Car brands not pumping the brakes on ads portraying environmental damage - perhaps it’s time to start?
Brb, buying a "I brake for watershed-friendly car commercials" bumper sticker.
If you’ve tuned into any major North American sporting event on TV lately, chances are you’ve seen a commercial similar to what I’m about to describe; the latest AWD truck or SUV in a car brand's lineup speeding along a dirt road, ripping over dunes, then tromping through a pristine stretch of river. Just some harmless marketing and pandering to the rugged nature of our wild biology, right?
Well, not exactly. Commercials such as these scream irresponsibility and a lack of understanding of not only how harmful it is to drive a 4,000-pound vehicle through a river, but also how damaging it is to portray this behavior as normal to car consumers.
There’s a laundry list of negative effects that can happen when driving a car through a river ecosystem, from potentially transporting hitchhiker invasive plant species from other watersheds, damaging riparian plants, harming in-stream fish and wildlife habitat, to causing erosion and runoff pollution. Environmental threats aside, it’s also a dangerous practice and can potentially cause extensive and expensive damage to your vehicle.
In addition, new and emerging research continues to be published on the harmful effects of 6PPD-quinone, a chemical found in car tires that has an incredibly deadly effect on several keystone species in the Salmonidae family including Coho Salmon, Brook Trout, and Rainbow Trout. Those species range in a substantial number of watersheds in the United States, and many of the rivers chosen by car companies to be used for filming domestically are in drainages that these species inhabit.
So given this lengthy list of negative impacts off-roading vehicles can have on river ecosystems, why do car companies continue to portray this as acceptable behavior? Three words; target marketing, baby!
Take the United States and the National Football League as an example: Of the 137 Million Americans who watch NFL games, 70% are men, and 64% of those men are between the ages of 25-39. Men of course, overwhelming, are the ones buying trucks in America. Throw in the fact that 70% of the total viewers (M/F) have a household income of $100,000 USD or more, that’s precisely the affluent demographic to which car companies want to sell their trucks and SUVs. Especially now with inflation bringing up the average full-sized truck price in America to a pricey $60,000 USD.
But really, isn’t it ironic? No, don’t start, Alanis. Many if not all of these car brands depicting less-than-stellar offroading practices are beginning to expand new electric and hybrid vehicle models across their lineups. Electric vehicle sales have boomed to a 375% increase over the past five years in America, and 2023 alone saw an unprecedented 1 Million EVs sold. This certainly confirms that EVs are taking the US market by storm, and it’s clearly understood by car companies that their consumers are becoming more environmentally friendly. So where’s the disconnect here?
To find the answer, we should probably ask - why do humans continue to feel the need to take our vehicles off-road through sensitive habitats? Maybe there is a bit of subconscious manifest destiny at play. Certainly, the belief that humans should tame the earth and hold dominion over it isn’t a new strain of human thought (how old is the Book of Genesis)?
Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic led more people to opt for outdoor hobbies to escape the pandemic-related shutdowns, stress, and anxiety. Maybe people just feel more like red-blooded Americans exercising their god-given freedom when driving through these sensitive habitats. Or, perhaps most likely, we humans don’t understand the full extent of how impactful some of our simple actions can be on the natural world and often need to have the information shoved directly in our faces to register and change behavior.
So with their target audience set in stone and pandering at full bore, will car companies ever feel the need to change their commercial portrayals? And even if they do begin to film their commercials in more positive and watershed-friendly ways, what difference will it make? That remains to be seen fully, but several organizations are already working hard towards ensuring these portrayals change for the better.
Just a couple of months back, the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency banned a commercial for the Toyota Hilux depicting some extreme river driving, which from what I could research, is the first time the ASA has levied a ban strictly for cars destroying river habitat. Curbing these commercial portrayals with legal action is certainly a viable option, and the ASA handing out that ruling is a powerful precedent that other global government advertising regulatory agencies could take up.
What about other non-regulatory ways to enact this change, you may ask? Trout Unlimited, the leading voice in the angler community in America for the past 60 years, made a big splash when its CEO Chris Wood wrote a letter to Chrysler’s CEO in response to a widely watched 2018 Jeep commercial portraying harmful river driving. It’s not clear as to if Jeep ever responded to TU’s collaborative invite given there’s nothing readily available on the internet discussing any follow-up actions from the letter. nonetheless, TU has continued to promote the topic with its audience to build awareness since that letter.
In 2022, TU even went as far as to offer any car company a free full ad in their TROUT magazine worth almost $6,000 USD, inviting them to show their vehicles in action promoting healthy river stewardship. It’s unclear if any car company took the bait on the ad, and given there have been very few commercials since portraying vehicle actions as positive impacts on the watershed, I think it’s safe to say car companies aren’t prioritizing any sort of media changes at a large scale. Why should they? They already have their target market locked in with lucrative corporate partnerships with the NFL and the likes to keep those manly consumer eyeballs fixed on their commercials.
With global warming projected to affect cold water ecosystems and salmonids harshly moving forward into the 21st century, it’s time to start rethinking how we interact with our local rivers. Simply put, because our watersheds and we humans deserve far better. Having car commercials portraying positive watershed interactions won’t change much in the short term, but will at least be a step in the right direction as our societies prioritize healthy watershed stewardship in the long term. From farmers, indigenous communities, and urban inhabitants, we all must continue to play a vocal part in protecting our watershed ecosystems for endemic wildlife species to thrive and to promote positive river recreational practices.
That includes car companies, of course. It’s time for us to demand better from them because we’re all in this together.