A Selection of my Favourite Car Commercials – Citroen: Alive with technology

The next instalment of my favourite car commercials is another golden oldie from the mid 2000s. To help generate interest in the new Transformer movie being released, Citroen teamed up with their production team to come up with a joint project. The output of this project was a distinctly attention grabbing short commercial where a conventional Citroen C4 transforms into a giant robot we all remember fondly from our youths. The transformer then proceeds to break dance to some catchy music displaying the (at the time) amazing visual effects people could look forward to in the movie. The main draw of this commercial is the graphic analogy of the technology embedded within a Citroen displaying it as being truly advanced whilst also generating interest for the forthcoming movie. I thought it was a truly unique collaboration and a mighty successful piece of advertising, I hope you enjoy it. 

Are we Trying to Force Electric Vehicles to be something they Aren’t?

Conventional vehicles have been with us for over 100 years and have become a cornerstone of our societies. They have been incrementally improved throughout their history and now represent one of the pinnacles of human engineering achievement. Indeed, some commentators have dubbed the car as one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments and they have without doubt assisted in the expansion of human prosperity.

Conventional vehicles are not however without their drawbacks and their benefits are reduced by their associated externalities. Electric Vehicles aim to address a number of these externalities and have regularly been referred to as a Disruptive Technological Innovation. What is a Disruptive Technology? Well, you can envisage the introduction of fuel injection into car engines as being a sustaining technological innovation that improves the performance of a technology without changing its fundamental structure. A Disruptive Technology is the opposite of this and breaks rather than alters the pre-existing mould. Disruptive Technologies push the frontier in nonconventional aspects of the product’s design such as significantly altering its architecture rather than providing incremental improvements on a primary attribute.

Should Plug-in Vehicles be bundled with Other Products and Services?

Some of the recent research emerging in the plug-in vehicle field shows that consumers tend to be the most open to consider a plug-in vehicle during times of instability in their lives. Moving house, changing job, having the first child are transition points when people tend to revaluate how they live their lives and if any fundamental changes are needed. Conversely, when people are “stuck in a grove” and are happy to have everything stay as it is then they’d be much less likely to think about altering their personal travel behaviour. These transition points do not happen very often and so its important to make them count.

Trying to get the most behavioural change for a single intervention would help to maximise the benefit of these transition points. This concept leads us nicely into considering if plug-in vehicles can be combined with other goods and services that may prove complementary. We’ve already alluded to early in this blog how plug-in vehicles can be sold in combination with an electricity tariff that may source its electricity from renewable/green generation or provide much cheaper rates during the night when the EV can be scheduled to recharge. Are there any other goods or services that can be combined with plug-in vehicles that share similar themes? I can think of a whole spectrum including combination boilers, cavity wall insulation and home compositing but there is one that, to me, stands out from the crowd.