Honda Attempts to Sell Hydrogen Power With Vastly Unsettling Ad Campaign
Telling someone that you can run a car on hydrogen — a greenhouse gas — and emit clean water as the singular byproduct is already an extremely novel concept. You don’t need a laser light display or sideshow antics to make that fact more interesting or palatable. In the case of Honda, you absolutely do not need to include the disembodied heads of singing children bathed in light. In fact, the actual message might even become partially lost in the abyss of confusion you’ve created as people furrow their brows and wonder if someone has snuck a psychoactive drug into their beverage.
For reasons clearer to hired visual artist Adam Pesapane than myself, the 2017 Clarity Fuel Cell ad campaign uses a central theme of floating heads — frequently representing chemical compounds and molecular structures. The end result is as informative as it is unsettling, though it heavily favors the latter.
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
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Hydrogen is a greenhouse gas? Didn't know that. Given the predominance of oxygen in the atmosphere, it's hard to imagine there's any free hydrogen running around. Or, did you mean that water vapor (H20) is a greenhouse gas, which it is. One of the difficulties in figuring out global temperature change is accounting for the effect of more or less water vapor (clouds) in the atmosphere.
It doesn't do it for me - but it's no worse than the writing here: "The end result is as informative as it is unsettling, though it heavily favors the latter." To equate how informative the advertisement is with how unsettling it is and then say "it heavily favours the latter" is contradictory.
The main source of hydrogen is dissociation from water, which requires electrical energy, and lots of it. The only economical way to produce it is with a nuclear powerplant. The people pushing for hydrogen as a fuel are opposed to nuclear, and opposed as well to the second most efficient electrical generation method, hydro. If this were a serious alternative, government-owned transit systems would be converting to hydrogen instead of LPG. We're not going to break away from hydrocarbon fuels until we have di-lithium crystals.
I could see setting up stationary fuel cells at well heads that were capped with a metered release valve in a permanent set up with transformers and power lines from there. But we would have to solve a way for the fuel cell to use what came out of the well head without any residual exhaust.