Now here's a smart marketing campaign. In an effort to raise awareness / interest in its 2010
Prius, Toyota planted five 18-foot tall "solar flowers" in Boston's Prudential Plaza and provided free Wi-Fi and electricity that was "partially powered" by the solar panels attached to the petals and stem. The so-called "Harmony Between Man, Nature and Machine" just disappeared from Boston but will next germinate in New York, followed by Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. We're not exactly in the market for a car right now, but we promise to think about it while we lovingly enjoy the free laptop charge and internet access.
[Via
PhysOrg]
Read - Flickr set from Boston
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posted July 21st 2009 1:47AM
Cool. I was just there today charging my iPhone
I was sitting on those over the weekend. Had no idea they were wifi/power stations. They also triple as chairs!
Would be even better if the flower is also a small wind turbine.
Toyotas one of the best car makers period! still have my 97 camry and still running pretty strong.
Pretty strong? The same can be said about many other cars... My parents have an 85 Ford Wagon that has only been to the mechanic once (timing belt)
But Toyotas are relatively solid cars, I suppose. I had an '86 Celica that held up pretty good. Well, until it got into a fight with Mercury Sable (I won)
while Toyota does make fine cars, anything from 97 should be running strong unless you beat the crap out of it. i have an 87 VW Scirocco and an 84 VW Rabbit both of which start up and go without a problem. actually until last week the newest car anyone in my family ever owned was a 99 Mazda Protege .... then my dad bought an 07 Honda Civic Si. its like driving a spaceship!
oh yeah my dad's 97 camry is working great too
What makes the Toyotas better is they usually don't cost half as much as those other cars while being as much or more reliable. And fuel efficient.
What makes Toyota better than other cars is that it's made by the Japanese.
And the Japanese makes Gundams.
Gundams>Transformers
Case closed.
Hmm, ever see a VW Bug? Those are a lot older than 12 years.
@Rick
The only ones I've seen on the road in the past 12 years have been the new (1998+) model.
"Partially" means your still using grid electricity.
Woah......I think you might be right!
Indeed. My guess is that the things are loaded with battery packs that are recharged every night from the conventional grid by Toyota's shadowy minions.
And how fantastic that they're raising awareness of the Prius in Boston. Thank goodness they didn't forget San Francisco either!
I wonder what the "carbon footprint" of this marketing campaign is?
Yeah, although realistically most modern PV systems are grid-tied anyway. What matters is whether you produce enough energy to offset the energy that you use from the grid.
That said, I doubt that the small PV panels on the flowers can produce enough energy to offset the consumption. It probably depends on how much the flowers get used, though, and for what purpose. There's more than enough energy produced by the panels to run several cellphones and a WiFi router, but even a couple of laptops (~30W each) used for ~8 hours each would probably be too much for the system to break even.
Thanks for the excellent analysis, I would have never known otherwise..
avast! Happy Yellow Flowers!!!!!
These would be awesome if they didn't look like giant flowers.
ROSS. Talk to me! :(
What is wrong with you, ur such a freak, youve asked the editors to talk to you for the like the past 6 articles. My god go talk to some real people out in the real world.
@Adderz
What did you expect? He's using a pot leaf for an avatar.
embedded in that pot leaf; an american flag
stuff like this that makes me want to move to the UK when i grow older =\
Look at that unemployed guy with the headphones.
You mean, the one with the laptop? How do you know he's unemployed?
So I just drive my prius into the pedastrians and park it next to big flower yeah?
They NEED to raise awareness and interest? Wow. In Japan there is *already* a 6 month waiting list for the car...
Silly Japanese people; they should have held out. There's no chance you're gonna get any electric flowers if you put out right away.
Those flowers could probably be a little more efficient if they also had wind turbines.
Or if the flower petals acutally faced the direction of the sun!
Partially makes sense, considering that the Prius only partially runs on gas.
Quick! Protect it with a peashooter!
Has anyone tried using a laptop outside with a glaring sun?
Fail.
have you tried turning yourself 180 degrees?
yes.
i have a unibody macbook. :(
Yeah, I was going to say... these are great for those people who had the good sense to buy matte-screened laptops, but good luck with most of the computers on the market today.... :-/
ARRRGGGHHH!
Triffids.
*runs away*
Huh. Now THAT is a marketing campaign. Pretty neat! If I saw that in Chicago and had my laptop, I'd use'em.
GM, take note. Green is in. Use it.
why is there a cop watching, just in case somone runs off with them?
they would not last 10 min in the uk before somone would take them or pull them to bits
just a thought.
more importantly why does it look as if he is reaching for his gun?
Say it with flowers, give a Triffid.
Am I the only one who is totally creeped out by the new prius ads?
Probably.
Crap! Where's the South Florida stop? Being the sunshine state, probably could get FULL powered solar. I guess we're not "alternative" enough for Toyota.
So keep your little VW New Beetle flower-looking doohickey!
We're way too busy defrauding Medicare ( http://www.miamibeach411.com/news/index.php?/news/comments/medicare-fraud/ )
and smuggling cubans and haitians (charging $10,000 to 12,000 per person for a 90-mile trip)
than to be bumming around all day charging iphones in bright sunlight (escalating overheat issues) and watching porn in the park!
On a more serious note...I bet viewing sucks in all the direct sunlight and with screen washout...and someone needs tell Officer "Fight Crime Later" in the pic that it's FREE wireless...move along, no one to harass here.
Yeah, whenever anything technology or auto related, it never makes it down to Miami. I guess Miami really is not considered part of the US.
Selling cars in the middle of congested, walkable downtowns well served by public transportation??? Mmmmm, location location location.
I thought it was strange that they picked the most mass-transit-friendly large cities in the US to have the campaign.
They should have picked Dallas, Houston, Miami, and other places where there is nearly zero mass transit.
They probably need to keep blasting the public with ads and in your face advertisements. Thee hybrids won't be around much longer and they're trying to milk their now hipster prius image. I mean why drive something that looks like a shoe and gets the same milage as a 80s honda, or even recent hondas. Or most diesel cars. The VW Polo gets 60-70 on a turbo diesel which still have some fun factor to driving. When that goes on sale here I'll be in line. They have a waiting list in Europe as well.
Hydrogen will be the next fuel source.
How about some reality checks on comparing cars with each other....
1) The amount of federal crash equipment alone (airbags etc), along with a bunch of other mandated equipment (catalytic converters etc.) has drastically increased the weight and decreased the efficiency of modern cars. Did your 80's car have AC, a massive stereo, ABS, HID lights, and a bunch of other energy-sucking accessories? Did it do 0-60 in under 10 seconds? It probably had about half the horsepower rating of a similar model today. Comparing a 00's car to an '80s car is just not fair - put them in a crash test or a race, and then decide which one you'd rather drive. If hybrids allow all this extra "baggage" for the same fuel efficiency, isn't that a good thing?
2) Diesel works in Europe. It works because they have much lower air quality standards, particularly in the area of particulates. Even ridden a bike in London - good luck coughing up pieces of lung every few days. There are some solutions (urea injection, particulate filters) which can make modern diesels meet US standards, but most of them suck power and require additional maintenance.
I agree with your comment on the "hipster" status of the prius, but until the volt and other plug-ins arrive, hybrids are a decent compromise for the next decade or so.
Regarding hydrogen, that's a joke. Storage and distribution are still major issues. There is currently no good (high throughput) way to make vast quantities of hydrogen other than by refining fossil fuels. Fuel cells have a major problem with the membranes being poisoned after a few thousand miles. Currently the developmental cars that GM et al. are offering, cost in excess of $1m each. H2 is just not ready for the big-time for at least another decade. Hybrids are here now. They're not an end point, but an important stepping stone.
If only the U.S. government would put a little more of that stimulus package towards mass transit (trains, subways, etc.), instead of getting more people to drive a Prius, it would be much cheaper and more "green" in the end. Also these solar flowers looks like they do not provide any shade.
@virgil
There are tons of diesel powered vehicles on the road in North America, I guarantee you've seen at least a few. I mean, they're pretty hard to miss, being big 18-wheeler trucks. Not to mention the clean burning diesel VWs and other cars that are starting to get more popular.