Opinion - Misleading Advertising

The people striving to sell cars, particularly those in the creative centres putting together major marketing campaigns, sometimes get so far away from reality that they begin to twist people’s perceptions. One of their favourite tricks is to make consumers believe that ordinary things are really something very different, special and highly desirable.

Holden is the big culprit at the moment. It's selling its new range of V6 engines as being SIDI units. Which I reckon makes it sound like the nickname of a crook on a British TV cops and robbers show. And the ‘DI’ gives the impression that the new Holden has a Detective Inspector under the bonnet. However, this time around the DI actually stands for Direct Injection.

The new General Motors Holden DI system is a good thing. Direct fuel injection is still relatively rare in affordable cars, but its introduction in the Commodore, and related cars within the Holden camp, it's gradually flowing down from the very expensive area of the market to those ‘real’ people can buy.

So the back half of SIDI is something about which Holden can be justifiably proud. But ‘SI’ (which more usually stands for Systeme Internationale, the metric system) is being used by Holden to describe the fact that its new engine has Spark Ignition.

The Holden engine has spark ignition. Wow big deal! Every petrol engine ever used in a Holden since the launch of the 48-215 of 1948 has a spark ignition system. And even back then spark ignition was long-established technology, because it dates back to the latter years of the 19th century. That's right, Holden is trying to tell us that 19th century technology is the latest and greatest thing.

Then there's Toyota and its ongoing description of its engines as being a ‘quad-cam’ units. Car buyers have been taught that a twin-cam engine is a good thing (which is generally, but not always, true, but let’s not get too far off the subject), so they are being misled into thinking that if two camshafts are good, then four camshafts must be better.

There’s no such thing as a quad-cam engine. It’s simply a twin-cam ‘V’ engine. Of course, if there are two lots of cylinder heads each with twin camshafts, there are four camshafts in total. But there are no benefits whatsoever from having four camshafts, it all works in exactly the same way as any other twin-cam engine.

Look at it this way, if an engine has a ‘V’ configuration and a single camshaft above each cylinder bank does that make it twin-cam engine? Of course it doesn’t.