

Pickups are, by most accountings, a menace. But that doesn’t mean they’re what customers should have. In America, the company’s F-series pickups have outsold every other vehicle, of any type, for 39 years running pickups constitute around half of Ford’s total sales, and probably an even higher percentage of its profits. It’s no accident that Zhao gives more screen time to pickups than any other car, even though Ford’s first electric pickup doesn’t go on sale until next spring. “Make It Revolutionary” joins this tradition and helps us to see its blind spots. The status quo, they promise, can stay - without so much ecological damage. Now they suggest we can buy our way to maintaining the lifestyle we already have, armed with products made from new materials (steel straws, hemp T-shirts) or redesigned so they don’t belch offensive exhaust (electric vehicles). Increasingly, though, they’re promising something different.
#FARM FRENZY 3 SERIAL KEY GENERATOR GENERATOR#
Emissions-consciousness isn’t what drew people to Fords in the past, so why change what works? Climate change is never mentioned - though the power failure that requires the truck to double as a generator certainly feels like a gesture at some of its effects.Īdvertisements have always told us that by buying one new product, we can improve our lives. The result is a pitch for electric cars that dwells barely at all on what was once supposed to be their great virtue: the potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

This explains the mix of nostalgia and futurism in “Make It Revolutionary,” which hawks the cars of tomorrow using images of the cars of the past (which were themselves once the cars of tomorrow), all the while stressing age-old American themes of hard work, self-reliance and family. If their future is to be an electric one, then their mission is to convince people that electric Fords are basically the Fords they already love, only newer. But automotive electrification is first and foremost a product of hard-nosed corporate interest in the bottom line.Ĭarmakers already know what makes customers spend. As for ecological motivations, well, maybe we can’t know what sense of planetary responsibility lurks in the relevant executives’ hearts. This shift - currently a matter of nonbinding pledges - has many motivations: the plummeting price of batteries, increasing government subsidies, the anticipation of tighter emissions standards. Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep have all announced plans to make 40 to 50 percent of their sales electric by 2030. “Give it zero vehicle emissions.”Īfter decades of dragging their feet, big players in the American automotive industry are beginning to imagine a move away from vehicles built around fossil-fuel combustion. “Take the original 0-to-60 head-turner” - we see a new, electric Mustang zooming down a desert highway. A designer in a tweedy jacket - most likely a reference to McKinley Thompson Jr., Ford’s first Black hire in that department - inspects a prototype of what appears to be a Ford Mustang. Cut again, to a mid-20th-century auto-design lab. “Take the truck our parents used to build this country and make it so it can power our homes.”Ĭut to a bustling urban bakery, where a different woman takes orders behind the counter, then heads out to make deliveries in an electric Ford van. “Take the familiar and make it revolutionary.” A woman gets out of the Ford, runs a cord from the darkened house, plugs it into the side of her truck and voilà: The lights come back on.

Close-up on the grille: It’s a Ford.Ī firm, masculine voice starts narrating. Outside, a gray-haired man in a cowboy hat switches on a flashlight and stands next to his vintage pickup truck, surveying the property. The lights go out, plunging the home into darkness.

Then a bolt of lightning shoots down from the sky. We’re watching from off in the distance, but the warm lights inside make it look cozy. A two-story house stands alone against a night sky.
