Andy Warhol and Campbell's Soup

Campbell soup is really, really bad! It's disgusting!

Good soup, the first spoonful is amazing, and it carries you away with pleasure, and after a while the clouds part and you gently, luxuriously return to Earth, and you realize that THAT WAS JUST THE FIRST SPOONFUL. Dozens more await you in the bowl. And I don't just mean fancy expensive soup. Soup in a can or a box from Pacific Foods -- or, for that matter, some of the more upscale options from Campbell's itself, such as some of the varieties of their Slow Kettle Style -- can sometimes be that good. Real gourmet soup in a fancy restaurant can be even better.

Andy Warhol was weird. Not only did he make many many large and small pictures of Campbell's soup cans --

 

 

 

pictures which long been considered artistic masterpieces, and I still don't understand why --- not only did he make picture of Campbell's soup cans, he continued to eat absolute crap like Campbell's chicken noodle soup with Nabisco soda crackers for lunch several times a week after he had become very rich. In the evenings he would go to the fanciest restaurants in NYC, and I have no idea what his breakfasts were like.

Maybe those lunches had something to do with keeping a connection to his childhood. Or reminding himself to stay humble. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Pittsburgh. His dad died in 1942, when Andy was 14. His mom didn't remarry. In the 1950's he brought his mom to live with him in NYC, and she would make his lunch of Campbell's chicken noodle soup and Nabisco crackers, just like when he was a a kid -- just like my family ate when I was a kid.

Also, every week, he would go and work in a soup kitchen. Where the soup was, possibly, some weeks, much better than Campbell's.

 

All the evidence seems to indicate that he was a good guy. But he was weird.

Is Toyota Getting Serious About the BEV Game?

Toyota finally released a mass-produced BEV, a Battery-Electric Vehicle, in May 2022, and now they actually seem to be advertising it. You say BEV if you want to make it perfectly clear that you're not talking about a hybrid, but a vehicle which is 100% electric. As opposed to a Prius. Yes, there certainly are other hybrids besides the Toyota Prius, but Toyota has sold about 20 million hybrids. I think that's most of the hybrids. 

Toyota has made all-electric vehicles before this, but it's been a while. The latest BEV version of the RAV4 was discontinued in 2014, and, as in the case of General motors' EV1, it would be a stretch tpo call the RAV4 BEV mass-produced. In the past several years, not only has Toyota concentrated on making millions of hybrids, they're also made a lot of positively hostile remarks about BEV's. A few months ago there came a high point in this anti-BEV messaging, which  is to say a low point: an advertising campaign which showed a Toyota hybrid going on and on and on through an animated desert while ICE vehicles and BEV's stopped, stranded.

They had another ad campaign where they referred to their hybrids as "self-charging hybrids." Please allow me to be the last person on Earth to inform you that there is no such thing as a self-charging hybrid.

So now, finally, a decade and a half behind Nissan, GM, and Tesla, years behind VW and BMW and Jaguar and Audi and Porsche and Ford and Volvo and Honda and Rivian and Lucid and Nikola, Toyota has a mass-produced BEV, the bZ4X, yes, that's small b, capital Z, 4, Capital X. 

 

But even more bizarre that the name of the BEV is Toyota's new advertising campaign for the vehicle, with the slogan: "Beyond Zero."

I checked several times, and, no, that's not "Behind Zero," as in an honest admission that Toyota is way, way behind most of the rest of the world getting started on this. It's Beyond Zero. Because, as Toyota proudly says in their new ad campaigns, they want to go even farther than zero emissions, and have a positive effect on the planet, and that they have plans for many more BEV's.

Again: years and years behind everyone else.

But better years late, and with yet another ridiculous ad campaign, than never.  Welcome to the present day, Toyota. 

Yes, the bZ4X has actually been available for a year and a half. But the new advertising campaign makes me think that Toyota may actually be getting serious about BEV's. If they've fooled me again, then shame on me.