The damage caused by the 231 million Toyota cars sold between 1992 and 2022 is estimated at a cost in the region of €10.7 trillion.
What if the world's biggest car maker by sales admitted and apologised for its mistakes of the past and committed to become a company able to provide clean mobility and fit for the climate emergency?
The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a ‘Born to Roam’ SUV advert for breaching rules on social responsibility on Wednesday, 22 November 2023.
The car company responsible, Toyota, made adverts that “presented and condoned the use of vehicles in a manner that disregarded their impact on nature and the environment," ruled ASA. " As a result, they had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society."
Obstructing
The same company was recently revealed to have lobbied the UK government to weaken weaken and delay the switch to cleaner electric vehicles, planned as part of the fight against air pollution and to hit climate targets.
As revealed in detail in an earlier report, Dangerous Driving, the same car company placed its bet on polluting cars, planning to produce millions of fossil fuelled internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.
While many car companies are finally transitioning to full battery electric vehicles, this car company is not only lagging behind, but revelations above and elsewhere, show it is actively obstructing the shift to cleaner vehicles, with disastrous effects for people and the planet. At the same time, it uses high profile sports sponsorships, such as of the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics, to promote itself misleadingly as environmentally responsible.
Apologies
But the Badvertising campaign has stepped in to help the company reinvent itself. We imagined what a serious leap forward for a car maker would look like.
How can they account for their polluting past, and communicate that shift? That’s why we now present TOYNOCA® to update TOYOTA, with a full corporate press release, an open apology letter, a new corporate 'Vision 2024' brochure and a video endorsement of the new move by 2012 Olympic gold medallist, Etienne Stott.
The damage caused by the 231 million Toyota cars sold between 1992 and 2022 is estimated at a cost in the region of €10.7 trillion.
It may look like that very familiar car company, but this one has actually taken the necessary leap to meet the great human health and critical climate challenge of our time.
The mistakes of the past are summed up in five apologies and five pledges by TOYNOCA®.
Based on the actual wrong turns taken by the real car maker, Toyota, TOYNOCA® says it was:
- Wrong to be so slow to take global heating seriously, despite knowing about their contribution to it for at least three decades, and apologises for delaying action.
- Wrong to cling to the polluting past for so long, and planning to make millions of polluting, fossil fuel powered vehicles even long passed when the science said
we should stop, and apologises for polluting so much. - Wrong to persuade their customers to drive down a dead-end by switching to ever bigger cars, to SUVs that are more dangerous, polluting, resource hungry and
crowd your streets, and apologises for advertising bad choices. - Wrong to pretend to be green when they weren’t, using their early reputation for hybrids to look environmentally responsible when they were actually falling far
behind, and apologises for greenwashing. - Wrong to lobby against a faster shift to cleaner cars persuading politicians also to go the wrong way, and apologises for abusing their power and influence.
Emissions
To take responsibility for the company's past, TOYNOCA® promises that it: will not sell fossil fuel cars; will offer a diverse range of sustainable products, from innovative electric bikes to electric tricycles to buses; will offer consumers an integrated, fossil free, sustainable mobility solution; will accept its historical responsibility and contribute to the UN Loss and Damage Fund, and will give “nature and climate” a veto-holding seat on the board. All of these are included in the TOYNOCA® prospectus for immediate change, Vision 2024, just the kind of bold, practical transition that every car seller should be making if they care about human health and the climate.
We estimate that the damage caused by the 231 million Toyota cars sold between 1992, the year of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and 2022, resulting from lifetime emissions of 15.8 billion t/CO2e or more than 13 times Japan’s annual emissions for 2021, has a cost attached in the region of €10.7 trillion.
This Author
Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on X @AndrewSimms_uk or Mastodon @andrewsimms@indieweb.social.
