New Car Czar Deese Doesn't Drive American



Obama's new "car czar" Brian Deese. (Bloomberg News)



Anyone interested in knowing what Brian Deese, the wunderkind tapped with revamping the nation's dying automotive industry, drives to work?

We were very interested to learn what Deese doesn't drive.

His nicely worn car isn't a Chevy. Or a Ford. Or a Dodge. Or any Big Three auto for that matter.

Nope. Deese, the 31-year-old tour de force behind President Obama's Auto Task Force, has been seen tooling around town in a car that might make board members of General Motors shudder: He drives a Honda, whose manufacturer is based in Japan.

One source describes Deese's car as an "old, old, old silver Honda Civic two-door hatchback."

Another tells us Deese's two-toned Honda was never properly repainted after the new auto whiz got into an accident a few years ago. The car still has Connecticut plates, a relic of his recent days at Yale Law School.

So, how did a young man who drives a Japanese car and has "never set foot in an automotive assembly plant" became the president's so-called car czar?

The irony doesn't seem lost on Deese. (To be fair, Honda has manufacturing plants in the United States.)

Meg Reilly, a Treasury Department spokeswoman who speaks on behalf of Deese, joked to the Sleuth, "Considering the amount of time he spends in his office, Brian may start saving gas money by sleeping in the back of his 11-year-old Honda full time."

The New York Times, in a recent profile of the sometimes bearded car czar, described his exhausting drive to Washington (with his dog) from Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago. The Times quoted Deese as saying, "I slept in the parking lot of the G. M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio." (The article noted that the Lordstown plant produces the Pontiac G5, a car that under Deese's plan will disappear.)

But there was no mention of what kind of car he drove from Chicago to Washington.

A source close to Deese initially said, when contacted for comment, that "it sort of confounds us that anyone is all that interested" in what he drives. But believe us, American autoworkers will care.

What do you think of America's new automotive empresario showing up to work in his Japanese car? Sound off in the comments section.