#Advertisement

Toyota is teaming up with Clear Channel Outdoor Americas to help clean California’s air with a billboard advertising its hydrogen-powered Mirai fuel cell sedan.

From April 3 to May 28, a total of 37 billboards in Los Angeles and San Francisco will filter smoggy air, thanks to the titanium dioxide-coated vinyl used in the sign.

While Toyota missed an opportunity to explicitly rub salt in a certain rival’s wounds, this is nonetheless a pleasant change of scenery in the automotive world, especially considering all of the Volkswagen emissions scandals of the past couple of years.

God bless the internet: nothing escapes its notice. Autosavant is a relatively small blog, operated as a labor of love by a bunch of passionate car guys who take time off from their “real jobs” to review cars, comment on auto news and, in this case, catch companies making sloppy mistakes in their advertising. Autosavant’s Editor-in-Chief, occasional TTAC commenter and all-round nice guy Chris Haak did just that with a new Chrysler 300 ad in Automobile Magazine, finding that the Wieden + Kennedy spot shows a 300 displaying 7.9 MPG on its trip computer. Haak writes

Now take a look at the closeup of just the dash below. From the angle of the tach needle, it’s clear that the car is idling (and in reality, had probably been doing so for quite some time during the photo shoot). On the right side, you’ll see the fuel gauge, which is a small circular inset at the bottom of the speedometer. It’s shown at a bad angle in the photo, but it appears to be marking somewhere above three quarters of a tank of gas. Then look at the DIC between the gauges. The trip computer is clearly displaying the fuel economy, and it’s showing a 7.9 MPG average, and a DTE of 60 miles…

Of course the car was idling for a while to get such poor mileage It’s just that it’s kind of a shame that the agency that did such a great job with the “Imported from Detroit” Super Bowl commercial for the 200 could have easily figured out a way to display something other than an embarrassingly low average fuel economy number on the display, or at the very least, photoshop a “1″ or “2″ in front of the 7 so that it showed 17.9 or 27.9.

You know what rated at about 7.9 MPG? A Bugatti Veyron on the EPA’s city cycle. Usually we take issue with advertisements that stretch the truth, but as Haak points out, in this case a lie would have been more accurate.

Based on these teasers for Dodge’s much-anticipated 60-second Super Bowl ad, we’d have to say they’re still working it out. One thing is for certain: if the point of spinning off the Ram brand was to broaden Dodge’s appeal, the new ad wizards aren’t trying hard enough. The ad above, like most of the latest tranche of Dodge ads, is from the old-school, knuckle-dragging, truck-alike, gender-role-based marketing school. In short, the new Dodge is nothing new…

The very first post-bankruptcy, Chrysler-brand advertisement was a true re-badge, literally replacing Lancias with Chryslers in the exact same advertisement. The second spot, which we ran yesterday, was a vague, year-end spot emphasizing history and heritage while showing only one modern car. Though it’s not a strict re-badge like the Lancia ad, the new Chrysler ad is, at the very least, based on some serious platform-sharing. Specifically the ad above, an Italian-language spot for the Fiat Group, is thematically identical to the Chrysler ad.