God bless the internet: nothing escapes its notice. Autosavant is a relatively small blog, operated as a labor of love by a bunch of passionate car guys who take time off from their “real jobs” to review cars, comment on auto news and, in this case, catch companies making sloppy mistakes in their advertising. Autosavant’s Editor-in-Chief, occasional TTAC commenter and all-round nice guy Chris Haak did just that with a new Chrysler 300 ad in Automobile Magazine, finding that the Wieden + Kennedy spot shows a 300 displaying 7.9 MPG on its trip computer. Haak writes
Now take a look at the closeup of just the dash below. From the angle of the tach needle, it’s clear that the car is idling (and in reality, had probably been doing so for quite some time during the photo shoot). On the right side, you’ll see the fuel gauge, which is a small circular inset at the bottom of the speedometer. It’s shown at a bad angle in the photo, but it appears to be marking somewhere above three quarters of a tank of gas. Then look at the DIC between the gauges. The trip computer is clearly displaying the fuel economy, and it’s showing a 7.9 MPG average, and a DTE of 60 miles…
Of course the car was idling for a while to get such poor mileage It’s just that it’s kind of a shame that the agency that did such a great job with the “Imported from Detroit” Super Bowl commercial for the 200 could have easily figured out a way to display something other than an embarrassingly low average fuel economy number on the display, or at the very least, photoshop a “1″ or “2″ in front of the 7 so that it showed 17.9 or 27.9.
You know what rated at about 7.9 MPG? A Bugatti Veyron on the EPA’s city cycle. Usually we take issue with advertisements that stretch the truth, but as Haak points out, in this case a lie would have been more accurate.
This equates to catching a spelling error in a Pulitzer Prize winning story.
I should clarify: what you’re seeing here is a quarter-page of a two-page spread, not some tiny corner of a tiny ad. Click over to Autosavant for more pics/context.
I’m not saying it’s earth-shattering, but given that Chrysler’s got one of the lowest fleet fuel economy ratings, this is not great.
Maybe it’s 7.9L/100KMs? , it’s what we use here in Canada for our fuel efficiency ratings ( L’s / 100 KMs), which would make it around 22-24 MPG.
@windbane
I thought that too at first, but the DTE is in miles. I doubt you can have one in metric but not the other. I know I can’t in my F150. It even changes the outside temp to Fahrenheit when I want to see MPG instead of L/100km on the dash.
+1 pgcooldad
@Edward Niedermeyer
I don’t get the point, it’s possible to get that kind of mileage in any car, under similar conditions.
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.
#1 I can tell from the steering wheel that this isn’t a 2012 SRT8 – which would be the only model to do that badly on gas mileage. Even the 2012 SRT8 does better than 15mpg.
I have the 2006 and I get at least 10.1 MPG city/combined.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj2qrQRjLTs
I’m willing to bet someone reset the mpg meter and started driving. when you start driving, it starts going up steadily.
This is quite the stretch here…
1) People who are enthusiasts will know that the 300 is capable of much better gas milage than that.
2) People who aren’t won’t even notice.
But it is a really stupid error. Someone is asleep in marketing-land, regardless of whether or not buyers notice. Does Chrysler really need to be taking chances?
This is much more damning than the “stoned Chrysler workers” Fox news meme.
This is not damning at all man. Back when speedometers went only to 85mph, should we have gotten on the case of every car ad that showed a speedometer as a “catch” that this car can’t go faster than 85mph? Come on, this is below the TTAC readership’s sophistication.
It’s not “damning” in the sense that anyone’s going to actually get this mileage, it’s “damning” in the sense that it sends a message that folks aren’t sweating the details (as friedclams points out).
Back when speedometers went only to 85mph, should we have gotten on the case of every car ad that showed a speedometer as a “catch” that this car can’t go faster than 85mph?
It’s not the same thing. It’s about the message, and this isn’t the message that the company should want to send, particularly when there are websites that will get the word out very quickly.
It was a dumb error that should have been Photoshopped out of the picture. We all know that the car averages better than 8 mpg, but we’re talking about marketing here.
Exactly. What carguy said.
This is a lame “catch”. Those who know, will know that this is because of idling and nothing else, those who don’t won’t notice nor know what the “7.9” is (there’s no “MPG” notation from what I see, just the tail end of “AVG”).
The other day I pulled over the send a text message soon after starting of, and my 4-cyl Acura TSX displayed 7MPG. Come on. This is sophomoric — the auto-geek equivalent of Homer Simpson giggling everytime he says “titmouse”.
… allow me to go on.
IF:
– the trip odometer shows 154 miles, are we to assume this car’s range is 154 miles? “Terrible! Gotcha!”
– The “door ajar” light is on in a photo, do we assume the fit and finish is terrible? “Gotcha!”
– This base-model car has no tachometer, do we assume the engine can’t rev?
– The pic above shows one hand on the wheel only, and seemingly at the 12- or 1-o’clock position. Should we bite their head off that they “don’t know how to drive properly”?
Really, man, I’m surprised to see this on TTAC, not having been on in awhile. Let’s call auto manufacturers on things that count.
Based on his impassioned, multi-post defense of sloppy advertising agency production processes, I’m going to assume that Kman is the employee at Weiden+Kennedy currently getting his butt chewed.
Relax, Kman, I think your job is safe. Just don’t make the same mistake twice. Weiden + Kennedy didn’t spend thousands of dollars on Photoshop licenses for noting, so go ahead and use it next time. Geez, all you had to do was Photoshop out one little “.” and the car would have been able to do 79 MPG (average). Problem solved!
Yes, no big deal, in the “real world” when read (or likely, skimmed)by ordinary consumers. But somewhere in Detroit the 300 brand team is freaking out. The marketing executives are on the phone, freaking out. The account executive at the agency is on the other end of the phone, sweating bullets, freaking out. And the creative director is swallowing is fifth Tums of the day, freaking out. And the art director, who just got a box placed on his desk by the security/HR guy, is definitely freaking out.
Methinks some of you might be taking the piece too seriously. This isn’t supposed to be earth-shattering news, just a touch of humor.
Maybe it’s L/100 km…
I thought the same thing but it would seem particularly odd to mix Imperial and SI units.
Boff is correct, it is a metric/canadian display showing “7.9” litres per hundred kilometers travelled. About 29.77 MPG.
it is a metric/canadian display
No, it isn’t metric. The item on the display below the MPG measure shows a distance traveled in miles.
It’s a real-time MPG calculator. Depending upon the math used to calculate it, the car had surely been idling for awhile (which would make sense — it was a photo shoot). A car that is idling is getting 0 mpg, of course.
No, it shows TE – time elapsed in MIN.
No, it shows TE – time elapsed in MIN.
No, it doesn’t. The left-hand side of the trip computer is obstructed in the photo, but the second line displays “DTE”, which means “Distance To Empty”. That is being displayed in miles (mi.)
Have a look at the owner’s manual for the 2011, and you’ll see that it’s the same.
http://www.chrysler.com/en/owners/manuals/
It is MPG. But again, MPG at idle is zero. During a photo shoot, one would expect a lot of idling, and that will reduce the MPG calculation.
“…a lie would have been more accurate.”
Ed, with those standards you might get hired by the New York Times!
Believe it or not, I really like my job and have little to no interest in being hired by anyone.
Toad, you spelled “Fox News” wrong.
Toad, you spelled “Fox News” wrong.
Figures Mr. nonsense would say something like that.
This post is in line with TTAC keeping a wary (and at times, humorous) eye on auto advertising.
It was not intended as a major gotcha.
Ed is very capable of exacting fine detail from dense addendum files that other reporters miss and that some in the industry/govt wish would stay unnoticed (like when he found financial and tax obfuscations in the GM bailout).
8 MPG is respectable. Nothing to scoff at.
MPG is overrated anyway. Think of it this way…the higher the MPG, the more boring the vehicle is…
A hillarious little oversight, would have been funnier if they had tried to photoshop the gauges to show the car in motion and displaying really low fuel economy. I am suprized the ad agency didn’t catch it given they’ll photoshop wedding rings on and off a a man in a magazine ad depending on which magazine the ad is in.
It is very sloppy work by the ad agency though. Would they have okayed an exterior shot of the car with birdsh1t on the hood?
Only if the bird worked cheep
ba-dum-chak! [RIMSHOT!]
It’s probably just a brand new car…fuel computer is simply lacking enough data points to accurately calculate MPG.
GOOD ONE! I manage for one a large print run quarterly magazine and we photoshop all kinds of things. Detail to us is very important and that even under close examination one would have a hard time telling things have been altered. This just shows to me a young graphic designer, including an over worked staff to let this go by. Photos have to be carefully reviewed as if it’s proof reading copy for typos.
Wouldn’t photoshopping the DIC be a violation of truth in advertising rules? It’s one thing to alter backgrounds, people, etc., but it could be deemed deceptive to alter the actual display as shown in the car.
Autosavant?
Are they some how related to the poster who would always claim every car was inferior to his magnificent 7-series?
Most certainly not related. For the record, we had the Autosavant name far longer than that guy did. We’ve been Autosavant since 2005 or 2006.
I wouldn’t kick a 7 Series out of my garage, though.
By the way, Ed is spot-on in his assessment of my post at Autosavant. It’s not a serious critique or “gotcha.” It’s just that with Chrysler having very little margin for error and having issues with its large car-heavy product mix, their agency should have paid a bit more attention to a detail like that. I was amused by it more than anything, and I said in my post – which Ed quoted above – that in all likelihood the car had been idling for a while, which of course is what dragged the average economy down to 7.9 MPG.
And you guys criticize Autoblog?, Sheesh.
Yawn.. slow news day. I’d be more inclined to go with what windbane mentioned above.