{"id":5167,"date":"2010-09-02T09:27:06","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T13:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=5167"},"modified":"2010-09-02T09:54:36","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T13:54:36","slug":"rival-electric-car-manufacturers-already-positioning-for-dirty-ad-campaigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/09\/02\/rival-electric-car-manufacturers-already-positioning-for-dirty-ad-campaigns\/","title":{"rendered":"Rival electric car manufacturers already positioning for dirty ad campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Page<\/a> rounds up the GM-versus-Tesla ad campaigns of the near future:<\/p>\n

\n

As US motor mammoth GM gears up for the launch of its plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, it has applied to trademark the term “range anxiety” — meaning the fear suffered by battery-car owners regarding their ability to get home again after a given journey. Upstart battery car maker Tesla Motors has issued a panicky and unconvincing statement in response.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

GM feels that “range anxiety” is a major reason why its original EV-1 battery car of the 1990s failed.<\/p>\n

\u201dWe\u2019ve been here before,\u201d says GM marketing honcho Joel Ewanick. \u201cWe have first-hand experience with what the issues are.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, the difficulty with an all-electric battery car is that there is little certainty of actually being able to complete any journey even close to the vehicle’s rated range, as battery endurance is highly variable — and manufacturers can’t publicise the worst-case (or even perhaps the likely-case) figures. If they did, nobody would ever buy their products.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, reputable Swiss boffins have lately pointed out that in fact a VW Golf powered by one of the new, super-low-emission injected turbodiesels is responsible for less carbon emissions over its lifespan than one with a li-ion battery running on typical grid power.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, to wrap up the discussion briefly, nobody will be buying Tesla Roadsters or Government Motors Volts for their economic<\/em> virtues: they’ll be buying them as expensive status-signalling devices to show off their (real or imaginary) environmental awareness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lewis Page rounds up the GM-versus-Tesla ad campaigns of the near future: As US motor mammoth GM gears up for the launch of its plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, it has applied to trademark the term “range anxiety” — meaning the fear suffered by battery-car owners regarding their ability to get home again after a given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,28,15],"tags":[97,111,497,278],"class_list":["post-5167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-media","category-technology","tag-advertising","tag-cars","tag-electricity","tag-governmentmotors"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1ll","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5169,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions\/5169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}