Cars: Buying Cognitive Dissonance

To escape global warming you need to buy a new car. The automobile industry reminds me of this every day. In reality when I drive my "old" fuel efficient car, I end up on the highway, snagged in traffic with thousands of other cars. But all the car advertisements insist that if I would only buy a shiny brand new Ford or Chevy or Dodge, I wouldn't be stuck in that traffic jam. I'd be driving on the open road, in the mountains or the desert, not a car in sight, no smog, only the sunset baking the auburn canyons and the glint of sun off the new wax -- just me, the car, nature, (and my sunglasses).

Really, I seldom drive because I don't need to. I love to walk and I actually enjoy public transportation, with all its jostling and smooshing together of humanity. It's also a pragmatic choice, this "alternative" transportation. There's a lot of traffic congestion in my neighborhood, which at peak hours, involves mostly high-strung, work-ready parents dropping their kids off at school. Their idling SUVs jam the intersections for blocks. Each parent in turn deposits their child at school, with the lunch, and the homework projects, the gym bag, and the well-wishes. The inch-worming traffic wildly irritates the workmen and FedEx drivers, frustrating their attempts to deliver goods and services on time. So for me, it's often faster, cheaper and more relaxing to take the bus.

Sometimes when I'm out for a walk or run, I have to pass this restless line of SUVs and trucks, and I try to hold my breath like I'm swimming under water until I get past the idling vehicles and short-tempered drivers, the restless children, and the impatient truck driver who wants to swerve around the whole line of cars and get through the intersection but can't. When I finally pass all the emitting vehicles -- I eagerly gulp whatever air ends up in that space. I should worry about the quality of that breath, I'm sure. How well am I oxygenating my lungs as an uncommon pedestrian in a sea of cars?

In order to be a good citizen in a time of global warming, Time Magazine says you should live in the city. But if I were to take this advice to heart, would I become a naive martyr for the cause? Cities are polluted, and if I walk or take public transportation don't I make myself even more vulnerable to everyone else's choices to drive?

Plus, the new-car ads constantly tug at me, telling me to ignore reality and instead envision cars as a sort of personal utopia. Leggy models have long since been replaced by all of nature, and now I have confidence that if I buy any Infiniti, or Volvo, or Saab, the new vehicle will swiftly transport me from the smoggy present to a pristine, otherworldly mountain road. There I will switchback along, zooming past snowbanks and negotiating slick spots with the surest of handling, surrounded by the freshest air, forever warm and safe in the arms of mother nature.

Marketing with animals seems to be effective, and automobile marketers don't shy away from piling on animals as well as nature. Infiniti ads once featured woodpeckers that flew into the car to check out the wood on the console. I'm not sure what happened to the birds, but I remind myself that it's not only the Queen of England, with her privilege and idle time, her Landrover and a vast territory of heaths and heathers, who can see a fourteen-point buck in the countryside. There's nothing to stop me from doing the same. I can purchase a new Subaru from my local dealer any day of the week and crash through beautiful forests in four wheel drive comfort. Then, according to one Subaru ad, a deer will emerge magically from the forest, stand next to my windshield and gaze at me appreciatively, the two of us, bonded by nature and my new car.

With all the marketing talk of blue skies, I'm always convinced that there's a very very environmentally hospitable, economical car just around the bend. I turn each magazine page expectantly, hoping to see this dream car of mine.

You would think my dream car would materialize, they've been "working" on it for decades. The time is ripe. News articles are suddenly unanimous, definitive and grim about global warming. All the papers show photos of cars, bumper to bumper, in cities obscured by brown smog, with people on scooters wearing gas masks, sometimes coughing. But the automobile industry still natters away with the very same antithetical vision -- large gas-guzzling vehicles zooming silently through pristine, untouched nature. How did they get that Jeep to the top of that precious precipitous canyon, so much cliff and sky, without a trace of car noise or exhaust?

At some point perhaps, we can be swayed, along with the auto industry, to conjure up any vision, no matter how absurd. To wit, you can place you and your imaginary new car into a scene from "An Inconvenient Truth" without a trace of remorse or irony. A recent magazine ad did this very thing, featuring an Aston Martin Roadster parked in front of a glacier, similar to Grey Glacier and Lago Grey, bits of ice floating by the car. (You can see the ad in this PDF. )

Of course the Aston Martins is the classic luxury car-- sporty, fast, and expensive; you would need to pay to realize this dream. The flagship "Vanquish" model lists for $255,000. It gets about 11mpg in the city and 17mpg in the country, but notably has outstanding horsepower and reaches speeds of 165 to 225 hundred miles per hour. All the better to blow by glaciers with. Naturally, for that price you have your choice of leather seat color, from among hundreds of nature's finest shades, including Falcon Grey, Kestrel Tan, Quail Grey, Red Fox, Sandstorm, Shark Blue, Bison Brown. I think their "Arctic Blue" succinctly complements the glacier theme. By immersing yourself in such dissonance, carbon credits would be a distant afterthought.

We know better than to think that the Vanquish is melting earth's glaciers, and to be honest, given the chance by some benevolent spendthrift, we'd probably be all too happy to take the Roadster for a spin. But while emissions soar, fuel economy standards remain the same, decade after decade. The auto industries fights tooth and nail for the right pollute, and we the people of habit collude with polluters by resisting change. The automobile industry, like an aging Faulknerian belle, forever insists on miring us in their beloved automobile myths. But there must be some breaking point. The further they attempt to pull us into the wilderness, the greater our cognitive dissonance. Then at some point we'll collectively snap and insist on change, insist on a new reality for transportation.