I'm surprised (though I probably shouldn't be) when politicians recycle the same old, bad ideas no matter how many times they are shouted down by common sense.

So here we ago again with the "brilliant" idea of crushing older cars to save the planet. Previously this theory was used to get "gross polluters" off the road. The idea was to give industry giants smog credits for every old car they crushed. If, for example, they gave someone $700 for an old car they would get the equivalent of several thousand dollars in credits against air pollution fines.

I first heard of this program when I was a bright-eyed editorial assistant at Hot Rod Magazine in the fall of 1994, and the project car they used to illuminate the program's stupidity was the Crusher Camaro. Basically, the Hot Rod staffers found a one-owner, all-original 1967 Camaro about to be driven into the crusher by an old guy who wanted the $700 without the hassle of selling it (it still ran fine, but he hardly ever drove it). They gave him the $700 instead and turned it into a tire-shredding street terror with a crate engine and bright yellow paint job.

Since I'm a 60-year-old man stuck in a 25-year-old body (or is that a 6-year-old boy stuck in a...), nevermind. Any way, I was watching 60 Minutes last night and watched this report about New York's Nassau County district attorney who successfully prosecuted a drunken driving case as a second-degree murder crime.

In the case, 24-year-old Martin Heidgen was driving his full-size GM pickup with three times the legal limit of alcohol in his system. His friends told him not to drive but he did it anyway. He ended up driving for three miles the wrong way on the parkway before slamming head-on into a Town Car limousine carrying a family from a wedding. The result was horrifying, as the video below shows.

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

December's gas-electric car and SUV sales plunged almost 43 percent from the final month of 2007 as the year wound up on a discouraging note for the only alternative technology vehicles to so far make a dent in the auto market.

It was a near-repeat of a stupendously disastrous November, when sales of fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles fell 50 percent from a year earlier.

For all of 2008, hybrid sales tumbled 10.3 percent with 310,724 models sold. While nothing to boast about, the hybrid segment bested the overall market's performance of an 18.2 percent drop for the year, according to Edmunds.com statistics.

The only bright spots were that hybrid sales in December actually rose a bit from November, and that 2008 hybrid sales were the second-best on record in the decade since 1999, when Honda introduced the first model, the now-discontinued two-seat Insight. The year's sales trailed only 2007, when 346,431 hybrids were sold.

Incentives Made the Difference

The 6.8% rise in sales volume from November to December was due to hefty incentives and discounting by most automakers and to an especially effective financing program that General Motors' financing arm provided for almost all of the company's lineup.

Industrywide, the same pricing and financing incentives led to a one-month sales gain of 20 percent.

In the hybrid segment, December's total of 17,652 sales was the second-lowest of the year, trailing only November's dismal 16,536.

After that, you'd have to go back to January 2007, when only 17,591 gas-electric cars and sport utes were sold, to find a worse month for hybrids.

Tech geeks and gadget freaks as well as much of the mainstream media will be tuned in to what happens in Las Vegas this week. The 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) officially opens on Thursday, although it traditionally kicks off the day before, with major CE brands like Sony, Panasonic and Samsung holding press conferences from almost dawn to dusk.

Yours truly will be traveling to Sin City today to check out all the latest car tech. And while I'm reluctant to reveal just how long I've been making the annual trek to Vegas right on the heels of the holidays (so much for those New Year's resolutions), let's just say if my first CES was a newborn I'd be well into paying college tuition by now.

Besides knowing how to beat hour-long cab lines, slip into SRO sessions and the quickest route between the North and South Halls of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center, attending CES for as many years as I have gives you a certain perspective -- and the incentive to develop a strategy on what to see and what to skip before the madness begins.

With that in mind, here are four of the car tech trends I'm anticipating we'll see at CES 2009. Check this space throughout the week for blog posts and the main Edmunds site for our wrap-up coverage to find out if I've nailed it or not.