Priuses And Telling Stories
I am always interested in the facts trotted out about how hybrid cars don’t actually meet their advertised mileage per gallon. A recent Car & Driver article about the Honda Civic Hybrid essentially put the kiss of death on hybrids with the words “In a hybrid, the trick is to drive like a grandmother.” (Consider this is a magazine which typically showcases cars like the $1.25 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4—top speed 253 mph.)
The EPA testifies that the Civic hybrid gets 49 mpg in city driving and 51 on the highway. But those numbers are rarely achieved. To get mileage in the high-40-mpg range requires gradual acceleration, timid cruising speeds, and cautious use of the throttle. Suffer a short lapse in concentration or accelerate immoderately, and fuel economy will suffer. Fact is, to do this right, you will drive more slowly than you ever have.
Not exactly the way to sell hybrids to the go-fast crowd.
Car & Driver magazine has a point when it comes to the numbers, though.
Producing an accurate gas-mileage evaluation is so difficult that most folks don’t think even the federal government can do it.
So if people don’t can’t have faith in the accuracy of the gas-mileage numbers, why do they buy hybrids? Shouldn’t the reality of hard results taint the ostensible value of hybrids? Well, as Car & Driver points out (in 2004, mind you):
Wearing a Toyota Prius has become … a sought-after badge among the greenies…
Via a Salon.com article, via a treehugger article, I ended up at a site containing an interview with some researchers from UC Davis who researched the real reasons why people buy hybrid cars.
I think the question journalists are asking is, ‘Do hybrids save money?” It’s the wrong question. A more basic question to ask is, “Do people who are buying hybrid cars really care about saving money?” The truth is that everybody likes to save money in the abstract. But we found in our research that saving money is not the primary motivator for buying a hybrid vehicle. Some people might think about hybrids as ways to save money. Those are not the types of people who are buying these types of vehicles.
As with the Wal-Mart and Prius dichotomy I mentioned earlier, people don’t buy Priuses for pragmatic reasons. Rather, the interesting point that the researchers bring up is the idea of storytelling.
In an increasingly market-based society, the things we buy are more and more a part of representations of who we are. And cars are incredibly important symbols of who we are, in large part, because cars are so mobile and so many people see them everyday.
Also, I think our identities are constructed as narratives. And we’re always looking for new elements for those narratives. We’re comparing the stories we have about ourselves today to older stories and to ideal stories. In those comparisons, we’re looking for either new ways to either advance the storyline we like, or change the one we don’t like. The idea of what a car means can be one of those important story elements.
If Honda or Toyota or others who are selling and marketing hybrid cars understand this motivation, it could explain why they jumped into the hybrid market even though the technology is still relatively unproven and there are definite questions about the long-term implications (what to do with all the batteries, for example). In short, we’re talking about conspicuous consumption with a message.
The wikipedia definition of conspicuous consumption:
Conspicuous consumption is a term introduced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term is used to describe the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth. The term is generally reserved for those forms of consumption that are motivated by societal factors and is not used to describe impulsive behaviours associated with personality disorders, such as binge eating or compulsive spending. [my emphasis]
It seems to me that people are picking out the brands and products whose values they believe best reflect the story they want to live and display to others.
This got me thinking. Is there a way to leverage this behavior that enables people to display socially-aware information? I think there’s a connection between this concept of conspicuous consumption and the idea of personalized personalization.
(N.B.: This post is chronologically incorrect, as I was working on it prior to the personalization of personalized information post but wrote the post on personalization in the interim.)