sacramento Taxpayers Association, Small Business Action Committee, and National Federation of Independent Business/California, argue that the measure allows Sacramento policymakers to “raise taxes instead of streamlining thousands of state funded programs, massive bureaucracy and waste.”

“They contend that the measure would hurt small businesses and cost the state jobs.”

Otherwise, for the CPB study — the impression almost anyone will get — is that’s all California sunshine and Floribunda roses for everyone except the “1 percent” who will pay for the party.

The study reports:

“The wealthiest 1 percent of Californians — those with annual incomes of $533,000 or more — would contribute more than three-quarters (78.8 percent) of the revenues raised by Proposition 30’s tax increases, while the top 5 percent of Californians — those with annual incomes of at least $206,000 — would contribute 81.2 percent of the revenues raised.”

It’s worth pointing out, which CPB does not, that someone making $206,000 a year is not “wealthy,” although certainly well off. California is so expensive that an income of that amount here is the equivalent of something like $100,000 in Arkansas or Michigan. It’s barely enough to pay the already existing massive taxes, a sky-high mortgage and private-school tuition to get your kids out of the failing California schools.

Killing jobs

But even for those who truly are wealthy, say making $1 million or more a year, this tax is bad. Because these people use their incomes to re-invest in businesses, creating new jobs. Take away billions more dollars of that money and the state inevitably will have fewer businesses and jobs.

Two examples prove that, neither cited by the CPB, even for refutation. In 1991, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, along with the Democratic Legislature of that day, increases taxes $7 billion a year. Far from solving a budget-deficit problem, it made the problem worse. General-fund revenues actually declined, by $2 billion to $40 billion, from fiscal year 1991-92 to 1993-94. And revenues didn’t recover until after the tax increases expired, going to $46 billion in 1995-96.

You can read the numbers for yourself. Open Gov. Jerry Brown’s own January 2012 budget proposal and scroll down to Schedule 6, page Appendix 12 toward the end.

Then there’s recent evidence from Great Britain. The Wall Street Journal reported:

“Preliminary figures out this week show that Britain’s 50% top marginal income-tax rate may have reduced tax revenue from top earners by as much as 5%, compared to the old 40% top rate. Tax revenue from those filing self-assessments due January 31 was down some £500 million versus last year.

“What this week’s numbers teach, however, is that Britain’s richest taxpayers are simply shifting their incomes, or themselves, offshore, or deferring income, or otherwise arranging their affairs to avoid the confiscatory new top tax rate. Maybe that’s unfair, too—the rich are usually better at protecting their assets—but it’s the predictable consequence of a tax rate whose animating purposes are envy and spite.”

So there’s no guarantee that Prop. 30 even will raise revenues; it could retard them.

The rich will flee

The CPB nowhere acknowledges that rich people obviously are the most highly mobile folks around. They can jump in their Mercedes and Cessnas and move to their houses in other states and countries. Their tax accountants can tell them how long they can stay out of California to avoid paying income and capital-gains taxes here.

If this tax passes, many rich people simply will permanently leave the state in disgust. That’s already happening. One of the Facebook co-founders, Eduardo Saverin, left America earlier this year for low-tax Singapore. The latest from Reuters:

“Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his U.S. citizenship earlier this year, made his debut on a Singapore rich list published by Forbes Magazine.

“Brazilian-born Saverin, 30, is No.8 on the list with an estimated net worth of $2.2 billion.

“Saverin has been living in Singapore since 2009 but only gave up his U.S. citizenship ahead of Facebook’s initial public offering.”

This happens all the time. If you’re a rich person, why be robbed by California’s potential 13.1 state income tax, which then would be the highest of any state, on top of a potential 39 percent federal tax if President Obama and congressional Democrats have their way? That’s a total of 52.1 percent. All for the privilege of living in a country, the United States, that abuses you and thinks of you not as a business and jobs creator, but as a tax slave.

The CPB report blythely says:

“Nevertheless, the average household in the bottom fifth of the income distribution would see a total tax increase of just $24, and the average household in the middle fifth would see an increase of just $55. In contrast, the average household in the top 1 percent would pay an additional $21,883 in taxes.

“Consequently, Proposition 30 would take a modest step toward reducing the significant income gap between low-and middle-income Californians and the wealthy.”

They just don’t get it. How can “low-and middle-income Californians” be better off when their jobs are killed after the wealthy leave the state — and take their money and businesses with them?

I’ve been keeping tabs here on the hypocrisy of ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love of gigantic, gas-guzzling dinosaurs. Since leaving office, he’s been photographed tooling around in a Mercedes G-Wagon SUV, so big it needs an entire Persian Gulf  nation to supply it with fuel. The “G” stands for “gas guzzler.”

Yet he’s still giving speeches around the world urging everyone else to save on energy to prevent climate change, and last December even was named Renewable Energy Leader of the Decade!

Then there’s his Bentley, another gas-guzzling dinosaur, which he’s shown driving in the video below. Did the publicity surrounding that help Bentley goose sales by 37 percent in 2011? I think it obviously played a part in it. Arnold is the most visible Bentley driver in the world.

You know about those things if you can afford a car that costs more than $200,000.

Here’s Arnold, wasting gas and living that hypocritical life of the rich and famous, beginning at 1:15:

Jan. 9, 2012

A day after his seven-year tenure wrecking California, Arnold got a parking ticket. The link has pictures. Guess what he was driving? Surely it must be a Tesla electric car, which he touted earlier this year when it located its factory at the old GM/Toyota factory in Fremont? He said then:

What we are witnessing today is an historic example of California’s transition to a cleaner, greener and more prosperous future. We challenged auto companies to innovate, and both Tesla and Toyota stepped up in a big way, not only creating vehicles that reduce emissions and appeal to consumers but also boosting economic growth. Tesla, just a start-up company a few years ago, will soon employ Californians in green jobs on a large scale at the former NUMMI plant. In fact, Tesla’s founding and expansion in California is a direct result of our nation-leading policies that support demand for green products and the companies and people who produce them. I am thrilled with today’s announcement and can’t wait to see what this partnership brings next.

Nope. Today Arnold was driving a Mercedes G-Wagon, a Teutonic behemoth “car” so big it could hold a whole division of the Waffen SS.

According to Motor Trend, the G-Wagon gets just 11 mpg, highway or city. Most cars nowadays get close to 30 on highway. The gas guzzler costs $124,450, plus tax. The total would be about $150,000.

I don’t mind rich folks living well and driving great cars. If I had the dough, I’d buy a Ferrari-red Ferrari, like this one. But that’s just me.

And I don’t believe we’re “running out of oil.” So that’s not my objection. It’s the government that causes every phony energy “shortage” and “price increase,” as is happening now. (What’s really happening is that we have inflation because the Federal Reserve keeps debasing the dollar.)

My objection is that this fraud, this phony, this hypocrite has destroyed our economy by imposing the jobs-killing AB 32, which is supposed to cut greenhouse gases — while he personally spews out more greenhouse gases than a Krupp arms factory.

Soon, thanks to Arnold, we’ll all be taking mass transit or pulling rickshaws, while he tools around in his G-Wagon. Good riddance.

Jan. 4, 2011

Did you know there’s a museum in das Vaterland that boasts Arnold’s gas-guzzling Mercedes S600? That’s the huge, 12-cylinder job that drinks gas like a boozer guzzles cheap vodka and drives faster than one of Werner von Braun’s V-2s. That’s a picture of it, above. Notice the California license plate.

I think both global “warming” and the oil “crisis” are bogus, so I don’t care what people drive. But Arnold has made a career warning that We’re All Doomed vom Der Global Warmung Und Muzt Konzerve — Or Elze.

He wants you to take mass transit or drive a Yugo. But he gets to drive in the biggest car around and take private jets. And as soon as he stops wrecking Kalifornia, when he leaves office in January, he’ll become Obama’s Energy Czar or Environment Czar or Global Warming Czar, or get a similar post at the U.N.

His Merc is in a museum. But he now tools around in another gas-guzzler, a Bentley: