We’ve seen a lot of stupid videos lately, such as the 10:10 fiasco of blowing up school children because they were ambivalent about reducing their carbon footprint. Now, we are treated to a “behind the scenes” video of how Hyundai shot a commercial for a gasoline powered car, using no gasoline and leaving no carbon footprint. There’s all sorts of clever human powered props, and the whole set resembles some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption. But the real punch line is: they had some guys push the car to get it going for one scene.
Honestly, I don’t see the point. It seems beyond ridiculous to make a zero carbon footprint commercial for cars that use gasoline. Note all the trucks, rental, and equipment vans surrounding the commercial shoot, now how did all those get there? Pedal power? Watch this video:
Here’s another video aptly titled “Creating the illusion”:
And yet another on the alternative power sources:
Nice, but the thing that makes this a candidate for the FAIL blog is this: transporting all this equipment to the shoot couldn’t be done “carbon free”.
Here’s the final product, the actual commercial:
If they really wanted to create an “illusion” you’d think they would have had the good sense to keep the U-haul, Budget, and Ryder rental trucks out of the video scenes. But, when you are on a mission, details like this apparently don’t matter. On the plus side, at least they didn’t blow up anything or anyone.
h/t to Tom Nelson
@James Baldwin Sexton
Yes, people do buy these disingenuous advertisements. Just walk into an Andronico’s (food store, West Coast) or a “Whole Foods” (again, über-green market) … and be amazed. So many things now are branded with the light-yellow-green “green label” as to make me want to puke. But its like branding turds in bows and glitter. Turds they remain. Water bottles are now often sexy, European styling, and limey green.
Everything is about recycling, but to a population of DINKs and ECPUs (double-income, no kids … or … environmentally conscious parental units), it really is all about trendy image-setting. Something to “talk about” at all social events. Its OK, it all comes in cycles, and paves the way for lots of inefficient spending on questionable products. Makes plenty of people a living, I guess. But the interpersonal brow-beating is sometime quite amusing to observe.
After seeing the “recycleable trash” path of ignonymity taken … at the local “recycling and reuse facility” (AKA “metropolitan dump”) – whereby all recycleables are dumped into a grinding machine – glass, plastic, metal and all – and grossly separated into a small pile of useful stuff, and a great big pile of “standard trash” … I’ve stopped entirely filling my “colored bins”. If its all treated as trash anyway, there is no way in hell that I’m going to give the trash company all those CVR fees for all them bottles. No way.
In Baltimore (and a hundred other “progressive cities”) I’d be fined. Well stuff it, folks. I’ll happily take my own trash to the dumps every few weeks… as it gets nice and ripe in the summer time. It remains one of my inalienable rights.
=GoatGuy=
Building all the extra equipemt like the stage, the bikes, the solar panels, the batteries, the various mechanical devices consumes MUCH more energy than the little fuel saved with the single car.
I’m totally greened out……….
sick and tired of hearing green this and green that
Well, i can see that there is some point to presenting a commercial where it’s all hand-powered, like the Honda chains of parts. Metaphor and artistic interpretation has some place.
Where it becomes a massive con (or group stupidity) is where they claim to have actually achieved something by being ‘special’ in their production method. It’s not clever.
Lots of green jobs in Canada, it seems.
It’s a 274 horsepower car!
Greg says:
October 28, 2010 at 12:19 pm
I give them serious props for reducing solid waste on the set by 3/4 if that is actually true. Film sets produce massive amounts of garbage
As a matter of fact, you could say that is all they produce. Reducing solid waste from filmakers by 3/4’s would be an excellent start, with more concessions to be made in their wasteful production and consumption following.
But they did not use hand cranked cameras!
They have conveniently overlooked all the energy required to manufacture the materials and equipment they are using.
I am a Hyundai dealer, and also a skeptic, and an active skeptic at that.
Hyundai has the best average fuel mileage of any car line. The 2011 Sonata, only comes with a 4cyl (Camry and Accord have V-6 options), and gets EPA 35 MPG highway with its standard 6 speed automatic.
To get people who want more power to buy a Sonata (the US version is only made in Alabama), they are offering a turbo version, so you get power when you need it.
I dont see this ad as been crazy green, and think people are over reacting. Hyundai has set a target of 50 MPG fleet average so lets cheer them on. Go Hyundai!
My wife was watching this commercial for the first time a week or two ago and I remember her turning to me and saying ‘what a stupid commercial, how much more CO2 did they expend having people push things around and constructing the set like that vs conventional electric power?’
Being an engineer, I was tempted to come up with a reasonable approximation of how much ‘worse’ this set was vs using electric power, but then I decided it was better to mock it in simpler terms. Isn’t a carbon-free world great? Instead of using machines, we’ll all be digging ditches manually and sweating while inconsistantly turning hand-cranks in the summer heat. What an idyllic world it will be, indeed.
What a bunch of BS! If you take all the extra manufactured equipment they had to use and truck there, extra people they had to get there, extra food they had to eat, extra big fat paychecks they had to give and inefficiencies of their contraptions, driving the car around must have a much smaller carbon footprint.
What a bunch of liars and scientifically challenged idiots.
… Never buying Hyundai!
I am grateful to you for the best writing – you are a talent, dear writer. Every little thing I want to do now is to begin my writing – I say you it will be a excellent essay
All that for a 30 second commercial?
On one hand it was a creative effort, however impractical and useless. They sould also have considered fasting and reducing their respiration rates by controlled breathing.
“It’s a 274 horsepower car! Steve Kopits”
Priceless ROTFLMAO
What a bunch of baloney!
If I did the embodied energy analysis, I would have no problem proving they wasted more energy than usual.
And how much did that “green consultant” burn up?
Paul Deacon beat me to it, but once you have boarded your flight at “carbon neutral” Christchurch airport, landed in Wellington, your only options are carbon neutral taxis, or…
the bus.
That’s it?
All that for a thirty second ad? I didn’t see the backdrop in one frame (I watched it three times), or the rain, or the pedal power trees. And to top it all, they’re not even subtle about it, showing the guys pushing the truck. With all the distractions going on, did anybody actually see what the car looked like at the end? I thought that was what it’s supposed to be all about. Massive fail.
Reminds me of the pious “No animals were harmed in the making of this film” credit – except for the hundreds of cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc killed to feed the crew over several months, that is.
I am increasingly making my purchasing decisions on brands and products that do not make a big deal about how green they are.
So, when my Satan gas spewing V8 BMW requires more poison juice to run, I do not go to a BP or Exxon station, as they take up way too much airtime with their earnest, hand-wringer adverts.
I’ll go with Shell, thankyou, with their F1 supporting V power stuff.
I only go for the “green” product if I have absolutely no choice.
Goatguy – re your comment about the poor conversion rate of gas hobs, I am of the opinion that this is largely due to the burners typically having a ring of ports around the periphery. This means that most of the flame gets directed at the edge of the pans, and consequently gets wasted. Electric hobs, on the other hand, heat the whole of the pans base. I cannot understand why gas burners can’t be made smaller and have most of the flame emitting from the top. Proper design should mean adequate air being drawn in to ensure complete combustion.
Microwave ovens normally quote “cooking power”, but this is typically only about 2/3rds of the electrical input rating, so a 95% efficiency is simply not possible.
What, so none of the pushing and cycling would involve exhaling CO2?
Goatguy
At October 28, 2010 at 12:07 pm, you said:
“The amount of energy that it takes to safely can food en masse is 97% less than to cook the same food by traditional techniques on the stove. ”
That’s an interesting idea, I don’t know about 97% less than cooking at home, but I can believe it is probably more efficient.
Then you said:
“Here’s another cooking fact. Compared to electric stoves, a gas stove loses over 75% of the thermal energy of the burning natural gas. The coupling of burned-gas to pot-bottom is terrible.”
This is really comparing apples-and-oranges. Burning the natural gas at the electric generation facility has the same problem as burning gas in your stove. They can improve the efficiency and sometimes by a lot if they can use the waste heat, but then there are the losses in transmission and distribution of the electricity to your stove.
So it probably doesn’t change by much, except in the case where the generation facility uses the waste heat for some other useful purpose.
MikeEE
paulhan, apparently this was for a campaign, not a single ad.
BTW, my new car is 285 HP, also a 4 (2.4), and who freaking CARES what the mileage is when you have that much power under your foot?!