Ideas for Good–Good Intentions, Flawed Execution

Take 30 seconds to watch the video.

At first glance this sounds reasonable, right? Toyota is doing good in the world!

Yet the engineer in me screams in disgust. Is Toyota really claiming that their use of solar panels in their car lead to the use of solar panels to ventilate medial tents in remote areas? Let me watch the video again…

Yes, the Toyota marketing team wants to plant in your minds that their research is the reason some lady or some tent designer decided to put solar panels to use in this way.

This is precisely like saying, “Toyota – we use internal combustion engines in our cars, so every hospital that uses generators based on the same principles uses our technology!”

I appreciate that Toyota is trying to improve quality of life and energy efficiency but there’s gotta be a better way to advertise this than this. Here’s another example:

This ad makes the same mistake as the previous one but even more than that. The claim that the park would be self-sustaining simply because they regenerate electricity from braking roller coasters is laughable. If energy was harnessed from the motion of people’s steps and some solar energy as well I think the claim is applicable but with the statements in the commercial this is not the case.

I think that this is probably like seeing political ads for someone who is well-versed in political culture and facts. I’m in training to be an engineer so over the years my brain has come to think like one so I notice engineering flaws that I’m trained to notice.

For what it’s worth though these commercials are probably great marketing for Toyota.

What do you think? How did these commercials affect you?