Subaru gets an environmental “F minus” on their new television ad.

I really don’t know what to make of the new Subaru commercial. You may have seen it. Some guy is lovingly “retiring” his old Forrester by parking it under some remote tree, with a few other junked cars, so that his Forrester can “live on.” How heartwarming…

My question to Subaru is, what the hell is up with this? These days, isn’t it the “done” thing in commercials to show everyone how “green” your product is? Even if your product isn’t “green” in any sense of the word, companies are still trying to convince the general public that it is, seeing as that is where the new public sensibilities seem to lie. But this new Subaru commercial is advocating that you NOT dispose of your used car in an environmentally sound way. You should to just go find some tree out in the middle of nowhere where you can just park it, in case someone, somewhere is too cheap to go to the dealer and get some new car parts.

I got news for Subaru. Disposing of your junked cars like that seems to be a requirement in places like Montana (you don’t believe me, take a ride on the Amtrak Empire Builder and see how many yards along the tracks have junked cars stored there). But this is not the environmentally sound approach, and I think Subaru should be ashamed for even suggesting that this might be a good thing to do. We need people who are MORE environmentally aware, not less. We have enough of those clods already.

I don’t care how much you loved your old car. You do not just go take it out somewhere and park it under a tree when it dies or when you get tired of paying the mounting repair bills on it. Donate it to some charitable organization that takes used cars (running or not) and somehow makes money off of them for their charity. You are doing somebody a favor and you are not out there trashing the environment with what will eventually become a rusty pile of useless metal, plastic and rubber.

Picture from here.