Off to the Races

Edit 5/13:  Added a few more pictures from the race below.

As I’ve discussed before, pretty much everyone in my family enjoys watching auto racing in its various forms (after all, what other reason would my parents have for naming their dogs after an Italian City known primarily for its racetrack and a defunct Formula One racing team?)  Unfortunately, the Pacific Northwest in general and the Seattle area in particular is something of a wasteland as far as high-level racing is concerned.  The NHRA does make an annual stop up here for drag racing, and the now defunct Champ Car series raced annually in Portland for many years, but beyond those two series professional racing has been basically nonexistent around here (amateur racing, on the other hand, is alive and well here, although that’s another post I’ll get around to making at some point.)  This means that going to see a race requires a road trip.  For the past couple of years, we have made the trip down to Miller Motorsports Park about 30 miles west of Salt Lake City in Utah for the American Le Mans Series race that takes place there, and will be taking place this weekend.  The bad news is that for a number of reasons, we’re not going to be able to make it to the Utah race this year, but the good news is that this means that we will have an opportunity to go see the final ALMS race of the year in October at Laguna Seca, one of America’s most famous racetracks and home to the famous Corkscrew turn. 

After the jump, a look at some of the photos I took at last year’s Utah Grand Prix. 

Highlights from the 2007 Seattle Auto Show

 

Compared to the big auto shows such as the ones in LA, New York and Detroit, the annual Seattle Auto Show is nothing to write home about.  Sure, it does give you a chance to check out all sorts of new cars without the pressure of some salesman breathing down your neck, as well as an opportunity to see all the luxury and exotic cars that would melt your bank account if you wandered too close to the showroom, but aside from a smattering of leftover concpets from the Detroit show earlier in the year, there’s not much else to see beside the stuff that’s already been on the dealer lots for months now.  Nonetheless, every year I  make the trip into downtown Seattle to check out the show.  Usually I go to the show with my younger brother, but since he now lives 900 miles away (and sells Lexuses, which gives him an opportunity to actually drive some of the nicer cars you might see here,) I’m on my own this time around.   Also this year, for the first time in… well, ever, I am not driving a way-past-its-prime rustbucket that was in dire need of replacement years ago.  This meant that rather than going through everything with the proverbial fine tooth comb, this year I could just skip right to the interesting stuff.  After the jump, some of the highlights from this year’s show, complete with a lot of pictures.

Oh! What a Failing

Automotive marketing seems to be a rather tricky business to be in these days.  In a crowded field of largely indistinct small cars, marketing is one of the few ways in which one can attempt to distinguish their products from the competition.  To that end, Toyota’s latest effort at capturing the hearts of the much vaunted 18-25 male demographic (or attempt to make their annual quota of loan defaults, I’m not sure which) has just been released on Xbox Live Arcade in the form of Yaris, a  free downloadable piece of advertising with achievement points attached to it, which will probably be the only reason anyone bothers playing the game for more than five minutes.  On the other hand, for those people who might actually consider purchasing a Yaris, the game is packed with all sorts of  useful information.  For example:

• A hood-mounted laser cannon is standard equipment, but you’ll have to pay through the nose to get the car in any color besides red;
• The Yaris is capable of defying gravity and driving on ceilings, climbing sheer vertical walls, and maintaining a speed in excess of 150 miles per hour;
• The car comes equipped with a shield system, and depletion of the shields will cause the car to spin out of control but otherwise remain unharmed;
• The Yaris will be the perfect car for your daily commute, once the highways have all been replaced with giant danger-filled halfpipes with inexplicable sheer vertical drops, hazards deliberately placed in the roadway, and roving packs of roller-skating toasters bent on your destruction;
• Oh yeah, you can also get 15″ aluminum wheels as a factory option if you want them..

I will refrain from going too deeply into the relative (lack of) merits of the game itself, as I’m sure other people more qualified than myself will begin ripping it to shreds soon enough.  A far greater issue lies in the fact that the game does absolutely nothing to tell someone why they should buy a Toyota Yaris, as opposed to a similar car like a Chevy Cobalt, a Honda Fit or a Nissan Versa.  In fact, about the only things in Yaris that have anything to do with the actual car at all are the character models used and the paint colors.  Granted, there are some cases (for example, candystand.com) where you can throw a little bit of branding into some game and call it good, but there’s one major difference:  On that site, they’re trying to get you to spend a buck on some candy next time you’re at the grocery store.  Toyota is trying to get you spend as much as $18,000 on a  car, which you’ll probably be driving for years. 

Most people I know wouldn’t ever buy a brand new car on impulse, even if they had the means to do so (at which point, I seriously doubt a Yaris would be anywhere near the type of car they’d be considering.)  Before I purchased my new car a few months ago, I spent hours on edmunds.com and manufacturer websites going through just about every detail I could possibly think of, in order to make sure I knew all about what I planned to buy, and what I would be getting myself into.  In theory, this would put me into the target audience that Yaris is supposed to be reaching.  The problem with this is that if I had encountered something like Yaris while I was shopping for a car, it would have told me absolutely nothing that I wouldn’t already have found out previously, nor would it have provided anything even remotely resembling a realistic simulation of how the actual car drives.  Am I supposed to believe that a car with a 1.5 liter 4-banger with 106 horsepower and 103 ft/lb of torque can hit 200 miles per hour, while driving up a vertical wall?  In the end, the result is that the game bears more resemblance to a rail shooter than a racing game.

That isn’t to say that this completely ficticious and unrealistic approach to advergaming should be avoided entirely, as long as some means of providing actual useful information on the product is included.  Yaris simply doesn’t do this.  There is little to no information about the actual car included, and I couldn’t find so much as a link anywhere in the game to even tell me where to find such information.  As far as I can tell, Yaris appears to be an attempt to salvage a marginal game concept by sticking a licensed car into it and giving it away as a freebie.  If someone who was shopping for a car were to come across this game, play all the way through it (no mean feat, given the frustratingly broken gameplay) and see everything the game has to offer, by the time they were done about all they would have learned from the experience is that Toyota makes a car called the Yaris, and that you can get it with aluminum wheels and upgraded energy shields to protect you from flying MP3 players and flaming snakes. 

With downloadable games finally reaching the mainstream of console gaming in this generation of systems, I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty more advergames like this before we know it.  With any luck, marketers and developers alike will look at the example of Yaris and learn some valuable lessons on how not to make an effective advergame.