On Saturday night Seth Myers, sporting his usual grin and dishing out his weekly dose of rapid-fire news satire on the Weekend Update portion of SNL, offered a brief plug (if you will) to electric vehicles: “FedEx announced this week that it will add four new electric trucks to its delivery fleet.  Four electric trucks! Well let me be the first to say, ‘Welcome back glaciers!’”

Cynical and biting?  For sure. Obviously, four vehicles in FedEx’s enormous fleet aren’t going to mitigate climate change on their own. But Myers’ underlying message is that we need more, not less, electric vehicles.

Was this crack actually funny? Depends on your sense of humor, but the group of twenty-somethings that I watched it with certainly didn’t think it was the highlight of the show.  Maybe NBC is trying to send a subliminal message. Well, here’s some insight on what’s going on inside NBC from the Wall Street Journal last week:

“In just one week on NBC, the detectives on “Law and Order” investigated a cash-for-clunkers scam, a nurse on ‘Mercy’ organized a group bike ride, Al Gore made a guest appearance on ‘30 Rock,’ and ‘The Office’ turned Dwight Schrute into a cape-wearing superhero obsessed with recycling….[This type of] ‘behavior placement’ is designed to sway viewers to adopt actions they see modeled in their favorite shows… ‘Subtle messaging woven into shows mainstreams it, and mainstreaming is an effective way to get a message across,’ says Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBCU Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, which oversees the effort.”

In other words, as electric vehicles garner more attention in Washington as the wisest way to reduce America’s oil dependence while retaining the mobility we’re used to (and creating jobs in the meantime), we know they’ve made it into mainstream consciousness when an edgier show like SNL brings them to the attention of a younger audience.

Indeed, shows like the Colbert Report, the Daily Show and the Weekend Update portion of SNL lampoon current events, but they also use their forums to raise important issues.  They are successful because they strike a balance, creating a lighthearted atmosphere in which trusting viewers are willing to soak-up a certain amount of half-hidden pedagoguery.

So, kudos to SNL for pointing out that we need electric vehicles en masse. FedEx may be at the cutting edge of adopting this new technology with its Navistar all-electric trucks, but hopefully increasing awareness of their potential will prod other businesses and organizations to invest in electric vehicles as well. (The Post Office, for example, is considering doing so.)

The “FedEx All-Electric Truck Tour” website also wrote about the SNL mention on their blog, Route66.

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