The following blog post references this Audi “Green Police” commercial. If you haven’t seen it, you were either a) going to the bathroom, b) fast-forwarding through the commercials on your DVR, or c) residing in a house full of women during the recently completed Super Bowl. If that’s the case, please take a moment to watch the video before proceeding with this post.

I have three things to say about this commercial:

1. The Cheap Trick song “Dream Police is awesome. Changing the lyric to “Green Police” actually works to update the song to modern times—if they actually had bothered to change some of the other lyrics as well. As it is, it’s just silly to hear “When I fall asleep, I don’t I’ll survive the night” in relation to this new eco police force. Will they arrest you for snoring? Or simply breathing too much while you’re asleep if you haven’t purchased enough carbon credits.
2. I actually love the commercial because plays well as a satire on the extremes of the eco movement. We are already shunned by our neighbors if we don’t set out the recycling can every week, and we feel pangs of guilt for tossing those plastic bottles in the garbage at the gas station. Speaking as one who has practically lived in San Francisco part time for the past 12 years or so, I can easily see something like this coming to pass there, and apparently, it already exists in New York City.
3. What this commercial doesn’t do is make me want to buy a green car. In fact, if anything, it makes me want to buy a Hummer so I can run roughshod over those silly roadblocks and the ninnies in green shorts on their 3-wheeled Segways. What the tarpit was Audi USA thinking here? I emphasize the “USA” portion of the company name here because this company has been in this country as long as I have, so they should have some sense of how Americans think. Maybe this would play well in Germany and England, but I can say with some degree of certainty that the majority of Americans, especially Americans with enough money to buy an Audi, value their freedom from puny little men running around exercising gestapo-like control over their little fiefdom.

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On a side note, when Kelly and I were shopping for her car, we went to a VW/Audi dealership in Sacramento. They didn’t have the car we wanted, a Passat Wagon with V6 and all-wheel drive, but they did have an Audi A6 Wagon with all the right specs. From the outside, it looked like it was virtually the same car as what we wanted, but the price was $10,000 more. So, I asked the sales guy, “What’s the difference between this and the car we want?” His answer: “The Audi has a certain… ahm-bi-ahhhnce.” Know this if you’re going to buy a new Audi: Ten grand of the sales price goes directly to… ahm-bi-ahhhnce.