Car Adverts - They’ve Lied To Me!
Meh! Driving.
It’s just now how I expected it to be - certainly not the way it was portrayed in all those adverts. I mean, I already have the foxy Wife, and lovely Daughter, but where were the wide open roads so I can pretend to be a Formula one driver:
. . . where’s my early summer sunshine flitting through the trees:
. . . and what about dramatic sweeping bends on mountain passes:
, or how about just some garden gnomes to dodge? I feel as if the whole car industry has done a massive mis-selling job.
Plain and simple: In reality, driving is nothing like the way it’s shown in adverts - even the ones featuring zombies:
. . . or this one demonstrating the ability of a car to have the same effect as seven pints of snakebite:
Take yesterday - I was working on the Team Valley in Gateshead, which is 14 miles from home. I had to drive though, as I’d something too big to carry to drop off on the way there.
OK, so I had the Today Programme on the radio for company, and I could have had a cup of coffee too. Except I’d left that on the kitchen table. But apart from that, it was just plain rubbish. I spent more time stationary than I did moving. And then most of the moving was keeping a defensively short gap between me and the car in front to stop some nurk cutting in and completely eliminating my braking zone. And the attitude of other drivers. OMG - just what must they be like when they get to work? And you can’t even talk to anyone about how crap it all is (England’s national sport, in case you didn’t know is moaning).
The final nail in the coffin is the journey time: one hour and twenty minutes to cover fourteen miles. I can reliably ride it in a shade over an hour.
No, all in all, driving around town is just crappy. Yet people do it every day - it’s their preferred way to get to work. Wake up and smell the energy drink, you mindless zombies! Take the bike - it’s quicker and better.
If you’re in any doubt, take a look at this advert from Ford. The only thing that overtakes their world champion, fuel injected, turbo-charged, 2.9 litre-engined, race winning, British rally champion, four-wheel drive, diesel, hatchback, saloon, estate car, that’s the leader of its class . . . . is a bike.
This was in a commercial from the ’80s. But it’s the only one I’ve found that seems to have any truth at all in it. And if it was true then, it’s doubly true now.
Beats me too. And I have the beautiful wife and awesome kids as well.
I can’t stand the stress and the feeling of being cut off from the outside world, arriving stiff and stressed, needing the privvy, not seeing anything because I’m focused on the road in front ugh. Give me a bike any day.
I wrote a similar post today about driving last weekend- I’ll post it in a bit…
…or the ones where they unpack tons of FUN stuff from the back of some horrible SUV/People Carrier/Estate and have a BIG PARTY in the street, which all the other drivers join in with.
(I went to some early Reclaim the Streets events before it all got a bit nasty, and the drivers didn’t get out and join in the BIG PARTY believe me even though there was some FUN stuff.)
I think I know where at least some of the roads are. When I was cycling here I almost felt like I was in a car ad, especially when the sun came out, even though I was on a bike. There was no-one else anywhere near me at all.
[...] what about dramatic sweeping bends on mountain passes, or how about some garden gnomes to dodge Car Adverts - They’ve Lied To Me! - karlmccracken.sweat365.com 01/29/2009 Meh! Driving.It’s just now how I expected it to be - [...]
Not sure if that All Things Gardening Store comment should count as spam. Basically, it looks to me as if they’ve had some ‘bot or other identify the phrase “garden gnome” on this post, and then create an automatic link for them. I think that sounds pretty much like spam, as the real context here is nothing to do with gardening.
So what do you think - is http://www.allthingsgardeningstore.com a spammer or not?
But if you’re from the alleged spam site http://www.allthingsgardeningstore.com, and want to defend the link, why not leave a further explanation here, just below this search optimised comment about how you’re leaving spam, that links back to your site.