GM pulled a “Reality Sucks” print ad directed at college students Wednesday. Coincidentally, on Thursday The Wall Street Journal reported that a subcontractor who set up one of the automaker’s wireless networks inserted the word “sucks” with any reference to any of GM’s competitors. Ford “sucks” (because Jim Farley wants to beat Chevrolet with a baseball bat, I guess), Chrysler “sucks,” Toyota “sucks”, etc.
As for the offending ad, it depicts a young college woman in the passenger seat of a car, probably a Chevy, snickering at a young college guy on his drop-handlebar bike as he holds his left hand next to his nerdy helmet to hide his face.
The moral of the ad is that if you ride a bike to school, you’re not going to make it with the ladies. Bicycling advocates objected, humorless as they are, prompting GM to pull that ad and another depicting a college woman getting splashed with water from a puddle when a GM sport/utility passes her on the street.
GM is making fun of “active transportation,” says the website, bikeportland.org, which also quotes a UCLA professor saying the ads “violated the decency and courtesy appropriate for a debtor.” Bikeportland (Oregon) concludes; “Yep, shameless. But just more of the same from the auto industry.”
Where does one begin?
This is what happens when GM tries to be cheeky. The “humor” here is about as funny as a Ron Zarrella joke. Another problem is that GM doesn’t try to pitch many affordable cars to college students, leading one to believe that it’s just more cash on the hood for debt-racked parents.
At the bottom of the ad are the badges for Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, but no Cadillac. Why not? If mummy and daddy are willing to buy their kid a Buick Regal or GMC Sierra, won’t they spring for a CTS-v coupe? Unless their son is a football star at, say, USC or their daughter a successful fashion model in her spare time, I don’t understand the economics of these student discounts.
There are a few other campus jobs that pay well enough to buy a new Buick or GMC, though as regular viewers of “Breaking Bad” know, it’s best for such “entrepreneurs” to keep a low profile and drive a 10-year-old Pontiac Aztek.
GM shows “typical discounts” for two of its new models in the “Reality Sucks” biker-nerd ad. Okay, I’ll give you the 2012 Chevy Sonic, but the other model is a GMC Sierra 1500 XFE. The college discount on the Sierra, if equipped “as shown” is $6,488, bringing the truck down to just $29,482. The college discount is available to undergrads, grad students or even recent graduates.
Full disclosure: I’ve been out of college so long that the four cars I owned during school, combined, barely cost as much as that Sierra discount. Point is, I’m as out of touch with the lives of modern college students as, well, GM’s marketing wizards, but at least I know it.
Under the photo of the embarrassed bike nerd and the co-ed car passenger you’ll find the words, “Stop pedaling, start driving.”
On second thought, perhaps GM is more out of touch than me. There are two kinds of car enthusiasts in the world; the kind who also like bikes, and those who hate bicyclists. Being in the first category, I’ve been yelled at to “get on the sidewalk” many times when biking in Metro Detroit, though curiously, only while in the suburbs and never in the city of Detroit.
Perhaps those are GM marketing execs yelling at me. They’ve certainly missed, or they are denying, the big bicycling movement. While Detroit isn’t a bike commuter town, you can’t drive home through most middle-class suburbs after work without encountering groups of middle-aged bikers out for a ride, their spandex uniforms matching the racing sponsors of the brand they’re on. Try to find an adult-size bike for much less than $400 these days, and you’ll need to go to Wal-Mart or Sears.
Motor Trend’s parent puts out a magazine called Paved. The Fall ’11 issue reviews seven new bikes, ranging in price from $470 to $14,000, including the $3,200 Cannondale CAAD 10 and the $6,500 Felt F2X.
To be fair, GM isn’t the only automaker suffering anti-bike myopia. In the mid-‘00s, you couldn’t swing a marketing exec through an auto show without hitting a sport/utility displayed with mountain bikes on its rooftop rack. This was supposed to put the “sport” in sport/utility. Today, automakers talk about a- and b-segment cars as emerging segments that will take advantage of “millennials” who want to live in urban areas and Megacities after they graduate.
These are the hundreds of thousands of buyers who’ll snap up Chevy Sparks, Fiat 500s and Scion iQs, goes the marketing-think. This is completely off the mark. While young people are car enthusiasts, too, we’re always in a rather small minority.
Young people move into cities so they don’t have to own a car. They’ll use public transportation to commute and rent Zipcars on the weekends. They can spend their first decent salaries on $5,000 bikes and own the cycling equivalent of a Porsche or Range Rover.
Part of GM does get it; the engineers and designers led by Advanced Technical Vehicle Concepts chief Chris Borroni-Bird, who are advancing work on the EN-V project of small, autonomous electric Segway-based bubble-pod cars. In the future, these will be the rented, personal transportation devices that will transport those who can’t, or won’t bike or walk home from the closest bus or light rail stop.
The EN-Vs, which heretofore will be badged as Chevys, aren’t pretty, sexy or fun. GM’s engineers and designers know they need to do this sort of thing to survive the future of the transportation business, and maybe in the process save the automobile as we know and love it. Too bad GM marketing and advertising doesn’t get it.
Ah yes, the good old days. When gas cost pennies per gallon, you could rent genuine Shelby Mustangs from Hertz, and the cops didn’t have radar. When Toyota was still an obscure Japanese automaker, Hyundai was still in the construction business, and Motown still dazzled the world with brazen displays of power and performance and style. When sex was safe, and racing dangerous. 
For example, the average American had to work 35 weeks to buy a regular Ford Galaxie V-8 sedan in 1961, and that’s exactly the same time it takes to earn the money to buy the Galaxie’s spiritual successor, a Taurus SEL, today. The Taurus boasts 88 more horses, is 9 seconds faster to 60 mph, and travels up to 9 miles farther on a gallon of gas. Similarly, a base 1961 Falcon sedan cost the same as a base 2011 Fusion — 25 weeks’ earnings — while a Mercedes 190 and Jaguar 3.8 also cost the same in 1961 — 43 weeks’ earnings and 67 weeks’ earnings, respectively — as their modern counterparts, the C300 Sport and XF.
For some cars, the good old days were, for pure affordability, really good. A 1961 Impala SS 409 took 42 weeks’ earnings to buy, while you’ll need to work 79 weeks to afford the nearest thing GM offers today, a Cadillac CTS-V sedan. It now takes three more weeks to earn the money to buy a base C6 Corvette than it did to land a C1 Fuelie back in 1961.