Electric Vehicles Are Still Waiting for Hollywood’s Casting Call

(Bloomberg) -- Ever since James Dean reveled in teen angst in his Mercury coupe in the 1955 classic “Rebel Without a Cause,” cars have been pumping exhaust into pop culture.

A decade later it was Steve McQueen losing hubcaps in a Bullitt Mustang, then Burt Reynolds burst into box office lore as the cop-fleeing Bandit behind the wheel of a Pontiac Trans Am. This past weekend, Jason Statham swerved a McLaren 720S under two tractor trailers to escape the motorcycle-riding antagonist in the latest Fast and Furious film, “Hobbs & Shaw.”

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But while gas guzzlers have scorched their mark on the silver screen, electric cars are largely still waiting for their turn to reign over the red carpet. Plug-ins may be capturing more cool factor, especially Tesla Inc. and its high-tech rides, but they've yet to land much time on screen. Since these models typically lose money and still make up less than 2% of the U.S. market, automakers still devote much of their precious marketing dollars promoting combustion cars by getting them cast for roles on make-believe roads.

“The business 101 would be that you're making a ton of money on your large pickup trucks and your large SUVs, so the dollar you put into marketing on those pays back more than the dollar you put into the EVs that you're losing money on,” said Mark Wakefield, head of the automotive practice at consulting firm AlixPartners.

There have been a handful of recent exceptions. The smash-hit Marvel Studios film “Avengers: Endgame” features Iron Man in an electric Audi e-tron GT, and the car stars as just the kind of futuristic gadget Tony Stark would want to own.

But automakers are still mostly sticking to showing off the sports cars that burnish brand image or their moneymakers in movies and television series. Take General Motors Co.: While it was in bankruptcy, the carmaker had trouble keeping Camaros in stock the summer it starred as Bumblebee in the “Transformers” series. More recently, the company reached out to a diverse audience by placing its GMC Sierra pickup in the revamp of the hit show “Queer Eye.” The Chevrolet Bolt, meanwhile, has been much harder to find on screen.

Placement in a big movie can cost a carmaker millions. TV spots tend to go for much less. When it comes to placing products in Hollywood, television and music videos, “typically you don't pay for it unless it is central to the plot line or the car name is mentioned,” Michael McSunas, the former leader of product placement for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, said in an email.

Companies will typically pay for a vehicle's transportation to the set or have an agency handle the placements for them. Overall, the average paid placement for television is around $30,000, McSunas said.

“A car in this country is a lot more than a vehicle on four wheels that you get from point A to point B,” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University television and population culture media professor. “Cars are filled with American mythology, and lots of it. And the electric car just hasn't been around long enough to gather that kind of mythology.”

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Electric cars were largely curio for green activists until 2012, when Tesla's Model S started selling. The Nissan Leaf also was establishing a market position, and the public started seeing more EVs on the road, raising their profile, said Raejean Fellows, president of the Electric Auto Association.

But the road to Tesla getting traction in the market hasn't been through theaters. The electric-car leader eschews traditional advertising and instead relies on the promotional prowess of its showman CEO, Elon Musk.

The carmakers that do have big advertising budgets have few EVs to feature on film. That will change, but it's still expected to take years -- Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts electric vehicles will take over a majority of the global market around 2037.

When battery-powered cars do get on screen, they're often lampooned as slow or nerdy. Cinema Vehicles, one of the largest suppliers of rental vehicles in Hollywood, television and commercials, said it has just one electric vehicle at its Los Angeles lot: a 2011 Nissan Leaf.

The car served as the Uber that actor Kumail Nanjiani's character, Stu, drives in the film “Stuber” about a cop on the hunt for a brutal killer.

The Leaf takes a beating. At one point in the film, two of Stu's riders giggle at his choice of transportation.

“Stop laughing; this is a Leaf,” Stu tells them. They erupt in even louder laughter.

In the series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David's ride was a Toyota Prius hybrid. David, who played everyone's bête noire in the satirical series about his own life, was often seen slowly puttering down the street as comical music played in the background.

“An awful lot of the culture of electric vehicles within popular culture has probably tended to be more pejorative than it has been celebratory,” said Thompson, the Syracuse professor. “It's not right, but there are an awful lot of people out there who make the assumption that people who drive electric cars are also people who eat kale.”

One group trying to turn the mockery on its head is the public-private advocacy group Veloz, which recently debuted a campaign called Kicking Gas, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger pokes fun at the internal combustion engine.

“On behalf of big oil, I want to thank you all for choosing muscle cars that use gasoline,” Schwarzenegger, who plays a car salesman, says over a dealership intercom.

Carmakers won't want to strike a similar tone in advertising their EVs, since the companies would effectively be shaming what's in showrooms.

“The golden rule is that you don't talk bad about your product,” AlixPartners' Wakefield said. “Effectively, it is talking bad about the 99% of your portfolio that is selling and, of that portfolio, a third of it is highly profitable.”

“You don't want to kill the golden goose,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kyle Lahucik in Southfield at klahucik3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, David Welch

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