My feeling is that people do pay attention, but only to a point and they often carry a wrong impression with them, which I think is the advertiser's intent. Toyota has a good rep as a high-MPG car company because of the Prius. So, people who don't want a Prius, but feel they need an SUV instead will still go to Toyota because in their mind, Toyota has vehicles with great gas mileage. And they'll buy a 14 MPG monster but still think they are being green because it is a Toyota. But back when our family owned a full-size Cadillac Escalade 6.0 litre 4x4 complete with front and rear air conditioning (I won't get into the argument of why such a vehicle was "needed" in our household) it consistently got 22 MPG measured in real life and yet folks we knew certainly never thought of it as being greener than any Toyota. Quite the opposite! Now I drive this Volt which beats the pants off of any current Toyota, plug-in or otherwise... but Prius drivers (and yes, even drivers of other Toyota models) around me still turn up their noses. Why is that?
No comments:
Post a Comment