flights

‘h’ is for hypocrisy.

If the premier selling point of a hybrid vehicle is fuel economy, then you have to wonder why Lexus won’t reveal how economic the 600h actually is. This information is nowhere on the Lexus website or in most of the 3rd party reviews.

It took me some digging, but I did finally find a review that addresses the fuel economy of the 600h and as you might guess from all the secrecy, it’s not great. In fact, Lexus estimates the 600h will only get about 20mpg in the city, which is just 4mpg better than the non-hybrid LS 460. Bad, but not terrible for a big luxury car I suppose. But how about the fact that the 600h will only get 22mpg on the highway, which is worse than the 460. All this for $110,000.

The bottom line is the 600h is a stupid novelty designed to help limousine liberals feel better about themselves. And based on the latest Lexus commercials – where they make the ‘h’ out to be a kind of badge of moral superiority – they seem to know it.

Two thumbs way down Lexus.

I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for cars that feature voice recognition technology. Like this clever one for Ford’s SYNC:

Or this one for the Ford Focus:

I enjoy these commercials, but I’m not buying what they’re selling. SYNC might be cool, and it could even save my life by automatically dialing 911 after an accident.The thing is, I could talk to my car too if I wanted to. But I don’t. I’d feel like a complete jackass talking to my car. Is that weird?

This reminds me of some focus groups I helped run about six years ago when I was working for Vodafone. We had people evaluate a variety of smart phones and PDA devices, using them to interact with various applications, send and receive text messages and just make phone calls. People appeared to love the PDAs for their big screens and QWERTY keyboards, but when all was said and done, these were their least favorite devices.

The big displays, keyboards and loads of cool features were all trumped by the fact that people felt stupid holding these big clunky gadgets up to their ears while making phone calls.