I'm not big on TV - I watch some History/Discovery stuff, some Red Sox games when available, and I like vegging out and watching a Law and Order or CSI episode now and then. But advertising has always bothered me, in commercials, billboards, magazine inserts, and on fools who wear a big logo on their jersey. One of the first courses I took at college was Political Economy 105, and one of the first presentations we had was a film called Advertising and the End of the World. If you're not big on 40-minute potential apocalypse documentaries, you can find a brief summary here. Anyway, the point of the whole thing is, our culture is overrun with this desire to consume, which is beyond any basic need or any worthwhile pursuit. We are always looking for new and interesting things to spend our money on, collect, posess, which drives companies to advertise their wares, which drives more people to be aware of them and seek to posess them. More resources are used, more trash is created, and the world slowly devolves into a resource-less wasteland of Gucci sunglass landfills.

So I start of enter the equation as a guy that doesn't believe in material things - my car, my laptop, and my properties are pretty nice, and I must admit I enjoy my guitars, basses and tennis racket. I just don't splurge on expensive goods, when a normal cheap version is 95% the same. You will never catch my in designer sunglasses, with a tee-shirt that says GAP or AmberCrombie or QuikSilver or whatever crap there is out there now. I will never buy jeans with pre-ripped holes, or pre-faded spots, or basically anything trendy, stupid, and representing pop culture.

Being of this mindset, most advertising has never affected me. I never see a commercial and really think, Wow, I have to do/try/drive/eat that. One of the rare times I flip through a mainstream magazine, I don't get caught by the Armani scent wafting through the page, while a square-jawed, gaunt male model gazes stoically out at the nothingness of the next page. I don't get riled up about car purchases during dead presidents' birthdays. Beer commercials have never done anything for me, no matter how many hops they show, how hot the girl is, or hold cold the silver train makes the surrounding area as it travels. As you can tell, commercials are, unfortunately, in my head and part of my knowledge base; they simply don't get much further in than that.

(There are a few exceptions; when they advertise a 3-course menu at Applebee's for $9.99, well, I'll try that out. C'mon, we're in a recession.)

Fact Checking This Chevy Commercial BS

A few years ago, Chevy tried to cram patriotism down our throats. In 2006, when consumers were starting to be more mindful of fuel economy and just nibbling at the hybrid market, Chevy used some Mellencamp verses and cheap images from our past to proudly proclaim, "This is our country. This is our truck." Shameless use of Rosa Parks aside, the commercial basically said Screw those foreign car companies, with their hybrids and tiny little zotches. Be an American, goddammit. Buy a big stupid truck. This is OUR country!

By fall of 2007, Chevy was doing a rapid about-face in policy, choosing to advertise their concept vehicle, the Chevy Volt. Typically, advertisements show something you can buy, at least soon; the Volt was over three years away from the market, and like The Ford Reflex, may not even prove feasible to mass-produce. So why is Ford's Reflex a PR stunt in web-news only, and Chevy spends billions on an ad campaign for a car you have about a 20% chance of ever seeing, in three years? And why did they get Poor Man's Orlando Jones away from Washington Mutual, and into their commercials, to show kids this remarkable not-yet-even-prototyped vehicle? Because in one year, they went from screw-you-envirogeek, buy-our-big-trucks to we care and are totally making a difference. Smelling that BS yet?

You could say I read too much into the pro-America Mellencamp campaign, and that I am unfairly beating them up on it - when Ford has been the Big Dumb Truck leader for a billion years, and has equally white-boy targeted commercials starring Toby Keith. But Chevy is owned by General Motors, and has been operated as a division of that company. GM you may remember as the company that had something to do with an electric car back in the late '90s. Back when they launched the EV1 and began leasing it in the southwest, GM had a real chance to be ahead of the curve - their EV1 was available in 1996, two years ahead of the first Prius hybrid's launch in the US. And the Prius was only a hybrid! But GM didn't go for it - they screwed around with the idea like a lazy husband thinking about home improvement projects, leasing out a few hundred here, feeling lukewarm despite overwhelmingly positive responses, and quietly pushing a second generation with a few hundred models, before shrinking funding and giving up entirely in 2003. Meanwhile, Toyota was selling the Prius models at a loss or even to build market share, customer confidence, and maybe make some positive impact. By 2005 most enviro-geeks had to be wait-listed for a Prius (not me, thanks Denis!), and meanwhile GM ad execs were sitting around a table deciding who could best represent their tough-guy American ideals, an insightful late-40's rocker, or wrestling phenom John Cena.

Have you toured chevy's new green website? Seriously, as if to drive home the theme - the website is lined in green! How environmentally friendly, to use that shade! Wow!!

Chevy has plastered these five little icons all over their website in an effort to look like they are undertaking soooo many initiatives that will improve their product line - let's go over the list one by one:

• Fuel Economy. Because when I think of Fuel Economy, I think Chevy. More on this at the end.
• Electric Car. Didn't I already cover this? It was a great, wonderful idea, in 1996; but you focused on making a 16-mpg, three quarter ton monstrosity in 5 variants.
• Biofuels (Ethanol, E85). This was never a solution; it was a half-assed attempt by the government to almost admit that something may be happening, and at the same time give in to the somehow hugely-effective corn growers lobbying. Do we need to cover this? Corn, people? Don't we eat that in, I dunno, EVERTHING in this country? Think that might have a small effect on food prices? Let alone the cost to refine ethanol from corn, and the lower mileage per gallon - from 16mpg to 12mpg? Wow. This could potentially be an effective aid in the movement for alternative energy sources, if it were made from cheaper sugar from say, South America. To be fair, their statement about it coming from grains instead of corn in the future is somewhat promising; but guys have been running cars on biodiesel for years now. Chevy: almost as smart as your kooky high school chemistry teacher. Biofuels have promise, but focusing on corn for E85 is really a step sideways.
• Fuel cells. Here they make an impressive display of...well, no, there's nothing. Just mention of some test markets, where they will be marketing prototypes. Like Honda already is?
• Hybrid. Here is where Chevy touts is Malibu hybrid and Tahoe hybrid. Nevermind that the Malibu hybrid (32mpg) is the equivalent of strapping a pair of AA-batteries on the regular Malibu (30mpg). Nevermind that it isn't widely (or even passably) available. Hybrid technology, again, was edgy in 1997, but aside from some deep-rooted 60+ conservative white guys, everyone's on board. Chevy's massive net gain of 2mpg on the vision-less Malibu just speaks to the fact that they aren't using this technology efficiently, and are about a decade behind.

But if you think this absurdity is getting to the end, you haven't even seen ChevaGanda lately. The Gas Pumps Hate Us commercial series? Definitely clever. A chuckle the first time. But why do gas pumps hate your vehicles, oh caver-in-to-oil-pressure? Oh maker of the Tahoe? Gas pumps really choose to come to life and attack your 30mpg Malibu? Instead of say, a 71mpg Honda Insight? From 2003? I guess what really pisses me off is the fact that they wave this about like it's some huge badge of honor, when they are 10 years late to the party, and have been producing the same inefficient, crap vehicles for 60 or so years. You want customer recognition now, for finally producing a few models that don't get blown out of the water by Japanese counterparts in EVERY category? You want to be seen as 'Green' for one prototype, when you killed off a more innovative idea six years ago? This is like a guy showing up to your house today with a circa-1990 slap-bracelet and asking if you wanna try it. No, dickhead! You're fucking late to the party. Change out of the acid-wash jeans already. Show us you can innovate for yourself, and not piggyback on the trends.

The final nail in the coffin is the end of all these commercials, with the big claim: "8 models with over 30mpg, more than Toyota or Honda." This is where the bullshit card is played. Look in the fine print on the website, at what the 8 models are: first two Aveo models (Aveo, Aveo5) and then two Cobalt models (Cobalt, Cobalt XFE). Yet on the left panel of he Chevy site, under vehicles, each of those is listed once, in the 17 vehicles currently for sale. So far, two out seventeen meet this claim. Then, we get on to the real cream of this bullshit soup. "Models" five through eight?

Malibu Hybrid? Check it out on the website - Very Limited Availability. Again, even if you swallow Malibu and Malibu Hybrid being two different models, if you cannot get one, then it really can't be touted as the model that tips them over the edge, can it? And HHR and HHR "Panel"? They slap some plastic over the windows, and they have a new model? BS!

To sum up, '8 models' is really '4 models', meaning Chevrolet still manages to produce a whopping 13 vehicle lines out of its 17 that aren't even remotely efficient.

All this crap is besides the very simple fact that the numbers aren't that good. EPA estimates (which can be a tad overvalued for non-hybrid vehicles; Honda's 1989 CRX gets a ~45mpg rating) for all these vehicles are 30-34 mpg. One model - ONE - gets to 36mpg, and again, that's an EPA rating, not necessarily representative of realistic owner results. In actuality, it might get 32mpg. So all this spin that makes you think they have 8 great, fuel-efficient vehicles; but they really have four, average-ish models. For the record, my 1989 Ford Probe got over 30mpg. And the Prius I bought three and a half years ago averages 53mpg. That seems impressive, and something worth proclaiming. Here's you're new slogan: Chevy - not all that far behind, if you pretend it's 1989.