Lighten Up
The lost art of having fun at the expense of others.
Welcome back to The Big Switch from Lafayette American.
Today, Toby Barlow has some thoughts about fun.
I recently judged a Chinese advertising show dedicated to auto. The vast majority was EV advertising. It was the full gamut of emotion, some of it weird, a lot of it funny. Meanwhile, here in the States, our car companies are also making EV’s. And while they’re occasionally making a good Super Bowl spot here and there, I would argue that they’re not having enough fun. Really not at all.
There was a time when Tesla was fun. Features like pet mode and the various Easter eggs tucked into the car revealed a certain joyful attitude. It’s one of the things people actively loved about the brand. Maybe because fun is a gateway drug to hope?
Of course, today Tesla is just a trainwreck of fevered egos, falling prices, and failed autopilot disengagements. Which opens the door for any other brand to step in. But the dull signal being sent out by car companies to the consumer shows raises the question about whether they’re really serious about the EV game at all?
If you’re actually in it to win it, you exploit your opponent’s weakness, and if they really screw up, then you go after them gleefully. If OEMs were actually serious about selling their EVs then they would be having a ball - either overtly or subliminally - messing with Tesla right now. Seriously. Tesla shares have been diving into an abyss, Tesla owners saw their residuals plummet overnight, all while the CEO loudly promotes Ron “Don’t Say Gay” DeSantis to be our next President. This is a piñata ripe for a beating.
The silence of brands seems to reveal how little they actually care about winning, laying plain how much this whole EV exercise is being done under duress. Like school children forced to eat their vegetables and do their homework.
That’s not the way to win the hearts of the customers. We love a good snarky win. We love some end zone antics. Come on, let’s have some fun out there!
Links from the vast internet:
EVs Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions — NYT
Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s.
Virginia is in a race with other states to land electric vehicle battery plants — Cardinal News
Local opinion on the shift in auto manufacturing from the industrial Midwest to the south and the increasing urgency pressuring states to make big investments.
Shell is acquiring EV charging network Volta for $169 million — The Verge / FoT
Last year, Volta was ranked second after Tesla in customer satisfaction for Level 2 chargers. It largely operates stations in high-traffic retail parking lots, providing free electricity for EV drivers, with revenue generated from ads displays.
Hey EV Owners: It’d Take a Fraction of You to Prop Up the Grid — Wired
A new analysis suggests that just a fraction of EV owners could make the grid more flexible and reliable by plugging into a system called vehicle-to-grid charging (V2G), or bidirectional charging.
📽️ Watch: Sandy Munro rants on Tesla margins and price cuts (spoiler: the margins are really good)
That’s all for now.
If there’s something we missed, or if you want to pretend to be Sandy and prank call Toby about a great idea to finally get Tesla to make an advertisement: bigswitch@lafayetteamerican.com