(part two)
Like I wrote last week in this column, I will try to explain why to buy greener cars, or at least why it's time to consider them.
The deprogramming exercise that I invited you to try, although humoristic, had a serious purpose. I wanted to make you realize that, too often, our behaviour at the steering wheel was often guided by emotions that were contrary to security and common sense. A friend of mine once told me that he could see how he was feeling by the way he drove. He said to me that when he felt frustrated by other drivers, when he started to yell at the lights, traffic jams or road construction, he could see that it was time for him to calm down and reflect on himself.
The emotional criteria of purchase
In the same way that we behave ourselves when we drive, we do not buy a car according to purely rational criteria but with emotional ones as well. You will probably tell me that you already knew that, and I will say that I knew you did as well. I am not naive enough to think that it will ever change. As human beings, we are much more emotional than rational. But the interesting question is: What are these criteria? What effect do they have on our decisions and in that matter, on the environment? And that's when it gets interesting.
Having worked in the advertising industry, sometimes doing car ads, I can tell that car companies and advertisers alike really want to emphasize the emotional aspect since, as we all know, love makes us blind... That's why the message from them is more about seduction than information.
The first criterion that I will mention is beauty. In this era where design takes more and more place in the creation of a car, exterior and interior curves, colors and texture are studied to make them attractive, comfortable and sensuous.
The second criterion is social standing. This one is linked to the image that different car companies have worked to build. We associate a certain personality to brands like BMW, Honda, Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen and others. That's how we will very often have these criteria in the back of our mind depending on what message we want to project by buying and driving a particular brand, independently of their real quality.
The third one is power. This is a seduction criterion. It is false to think that car manufacturers sell cars that are getting ever more powerful for practical reasons. The real goal is to convince you that when you compare their car to the others, you will get more power and therefore will be more powerful than the others. In this era where competition is king, every advantage that we think we will have by purchasing an object, but especially a car, will be attractive to us.
So, beauty, standing, and power are criteria that can possibly have a negative effect on the environment. Beauty will get people to change models more often, wanting the latest model to stay hip.
So by buying a car more often we will contribute to raise the amount of pollution and green gas emissions on the planet. For instance, the construction of a new car requires approximately 300,000 litres of water. Considering the fact that global water reserves are drying up, this is a fact to consider.