Greenpeace to VW: Turn Away From the Dark Side

Last year, Volkswagen premiered a commercial during the Superbowl in the US showing a boy in a Darth Vader costume trying to control objects around his home and finally starting his dad's VW Passat, or so he thinks. The ad was widely lauded and considered one of the best car ads of the year. 

Now Greenpeace has debuted a parody of the commercial for a campaign portraying VW as the evil Empire to try to pressure them to become more eco-friendly.  The video shows a group of children dressed as various Star Wars characters coming together to meet against Darth Vader. It then pans up showing the Death Star about to fire a laser upon them.

Greenpeace claims that VW is fighting against more stringent emissions standard in Europe, and that although VW claims that it makes the most eco-friendly cars, these vehicles only make up about 6% of its total sales. Finally, it wants VW to become an oil-free automaker by 2040. It claims that the reason that VW should do this because it is Europe's largest automaker and should therefore lead by example. 

According to Greenpeace, VW has continually fought against efforts to increase fuel efficiency in Europe and the US. It also claims that VW artificially inflates the prices of its most efficient cars. A reason that VW would want to make more efficient cars more expensive is not given. 

Specifically Greenpeace desires that VW stop lobbying against changes in EU emissions standards, have average fleet emissions of 80g CO2/km by 2020, have its most efficient technologies available in all models across all brands and guarantee that the next Golf use 3 liters/100km of diesel. 

The campaign's web page allows fans to sign up to join the campaign. At the time of this article, over  83,000 people have already joined the campaign, and it has over 36,000 fans on Facebook. 

 And here is the original ad in case you missed it.