A marketing guru once told me that many companies sell themselves based on their weakest attributes. By playing up what the market perceives as their limitations, the company seeks to reverse “misconceptions” which prevent greater popularity. The strategy is what Hitler called “The Big Lie:” a falsehood of such size and splendor that no one can believe that someone had “the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This explains why Ford Canada used the slogan “Quality is Job 1” while building the Tempo and Escort. It also illuminates automakers’ greenwashing.
The Big Lie is that automakers are environmentalists. Excuse me for stating the obvious, but cars are not now– nor will they ever be– good for the environment. You can argue about the relative amount of damage they cause. You can debate about the various ways to minimize their impact on world ecology. But every time I see the TV spot featuring a Ford Escape Hybrid frolicking with Bambi’s family in a pristine forest, it makes me want to hurl my TV through a window.
If you believe the ad, the Ford Escape Hybrid’s gas-electric hybrid engine emits nothing but organic, non-toxic pixie dust (at least until the internal combustion engine kicks-in). Even if that were true, it’s well worth noting that The Blue Oval Boyz sold just 17,551 Escape Hybrids (34/30mpg) year-to-date– as compared to 118,321 Explorers (13/19mpg).
In their rush to cover themselves in a Teflon-coated mantle of green, automakers are no dopes. They know that their key audience (their customers) are easily distracted by bright shiny objects. We’re good for the planet because of THIS. You don’t have to buy it, but THERE IT IS. They use The Big Lie to distract their critics (and customers) from The Big Picture.
While I’m no fan of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) legislation, at least the federal rules put automakers’ products into their proper perspective; highlighting the sum total of their vehicles’ environmental impact. Well, almost. No account is made of the pollution generated by creating and distributing these products. But I digress…
Honda provides my favourite example of green-tinged auto industry hypocrisy. This past year, Honda’s F1 group gave their race cars “Save the World” livery: a satellite image of planet earth and the signatures of thousands of people who visited myearthdream.com to pledge they’d reduce their carbon footprint.
What could be less environmentally-friendly than an F1 race car? F1 cars burn 60 litres of fuel to run 100 km, with hugely fat tires that need replacing on an hourly basis. And they are NOT emissions tested. What’s more, each car requires a massive support team and a globe-trotting entourage that makes the President’s traveling toadies look like a mobile coffee klatch.
The hypocrisy is going to get a lot worse before it gets even worse. The LA Auto Show confirms the trend: the automakers have replaced their previous pursuit of unbridled horsepower, techno toys and drop-dead glamor with the single-minded promulgation of their environmental responsibility– or at least the perception of environmental responsibility. Ironically enough, the underlying message they’re sending is actually the absolution of responsibility, not its embrace.
The LA Auto Show’s “Green Car of the Year Award” illustrates the point. The award's implicit rational: drivers can buy carbon footprint absolution, instantly divesting themselves of liability for the overall environmental impact of their personal choices. The fact that this year’s winner is not even a “car” but a great honking SUV tells us that hype has rolled over any reasonable analysis of individual consumption like a Tahoe Hybrid flattening a carelessly discarded Styrofoam cup.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with making, promoting and buying vehicles that do less environmental damage than others. But any examination of these vehicles’ impact without considering the myriad of issues surrounding their creation, fueling and use is foolish.
So why are all these “green” automakers playing us for fools? Because we are fools.
Once again, carmakers are simply giving people what they want. Americans are the world’s most pampered people. I’ve got not problem with that– right to the point where it’s easier for the Earth-aware to buy a Escape Hybrid than change their transportation habits.
It’s a lot easier to commute to work in a gas – electric Ford cute ute than set up a carpool in a less exotic machine, deal with the hassles of mass transportation, change jobs for one with more telecommuting, move house to reduce journey times, etc.
In short: As long as it’s considered possible to change the world without changing habits, that’s what people will do. The rule applies equally to buyer AND seller. In that sense, just as we get the politicians we deserve, we get the hypocritical environmental advertising we desire. Sad, but true.
I actually believe that 70% of Americans could satisfy 70% of their transportation needs on a 400cc scooter, and if it met Euro 3 emissions standards, would actually be pretty clean. I commute on a motorcycle every day, so I am as pure as the…whatever. Anyway, I don’t really know what to make of all this when I read that one prominent merchandiser of “carbon offsets” is paying 12 year Indian peasants to irrigate their fields via bicycle powered pumps so that rich Greenies can continue to fly around in Gulfstreams guilt free. If changing my razor can get me hot chicks, why can’t buying a hybrid save the planet? And if the automakers have found a schtick that works, what would you have us do, get the government to “fix it”?
Well said, Samir.
Excellent peice.
Cliff,
The scooter is problematic unless you segregate them. Also, many places just need protection from the elements.
Still, if we were to get a bit radical about saving fuel, we could convert a lot of roads to use by only ultra light cars with vastly reduced lane widths. Then you could get 100 mph or use an electric or even pedal where the road is flat.
Then the only problem is increased deaths due to accidents.
The manufacturers are telling folks in California what they want to hear. At the same time “short circuiting” some of the Silicon Valley venture capital that is on a “green mission”.
Honda did an excellent job of collecting money to put a microscopic name on the F1 car, they did an abysmal job of following up with the folks that did give money, and did believe that they would follow up because they are Honda. One would hope that the money went for a good cause, and not to fund their miserable F1 team.
Honda has the “greenest” fleet of passenger vehicles in America. On the East Coast, Honda teamed up with a company called Climate Energy to mate a natural gas electric generator with home heating furnace to achieve personal co-generation with amazing efficiency. How many automakers can say they developed their own solar cells that dramatically reduce polution in the production process (50% range if i remember correctly?). Honda goes out of their way to reduce their carbon foot print, like a good corporate citizen should. There are plenty more green things Honda does. They don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk. Yes, F1 has a large carbon footprint. Racing in general has served has proving grounds and advertising for auto manufacturers. They could have just as easily sold the space on the car to sponsors. What’s more responsible, selling the ad space for money, or using it as a call to action which promotes their “green deeds”? I realize it’s your opinion, but there are bigger examples of “green hypocrisy” floating around on the automotive landscape, like flex fuel vehicles outside of the cornbelt, Hybrid Tahoes, ethanol from corn, CAFE ratings, etc.
I’ld love to commute everyday on my motorcycle, but the way people drive around here, I wouldn’t feel safe in a full sized pick up truck!!! And the laws offer little protection for motorcyclists.
Great piece Samir.Oh yes Honda is wonderfull, how about all them ATVs they sell?Motorcycles,generators,lawn mowers,outboards,just about anything with a piston. Yeah its good to know that Honda has my best interests at heart. Nothing like commuting 30,000 miles a year in your Prius,then looking down your nose at the red neck driving 5000 a year in his 10 yr old F 150.But Toyota has figured out how to grow grass on a city street.Now theres an add that makes me gag,
Al Gores kid gets caught doing 100 mph while smoking a fatty?Well he was doing his bit for the common good huh?I’m sure the electric motors in a Prius are not doing much at a 100.Now G.M gets an award for a freaking Tahoe?
The whole green thing is turning into a massive buisness.
Two words say it all, Drive Less! simple easy and cheap.
Most of the important decisions in life are made emotionally, not rationally. Advertisers know this very well and play to the human audience as it is, not as a rational mind would want it to be. “Green” is the current hot fashion trend so that is what they are playing to.
How many marriages are rational, and would you want them to be?
The whole carbon credits industry angers me more than does the automaker’s noise. What a joke that the Al Gore’s of this world live in 10,000 sq. ft. plus mansions, jet around the world on private planes and then claim to have done no harm because they paid somebody to plant some trees. The facility with which a human being can make up rationalizations is mind boggling.
Cliffg
You obviously don’t live in a northern state or Canada. Try a scooter for a few miles at 20 below and you’ll change your tune. Just not a feasible solution.
Good piece this. Got me thinking a bit differently on the whole subject…
“Excuse me for stating the obvious, but cars are not now– nor will they ever be– good for the environment.”
Wrong. CO2 generators are excellent for the environment.
http://www.johnsongas.com/industrial/CO2Gen.asp
Luther:
I know you’re being sarcastic, but if I were to humour you, I’d ask:
What about the water used in production, the chemicals in the paint, the dust from tires, the energy it takes to extract and shape the raw materials that become a car, the engine oil that gets cycled every few months, brake dust, etc., etc. ?
Samir,
we can bust the hypocrisy with two straightforward government policies:
1. Stringent CAFE laws. For instance, require fuel economy to improve 3% per year, indefinitely.
2. A renewable fuel standard, that gradually requires fuel to become carbon neutral.
#1 forces action by the auto industry; #2 forces action by the oil companies.
This does NOT prevent manufacturers from selling large vehicles. However, they do need to be fuel efficient.
It shouldn’t cost much either: money spent on more efficient vehicles would save money on fuel.
In fact, it’s a revenue opportunity for the auto industry (just look at the Prius: Toyota gets to charge more for the car, while the purchaser still has a low cost of ownership).
Honda’s F1 one effort makes sense now.
Since they are near the back off the grid with the making up the numbers teams, it fits in with the marketing plan of reducing Honda’s carbon footprint by going slower than McLaren or Ferrari or BMW or Renault or Williams or Toyota (even with Ralf Schumacher) or even Red Bull and its wired Italian sister team Toro Rosso, were quicker.
The only teams that were slower were Super Aguri, (made from bits of old Honda F1 cars) and Jordan/Midland/Spyker/a team named after an insanely wealthy and politically connected(aren’t they all?) Indian businessman.
Gustave Doré made a nice illustration of Baron von Munchausen lifting himself and his horse out of a marsh they had gotten stuck in.
von Munchausen grabbed the nape of his own neck, heaved and Ho! they were outta there!!!
Fixin’ the motive energy challenge and the environment by the same logic is a cinch.
http://www.russianplanet.ru/filolog/dore/munchausen/munch07-290.jpg
1. Stringent CAFE laws. For instance, require fuel economy to improve 3% per year, indefinitely.
2. A renewable fuel standard, that gradually requires fuel to become carbon neutral.
Sounds good, but in the end, such policies are mere wishful thinking.
On #1, it’s easy to say, “make it so,” much harder to actually make it so. Everybody points to the Prius as an example (while forgetting that the cars that Honda and Suzuki made 20 years ago were just as fuel efficient), but even hybrid technologies will eventually reach their plateau. What then? Do we continue to penalize the automakers for failing to alter the laws of physics to satisfy our legislation?
On #2, I don’t believe there will ever be a fuel that is ‘carbon neutral’. Even if the fuel itself generates no excess CO2 emissions when burned, the production of this fuel will do just as much damage. Consider the amount of deforestation that would have to be done to satisfy the ethanol demands necessary to replace petroleum (and consider that your fuel economy is lower when driving with ethanol). Any biologically derived fuel product is going to have a serious impact, even if you don’t see it coming out of your tailpipe.
As long as the public continues to buy it, companies will continue to sell it.
This is a logical outgrowth of ‘free-market capitalism’ where corporate entities are considered to have no responsibilities except ‘maximizing shareholder value’.
If they can do that by selling sticks dipped in sewage, they will.
OTOH, I remember a former co-worker who in 2001 decided his ‘patriotic’ response to 9/11 would be to buy a GMC Suburban.
This is ooooooouuuuurrrrrrrr Kun Tray….
“It’s a lot easier to commute to work in a gas – electric Ford cute ute than set up a carpool in a less exotic machine, deal with the hassles of mass transportation, change jobs for one with more telecommuting, move house to reduce journey times, etc.”
There are practical limitations to this, of course.
Unless people live relatively close to each other, a carpool fails to avoid anything but congestion.
As for mass transit, even in some urban areas, population density is too low to take everyone everywhere that they would wish to go at a time approximately when they would wish to arrive. By car, I have a 25 minute drive to work here in Chicago. If I took public transit, I would be bound by someone else’s schedule (not good if I didn’t hear my alarm for 20 minutes one morning) and my commute would at least double, as I would have to wait for late trains and transfer to another line.
While many jobs could shift to telecommuting, the vast majority cannot — unless you want your children taught via computer screen and your neighborhood policed by video camera. Beyond that, there’s a social aspect that would be lost if we all spent our workday in our home office. What would be the point of living if, to lower our carbon footprint, we never saw another living person in our day-to-day lives?
Moving closer to work is only an option until everyone moves closer to work. If our cities were built such that office buildings were spread out throughout a metropolitan area, rather than concentrated downtown, this would be a definite possibility. But it’s far too late to reverse that trend and most people can’t afford to buy a 500k 1 bedroom condo downtown. And, regardless of how much good it might do, I would never want to even if I could afford it.
Good theoretical ideas, but as always the practical situation is hampered by feasibility.
It’s all just marketing – another angle to play on people’s emotions to get them to replace a perfectly fine posession with a new one.
In today’s world, the two biggest angles on getting people to part with their money is safety and the environment.
It works too – a lot of people want to allow others to limit their freedoms or choices so they can feel “safe” or “environmental”.
As much as the hypocrisy that the earth livery Honda F1 car makes – Honda usually is at or near the forefront in most disciplines to reduce waste, increaes efficiency with their power products. Honda was one of the forefathers of adding 4 cycle technology to their multipurpose and motorcycle engines (2 cycle engines were more powerful but produced significant emissions) – Honda started improving their engines in order to compete and now 2 cycle engines are becoming dinosaurs. Even their weedeater engines are now – and all their water craft where much of it’s competition kept to 2 cycle until it became a negative selling point (image caught up).
The founder of Honda followed a philosophy of do more with less. Reasons why Honda automobiles often had much smaller displacement than their competition – and when turbos were young and had terrible emissions – Honda went with variable valve timing (beating out even Ferrari / Porsche / BMW, etc.).
Any form of racing is negative to the environment at least in the short run. It’s the new principles and discoveries they make finding out how to make a gas guzzing race engine burn a little less fuel but go as fast and produce as much power. Those applications Honda then takes to their consumer products. Honda does a fun thing of rotating their production engineers / designers into their motosports programs (being an engineer at Honda is one of the most coveted positions an engineer can attain).
Taken to the fact that many new plants by Honda are now using cooling lakes in order to cut HVAC bills by 70-80% and using different processes in order to decrease the painting process.
Where your typical Ford / GM speak about how much they care – they talk the talk – yet hardly walk the walk (usually just with one off dream concepts). Honda normally speaks softly and carries that big stick. What else do you get with a company whose entire BODs were all engineers by trade at one point in their career.
I am not being sarcastic at all Samir. Burning gasoline creates CO2 and water (approx. 1.25 gallons of water for every gallon of gas burned).
As for dust, wind and rainfall errosion on rocks cause many times more dust than tires and brakes…And what specific chemicals are harmful?
Energy produced by hydrocarbon oxidation yields CO2 and water…Plant Food. The “Green” image is just marketing to those who are bad at chemistry. A Hummer H1 is more “Green” than a Prius…Chemically speaking.
Honda does a fun thing of rotating their production engineers / designers into their motosports programs
FYI: Toyota does the exact same thing as well.
Seems like all the automakers these days are desperately jumping on the environment bandwagon. Toyota was the first automaker to embrace this market on a large scale with it’s hybrids. Mostly it was simply the Prius. The Prius seems to have given Toyota big image boost in being environmently friendly and all other automakers are desperately trying to do the same.
There are a lot of good ideas here to reduce CO2:
increase vehicle efficiency, ride a scooter, use fuels that are closer to carbon neutral.
All of these, and an infinite number of other ideas, will be efficiently pursued by the masses if we simply pass a federal CO2 tax.
If we raise CAFE the ONLY effect would be that somewhere around 10 years from now the vehicle fleet will be more efficient; so we would force more efficient vehicles on the public by limiting choice. The way this will be accomplished will be by raising the price of cars and trucks to cover the more efficient designs. This in essence will also be a tax, only a much, much less effective one because all of these other options will not be encouraged by CAFE.
We have a big problem on our hands, why would anyone propose anything less than the most efficient means of tweaking the maketplace to solve it; a CO2 tax!
Ever since this ad http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Jordancarad.jpg/444px-Jordancarad.jpg (successful) carmakers have been selling something other than a pile of steel and plastic. It’s all about image, and how buying this car will make you feel..freedom, sex, escape into the wild, prestige, etc… Today, assuaging environmental guilt is what’s selling. What else is new?
If you are so green as a cloverleaf embracing a dawn distilled dewdrop, why don`t yoy address the real carbon monsters- the US electricity producing powerplants. they account for over 75% of all electricty produced by US of A. and almost 30 % of world total pollution emissions. by the way, the party is not going to be over soon. the fossil coal reserve for the States is for 400 years. this cheapest way of manufacturing electricity shows the whole essence of US industry. Squeeze blood out of the stone until last drop. why replace something with new one, if the old one passes by unnoticed, like leaf springs under Caravan or rusted cast iron blocks in your chevys. arguing about catfarts emissions of Prii or TrasgenderSuburban, is just counting nickels………
Excellent point of view.
I heard somewhere that the Prius hybrid is actually more wasteful than a Yaris or Corolla because of all the in-efficiencies in it’s production. Something silly like many components of the car are shipped all over the world multiple times, making the overall carbon footprint of the car worse than just a regular car.
Could TTAC do some digging into this story? It would be interesting to find the truth behind the Prius’s ‘Green-ness’
Jeff in Canada:
I did a quick google search and it looks like that comes from the nickel production, which is largly out of Toyotas’ hands.
http://www.betterworldclub.com/articles/hummer-not-more-efficient.htm
I did a quick google search and it looks like that comes from the nickel production, which is largly out of Toyotas’ hands.
http://www.betterworldclub.com/articles/hummer-not-more-efficient.htm
That’s a little like saying nicotine is a little out of Philip Morris’s hands.
They are all hipocrites, and so are we for buying cars. Unless you live in the woods clad in a loin cloth you’re probably destroying the earth just like the rest of us.
The difference is, most of us don’t pretend to be doing more than the minimum necessary. Honda and other’s definitely are trying to blind us with their token efforts. For every FCX they put on the road they have 100,000 “new” ATVs rolling out that have basically a ride on loawn mower engine from 1960. And make no mistake, cars like the Prius are like everything else, a profit generation device. Toyota took a bit of a gamble on that car in the begining which is why they probably get some extra undeserved credit for sticking with it, but they saw the way the market was swinging and now it’s a pretty safe bet to sell to the green crowd. It’s the new heathy high mark-up market segment to replace SUVs.
This is a very rare article, and so are the comments, because they mention the idea of ultra light vehicles that do 100 mpg. That is possible right now, and would make biofuel a real solution to transportation sustainability, but as Landcrusher says, on current roads the hospital bills will get big quickly. So, why not build roads for ultralight vehicles? This would be good for everybody, as it would reduce congestion on current roads. The roads for ultralights would be for vehicles under half a ton, width less than five feet, at least dual lane, and be covered, as many famous bridges are. If the bail out for US car makers consisted of a payment for every ultralight vehicle sold, adoption rates would soar. And where ever roads are shared by ultra light and other vehicles, 30 mph is fast enough. Next year will be a unique chance to do this, it wouldn’t cost much and could be done quickly compared to any alternative highway renewal plan, but it is essential that all affected parties see that it is in their interest. I might even get to ride a motorbike again. As for Hybrids, they only save fuel in stop/start conditions, like traffic jams and traffic lights, and does anybody really believe that traffic jam commuting is desirable?