Fake leather? BMW pledges "fully vegan" plant-based interiors from 2023
With the help of BMW, humans have finally achieved peak woke. Here's why vegan leather is not only a frivolous minority-appeasing exercise, it also won't fix the problems it purports to solve...
Some big news out of BMW recently, in preparation for the PR wank awards - vegan leather has arrived to save the planet from carbon-based destruction and saving the animals from vicious, carnivorous humans.
This notion that we can cut CO2 by cladding our Bavarian money-wasting interiors with plant-based plastic is one of the most breathtaking pieces of non-logic by a car company ever and that really is saying something.
Here’s how this brilliant idea was announced to the public:
The first question he is who actually wants vegan leather in their 7 Series? If you’ve climbed the corporate ladder and succeeded in life, financially, do you really want some coconut polyurethane and hemp-based stitching?
Or do you want the finest quality Corinthian cowhides your money can buy?
Who is the end consumer of this product and in what kind of quantities is it expected to be sold? Was the market screaming for this and BMW is the only company that seems to have answered the call?
Makes you think.
Leather is actually a bio-based material, just to be clear. It doesn't get more bio-based than leather.
Frankly, this news release has it all. It's factually untrue, it's dripping in woke appeasement and if you wanted that PhD in disgraceful greenwashing - there's your thesis. It's drowning in all of that.
Unfortunately, there was more:
No it doesn't - that is complete bullshit. (It was written multiple times in its own bullet point, and again with its own cross head in the press release. Talk about overdoing it.)
You senior executive head office PR weasels implying that replacing leather with some magic coconut in some way reduces the cars embodied co2 by 85 per cent - that is disgracefully false.
All of that aluminium, all that steel, all of those plastics, the glass. Give me a break.
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THE FACTS BEHIND MEAT PRODUCTION
Are you ready to accept some facts about how meat is made? Let’s do it refuting one of the more laughable paragraphs in the vegan Beemer press release. Hold on, it’s a good one:
Reduces co2 emissions from making the fricken steering wheel…by 85 per cent. That's a bit different, isn't it? That's hardly and impact.
This notion that we can cut CO2 by cladding our Bavarian Money-Wasting interiors with ‘plant-based plastic’ (sorry for calling it what it is - not) by not using leather, because cattle production is so CO2 intensive, this is one of the most breathtaking pieces of non-logic by a car company ever. That really is saying something.
Cowhides, from which leather is of course derived, are a by-product of meat production. We do not kill cows solely for their leather and then just throw the rest away. That's not how this works.
Therefore not using leather cannot hope to solve the problem of co2 from agricultural production of animals eighty percent of the co2 emitted in leather production is in fact intrinsic to rearing the beast so that it can be slaughtered for food or used in the dairy industry any suggestion to the country is agricultural non-economics. And bullshit.
Cows are slaughtered for their meat and every non-meat part of the beast is used; rendered down for tallow and gelatin, dried and pulverized for fertilizer, processed into leather, made into sausages or even worse frankfurts - that's where the scrotums and noses and anuses go.
I cannot stress this enough. If you decline to use leather because of some vegan-appeasing motive or some climate-appeasing motive, you turn a valuable by-product - the hide - into a waste product, which then becomes an environmental, moral and ethical catastrophe.
The leather you are sitting on in your car, is not an example of animal cruelty. It's an example of respecting the life of the beast which was slaughtered to provide our society's food. Much like our ancestors did on a smaller scale for hundreds of thousands of years before wokism and supermarkets existed.
So declining to consume leather has less than one percent impact on cattle numbers in the real world Dr Gary Brewster there, Professor emeritus at Montana State University from research published on the 4th of February last year.
Brace for impact, it's pretty hard reading, it's a 20-something page, fairly academic PDF with lots of numbers, titled Quantifying the Relationship Between US Cattle Hide Prices/ Value and US Cattle Production >>.
Doc Brewster with agricultural economist DR Cole Swanson, PhD., used granger causality tests, which use pretty scary statistical mathematics, over 25 years of cattle production in America to see if demand for leather affected the numbers of cattle in the United States.
They found that it emphatically did not. So use leather or don't, I don't care. But it's not gonna affect the number of cows getting the chop for Saturday arvo barbecues, nor is it gonna affect CO2.
Quad error demonstrandum, baby!
To be completely transparent on all of this, that research was commissioned by the Leather and Hide Council of America, mainly because that organization was pretty sick of getting routinely kneed in the nuts by PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
What a load of horseshit like as opposed to what partially vegan i don't know that partially vegan anything is possible something's either vegan or it's not on my world vegan is a kind of binary state of existence ontologically.
A steak and salad is not a partially vegan meal for example, but a salad could be fully vegan, I suppose, if you care not about the semantics.
This stuff we're talking about on the inside of future BMWs, the fake leather, it's actually plant-based plastic, most probably polyurethane derived from cellulose from plants in some lab. But calling it ‘vegan’ is actually very clever marketing indeed - some would say a masterstroke - because ‘vegan’ is one of those hot button terms currently very hard to have a respectful exchange of views about.
Anything orbiting veganism is tremendously woke at the moment. To be vegan, and I say this with complete and utter respect for the vast majority of normal vegans out there who quietly take the considered position not to eat meat or consume animal products on a number of logical basis: moral, ethical, taste, climate - I'm totally cool with that. Go vegan, it's a choice, free country.
But there is another class of vegan whom I would categorize as the ‘militant activist vegan’, and to me these people seem very keen to stifle debate by shutting you down if you are just some omnivore happily wearing RM Williams boots or something.
This is an Australian named Tash Peterson whose call sign is V-gan Booty. Above is a carefully chosen image from Ms Peterson's homepage and it was chosen by her, on which she claims humans abuse torture enslave and murder animals for meat dairy and eggs etc.
I'm not so sure those chooks in your back shed feel all that enslaved or abused for their eggs, but how would one really know? They're probably actually pretty cuffed to be behind the wire when the neighbour's cat does a drive-by at midnight - although one never knows.
P.S. I am totally in favour of the prosecution of criminals who abuse animals or farm them in reprehensibly cruel or abusive conditions, but “meat is murder”? Really? I don't think so.
Respectful disagreement here: perhaps it is for Hannibal Lecter to adjudicate, but in fact murder is a thing that only a human can do to only another human. On my world, murder is a reprehensible crime that should not be confused with killing, or trivialized in any other way including by comparisons to the production of meat.
But I am happy to engage in a respectful debate around that. Perhaps we should change the definition. I'm open to changing my view, but at the moment, I'm just not seeing it.
Murder is not even all killing of humans. Soldiers do not murder the enemy - they kill them, lawfully. Same goes for a police officer who shoots a bad dude waving a shotgun around in public.
Even if you make a mistake driving and someone dies, that is unarguably a terrible position for a great many people to be in, but you have almost certainly not committed murder. If a crocodile takes you on the Jardine River because you're so stupid that you swim in it - that's not murder. Crocodiles can't commit murder. And if the locals shoot that croc later, that's not murder either.
At the core of murder is a legal concept called ‘mens ria’ which literally means ‘evil mind’ in Latin; criminal intent. The evil intent to kill only a person. It's hard to accidentally murder a person, except of course by gross negligence or impairment by drugs or something of that nature.
I suppose murder is therefore generally just a thing that the perpetrator has to set out to do to another human and it is a properly reprehensible crime with far-reaching effects.
You cannot murder an animal, that's just a fact. There are crimes on the books for the unlawful killing of animals. These crimes are not murder. People working in abattoirs are not murderers, the dudes putting the meat out in the trays at Woolies are certainly not accessories after the fact.
But the term ‘vegan’ has been properly weaponized and militant vegans have this clever knack of framing any debate as if you could murder an animal and thus the v-word becomes something only a crazy brave person or a borderline sociopath would ever deconstruct.
I'm all for miss Peterson's advocacy, by the way. If you want free speech in society, you have to embrace people's rights to viewpoints with which you disagree, for balance.
Nobody should expect, ‘you go girl’ to be the only feedback when you put your rather definite position about anything out there for public consumption. So I’d suggest that conferring the v-word upon this bullshit BMW plant plastic project is a free kick on the express to Virtue Signalling Central. Except that it's not going to make any difference to animal cruelty or CO2 emissions.
Cloaking bullshit in the language of virtue just doesn't help anywhere, anytime, on any problem, in my estimation. Except if you've got a vested interest.
Unfortunately however, BMW will be unable to offer you a totally animal free vehicle anytime soon. That's a shame, isn't it? But they can offer you the next best thing:
Animal products in BMWs they say…
if you can't see it that's almost the same as something not actually being there isn't it abattoirs working this way but pro tip do not try this approach in a knife fight just it won't end well so why is the bavarian money waster detaining itself with this pointless but somewhat grandiose and virtuous sounding garbage.
Well I'd suggest that car making in Germany is kind of like mining here in Australia - our respective economies are built upon these things. So German government is actually very green and car making is actually not very green, not at all.
This is of course something of a problem strategically but you can flip it into an opportunity, if you are sufficiently creative and if the facts don't matter.
I can easily see a board-level BMW bullshitter reaching under the table and stroking the vegetables of a cabinet minister or ministers, metaphorically. They do have very smooth hands though, board members. Typically.
Over a long lunch they might explain, if that's the right word, how a vegan interior that replaces leather ‘reduces CO2 emissions by 85’ - thus appeasing the green imperatives of the German government while actually conducting filthy CO2-emitting business as usual.
That's a happy ending right there. Except for the planet. Or humans.
The rather dumb scientifically illiterate media will doubtless regurgitate these alternative facts all over the news, and this is an ecosystem of disinformation. Unless you've actually been there, it’s quite difficult to grasp exactly how monumentally charming car makers are.
BMW's head office in Munich is spitting distance from their giant frozen tornado museum event space. Not exaggerating. It's called the Velt which took four years to build. When I was there, the food was freaking fantastic, if memory serves. As tempting as the fancy stuff was however, I went instead with a nice juicy planet-killing T-bone steak. It was great.
But you are of course welcome to try the plant-based polyurethane ravioli if that is your want. It's a free country, at least it is for the time being before the vegans take over.
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