Pigknocker had invested so much in PR that it didn't have a lot left over for after-sales support.
Pigknocker Motors has reduced its carbon footprint to become one of the world's most efficient and carbon-friendly global manufacturers.
This is good news. Except for the fact that it's not news. Or true.
But it's just the bait needed to attract green-tinted car buyers who will “lean to green” to pacify their guilt-ridden materialistic heart.
More manufacturers are making big news out of PR machines because it these engines that can swing buyers into their showrooms.
A successful PR machine prides itself on successfully conning journalists into relaying precisely what they want to the public. The journalist sees it as an easy story and the reader sees it as a true story complete with an independent, unbiased writer's name on the top.
It appears to be happiness all around. Pigknocker Motors does so well out of the publicity that it starts to advertise in the same newspaper. A win-win-win.
But what about the reader? The chum who rushes out and with half a bank vault under his arm and 10 years to repay, plunges $45,000 on a Pigknocker de Luxe with seat warmers?
He believed the win-win-win of the manufacturer, the PR outfit and the newspaper advertising department. He was thinking win-win-win-win with his ownership of the de Luxe being the fourth big win.
Sadly it wasn't to be. Pigknocker had invested so much in PR that it didn't have a lot left over for after-sales support. To save on staff outgoings, the Customer Service woman with the nice voice was also the car detailer and wasn't there to answer the phone when the complaints started rolling in.
And all the greenery that was promised came at a cost. No-one told our chum that the de Luxe only used premium unleaded, needed servicing every 5000km, had superb wet-weather tyres for grip but wore to the canvas in only 10,000km, had back-up batteries that needed annual changes and that the much-lauded fuel economy was achieved in a vacuum-sealed laboratory in Finland with 125/75R16 tyres and with the mirrors, bumpers, door handles, wipers and grille removed while the engine ran artificially without alternator, water pump, aircond compressor, oil pump, power-steering pump and half its required sump oil.
Our chum, after a year of ownership, feels decidedly ripped off - a fact enforced by his self-opinionated neighbour with the Corolla who barely has to wash his car - but still believes he has done his bit to save the planet.
But, of course, none of this is true. No company would release a car on the market that promises the earth and delivers nothing but a breath of warm oxygen.
They wouldn't get away with it because car buyers today are savvy, right on the money and clicked into the new wave of technology.
No-one, especially the young who know everything and the mature who used to remember, could get fooled by any PR machine dishing up twisted facts. Could they?
