Fossil fuel car companies like Ford, Toyota and Isuzu spend billions of dollars each year on marketing to manipulate people into buying their highly polluting products. Then when faced with regulations to reduce pollution, these companies claim they’re just selling what people want.
Men in particular are targets of the manipulation through vehicle advertising. That’s why the top selling vehicles in Australia have names like “Raptor” or “Ranger” or “D-MAX” and are designed to look like Tonka Trucks. Marketers are tapping into the male sense of masculinity and ego.
You only need to look advertisements for Australia’s top selling vehicles the Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux to understand this. Word’s like “powerful” or “built tough” or “unbreakable” are used to appeal to the “little boy playing with his toy trucks in the dirt” that lives deep inside the Australian adult male psyche.
The result is that millions of Australian men feel compelled to buy these high-margin gigantic Tonka trucks. And in addition to direct advertising, the fossil fuel industry also uses subversive messaging to incite a fake culture war against electric vehicles, the high-water mark of which was Scott Morrison’s 2019 “won’t tow your boat” campaign against EVs.
At its extreme, the toxic masculinity can result in what the US refers to as “coal rolling”, the deliberate release of black smoke in front of EVs, the deliberate blocking of EV chargers, or – as happened in New Zealand last week, the smashing of fast charing stations with a sledge hammer.
The result is that Australian cities are now clogged with millions of these Raptors and Tonkas, the vast majority of which are driving around with empty trays and spewing out copious amounts diesel exhaust pollution into the air we all breathe.
Mainstream media complicit in Australian cities’ demise
According to Forbes, the fossil car industry spent around $US12 billion in the US on advertising in 2023, with most of this going to TV, radio and newspaper organisations.
While the automotive industry spend on advertising in Australia is rarely quantified, it is without doubt one of the largest sources of revenue for the major commercial TV stations like Channel 7, 9 and 10 as well as major Australian newspapers and radio.
You only need to switch on the TV or radio for a few minutes before being hit with an advertisement for a fossil car model, usually a diesel powered light commercial Tonka truck.
This has influenced major commercial media outlets, who refrain from reporting negatively on the industry or on the scale of the damage fossil cars are doing to our society in the form of air and noise pollution. They also frequently spread misinformation about electric vehicles which they fear might pose a direct threat to their fossil car clients.
Next policy push should be a ban on advertising light commercial vehicles
After the recent watering-down of the government’s proposed vehicle efficiency standard, now is the time to turn our attention to the root cause of Australia’s obsession with large polluting vehicles. Marketing.
Once it was became blatantly obvious that smoking was not only bad for smokers but also everyone else in the vicinity, countries around the world began to ban the advertising of cigarettes and banned smoking from workplaces, schools and other public spaces.
It’s time we took the same approach with large polluting vehicles.
Next time you’re at your local cafe or restaurant or dropping your kids to school, stop and have a look at the exhaust pouring out of the vehicles around you.
You can literally smell it almost everywhere you go. It is as inescapable as the constant background noise of the thousands of internal combustion engines endlessly roaring around your local community.
It’s become so ubiquitous we’ve all become numb to how terrible it is. When will we wake up to it?
Daniel Bleakley is a clean technology researcher and advocate with a background in engineering and business. He has a strong interest in electric vehicles, renewable energy, manufacturing and public policy.