It's called marketing and this is an attempt to make Kia look like they care about "the nature". It's obviously trying to appeal to a younger demographic that does no longer care about cars and are worried about the future of our planet.
Kia has done some nice things, I like the styling on their minivan.
Exactly.
> though that may not be the target demographic.
I'm thinking this is exactly one of their target demographics for a campaign like this. Aware, forward-thinking and often young to mid-life consumers. To Kia, every car buyer is a good car buyer. To the planet, it's quite the opposite.
Showing you're doing fun/exciting things with software is a good move in the competition for scarce sweng talent.
The best first car is no car or a used car.
Creating a new car produces massive amounts of carbon pollution.
For a mid-sized average sedan the pollution created from finding and smelting ore to the massive amounts of energy and water required during production it takes around 45/50k miles just to offset production alone, and that's assuming the new car does not use any energy.
Add to this that producing batteries is even much more taxing on the planet both in terms of resources and toxicity.
Add to this yet another thing: unless the energy that's produced wherever you recharge your car isn't coming from renewables the gains in pollution are further limited.
So, to conclude: unless you commute a lot, plan to keep your car for a long time and you live in an area where there is a huge % of renewables the, by far greenest solution is to buy a used car or keep your one, even if it has an old polluting engine, it's gonna pollute much less than producing a new car and using gas and coal to power it
According to EPA the average car during its lifecycle produces 38 metric tons of CO2 if it reaches 200k miles.
Producing a car alone, producing it, without putting a single mile in it produces between 7 and 35 metric tons (based on the size of the vehicle).
If you can do very basic math you can understand that the greener option is ALWAYS to keep your old car, unless, again, you do really a lot of miles and electricity in your country is mostly (70%+) renewable.
But that truth is hardly said loud, because it doesn't sell lots of cars and doesn't make enough money.
Meanwhile we're killing the planet even further convincing places like southern europe to buy electric cars even tho they mostly use gas to produce electricity in the first place.
There's plenty of studies online you can read: https://bfy.tw/SyoX
Your point of purchasing a "used car" as a better option reduces carbon emissions by removing vehicles from the system.
Don't buy new cars as a Co2 mitigation strategy is unrealistic and against buying electric is just pedantic and your argument is frankly misleading.
If you want to cite the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
OTOH when is the last time you've ever seen an ad for a Trek or a Schwinn? This is the time when bike marketers can come and eat everyones lunch with simple facts and logic. Much better to only need 15 pounds of metal and your own power to move around than 4000lbs of metal and power from a natural gas plant to move yourself around. Hopefully we see more ads for bikes in the coming decades.
I've heard recently that instead of getting electric motorcycles, the market is much more focused on e-bikes because there is less regulation around them.