| “Leaf” commercial: “What if Everything ran on gas?” ©2012 – Nissan Is it just me or have car companies and their commercials totally lost their way? A new Ford commercial the other day boasted that their car was “like driving a computer”. Another from Cadallac starring Kate Walsh a while back listed a “40 gig hard drive” as one of it’s top selling bullet-points. Another commercial for Nissan (video below), which I happen to love for the humor, is one that depicts a world where everything runs on gasoline EXCEPT their car. The poor, silent car it is promoting is called a “Leaf”. What kind of name for a car is that – a “LEAF”?! Are there no “real men” left buying cars these days? I prefer more inspiring names for cars, names with personality that convey power, strength, speed, or freedom such as “Marauder”, “Charger”, “Mustang”, “Fury”, “Fleetwood”, and “Grand Prix”. Even the soul-less names typical of many German cars, like “320i” are better than that! These are CARS we’re discussing, NOT toasters! Cars have personality, cars make noise, cars go places, cars get dirty, cars (used to) make smoke and fumes, cars can help the owner present a particular image. I must be a relic, but I don’t ever want to own a car that I have to “plug in”. Heck, I’d have it plugged in and get in, “turn it on”, and drive off until it pulled the plug out with me either coming to a rolling halt in front of my neighbor’s house to see him snicker at me as he fetched his morning paper, or just keep going with a very long cord-tail twisting around behind me until someone turned and drove over it yanking me to a sudden halt – the automotive version of having your shoelace stepped on!
I don’t understand what’s so “green” about electric cars – you STILL have to BURN something and produce just as much smoke and pollution (more if coal) SOMEWHERE ELSE, since the anti-nukesters will never allow us to build the plethora of nuclear plants needed to provide enough cheap and clean electricity necessary to truly make electric cars “greener” and effective for widespread use! |
 me standing next to a truly beautiful and “green” car (that’s not mine)¡ :/ I want a car that I can “START” and “turn over”, NOT one that I have to “turn on”! I want an “ENGINE”, not a “motor”, that will roar to life when I twist a real metal KEY (not press a reboot button) and where I can feel that herd of horses under the hood chomping at the bit to muscle me onto the open freeway on one of our antiquated 60′ long right-angle freeway acceleration ramps and then cruse at the legal speed of 70mph up hills with power to pass the inevitable junk-wagon that always seems to be tooling along in front of you just as the road is about to narrow to a single lane! I like a car to be SIMPLE, the LESS ELECTRONICS, the less to go wrong, the BETTER! I miss the time when a high school dropout could fix your car, or you could at least hold it together with bailing wire until you could get to the mechanic, rather than the whole thing just instantly turning into a 1-ton boat anchor without warning because some “oxygen-sensor” or the “main computer” failed. On my dad’s old car, the A/C compressor went out on the way home from a long beach trip. He simply cut the belt off and we drove home without A/C and power steering. Today, you would be stuck on the side of the road. I wander now if my car’s ever going to “crash” suddenly on the highway with an invisible “blue screen of death” and just seize up right there in traffic?! When I’m looking at a car, I don’t care about the size of it’s “hard drive”, I care about the size of it’s engine, it’s leg room, and it’s trunk size and it’s gas tank! Am I old-fashioned or what? The answer must be yes, because I even sorely miss those little triangle-shaped windows almost all cars USED to have. Some of the older ones used to even have them in the BACK too (like this one)! I even miss hood ornaments too and I love the swan that gracefully adorns this hood. |
