How far can you drive on $1? I saw this ad on cnn.com. The ad states the Prius gets 17 miles per dollar and the Leaf gets 37.8 miles per dollar. Yet the image shows that it's getting a good 3.3 times the distance, or 56.5 miles per dollar. How can they get away with it? (I'm not sure if the image will show, so I added a link to it.) http://threadbender.com/images/NissanLeaf.jpg
Maybe there was confusion regarding units? 37.8 miles is 60.8km. The "miles per dollar" also depends on the price of electricity, which in some places depends on the time of day you charge the car. Marketing issues aside, I still feel the leaf is a step in the right direction.
Notice the other little marketing trick they try to pull. See how they make the graphic two dimensional, despite the fact that the thing that's being measured is only one dimensional. It's a cute trick because it means that if something is twice as big then it occupies four times the area. And if it's just over three times as big then it occupies a massive ten times the area. So even if you exclude that fact that the data is flat out wrong (showing about 57 instead of 37) it's also a very deceptive way to present the data.
I love that yellow halo it's like OMG THIS IS FREAKING AWESOME SO MUCH FURTHER THAN THE PRIUS PER DOLLAR!!!!! It's great, it's like how if I have a chart with three things and one is 90, the other 92, and one is 95, I can zoom in so that it looks like the 95 is 2.5X better than the 90.
Many years ago I took GCSE Statistics. The basic level (~CSE) paper had a question that asked what was wrong with a comparison bar chart. It had the same tricks in it. Not sure about the US law but in the UK if somebody challenged that image they would probably be forced to withdraw or modify it due to misleading use of multiple dimensions. Advertising can be obviously ridiculous (eg "The Lynx Effect") but not misleading.
Its not an accurate statistical display, its an advertisement. Its not misleading, the goal is to show that the Leaf goes more miles per dollar, and it does that.
US law is ridiculously lax about misleading or even fraudulent advertising. There is no easy way for a consumer to initiate action, and the government only goes after the very worst offenders, and only then after years of abuse. Tom
In my state, misleading and fraudulent advertising in political campaigns is even a protected form of free speech. According to our state supreme court, judgment of the truthfulness of these advertisements is left strictly to the voters, not to any government agency. This year's campaigns set a new standard for lack of integrity, on nearly on sides.
