Recently, the Antiplanner suggested that electronics the Obama administration wants to mandate in all new cars would allow government bureaucrats to turn off your car if they thought you were driving too much. Even I wondered if that was a bit over the top, but last week, Fox News broadcast a disturbing report that the Environmental Protection Agency had confiscated people’s sport-utility vehicles for polluting the air.
If this report is true, it certainly would help make my case that we should be wary of government-mandated electronic controls in our cars. However, it turns out there a few minor errors in the Fox report: First, it wasn’t the EPA. Second, the car wasn’t confiscated because it polluted (or, at least, not just because it polluted). Third, it didn’t even happen in South Carolina.
