ELECTRIC AUTOPIA FEELS LONG OVERDUE
Getting rid of gas engines at Disneyland ride is a great start. Here’s hoping its next sponsor will be a true climate champion.
When I broke the news earlier this month that Disneyland is planning to ditch gas engines and make a long-overdue switch to electric or hybrid cars at its nearly 70-year-old Autopia attraction in Anaheim, I got two main questions from readers.
The first, typically from fellow Disney fans, was this: What about Autopia’s counterparts in Florida and Paris?
Alas, I don’t have anything to tell you on that front. When I asked Walt Disney Co. spokesperson Melissa Britt if electric vehicles are coming to Tomorrowland Speedway at Walt Disney World or Autopia at Disneyland Paris, she didn’t offer much.
“While we don’t have anything to share specifically about plans for [those attractions], we are always looking at ways for us to achieve our sustainability goals and do have other future projects in the works,” Britt said in an email.
She added that the company “has operated under a long-term vision to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions” since 2009.
The second question I’ve been getting: If Autopia is part of Disney’s Tomorrowland, supposedly all about building a better future, why has it taken so long to replace oil-fueled vehicles that we’ve known for decades are spewing deadly greenhouse gases?
That one I can answer. The ride’s original sponsor was Richfield Oil, which later merged with another company to create ARCO. In 1998, Disney and oil giant Chevron Corp. inked a 13-year marketing deal that included Autopia sponsorship — dashing any hopes that the ride would go electric, even as scientists sounded the alarm over global warming and electric cars began to enter the public consciousness.
Then in 2016, Honda became the ride’s sponsor. Good time for an electric overhaul, right?
Nope.
Honda spokesperson Marcos Frommer told me via email that the company did “replace the existing engines with cleaner, more efficient engines” as part of Autopia’s 2016 overhaul. But as I noted in my recent column, the noxious fumes emitted by the gas engines still reek terribly, to the point where it can be hard to breathe just waiting in line. I feel terrible for the Disney employees who work there all day — and worried for their health. The exhaust can’t be good for their lungs.
So I was especially disturbed, when I rode Autopia last month for the first time in years, to realize how eager
Honda appears to be to leave riders with the impression that its involvement with the attraction somehow contributes to a greener future.
Several videos that play for guests waiting in line feature Honda’s ASIMO robot character apparently getting ready for a road trip. One of the videos shows ASIMO seemingly deciding where to travel, sitting at a computer scrolling through illustrated images of gorgeous landscapes including Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley National Park and Sequoia National Forest.
The terrible irony is that many of those landscapes are increasingly being torn apart by bigger, hotter wildfires and other weather disasters made worse by global warming, and overwhelmed by air pollution from gasoline vehicles on our freeways.
To me, though, Autopia’s cruelest twist is the sign that all drivers pass under as they finish the attraction:
“Autopia — Powered by
Honda. Powering Your Dreams Through Tomorrow.”
It’s a slight rephrasing of Honda’s corporate slogan, “the power of dreams.” Frommer, the company spokesperson, suggested it’s a fitting sign-off at Anaheim’s Autopia as Honda works toward a goal of making battery electric and fuel cell cars 100% of its sales by 2040, and as it collaborates with Disney “to tell inspirational stories that celebrate personal mobility and freedom.”
“Honda has been a pioneer in introducing environmentally friendly technologies to reduce vehicle emissions,” Frommer said.
But those are lame excuses after eight years of greenwashing at Disneyland — and who knows how many yet to come.
Disney would tell me only that it’s planning to remove pure gasoline engines from Autopia “in the next few years” — hardly a firm timeline. The company wouldn’t confirm if the new cars will be all-electric, or hybrids
that still use some amount of oil.
It’s possible the timeline is tied to the end of Honda’s sponsorship agreement, although that’s hard to know for sure. MotorTrend magazine reported in 2016 that Honda signed a 10-year deal to sponsor Autopia, which could be up for renewal in 2026.
Whatever behind-thescenes business machinations need to be worked out, I’ve heard loud and clear from Disney fans and folks who care about the climate crisis — and believe me, there are many who fall into both categories — that as excited as they are to see the company embrace clean energy at Autopia, they want to see Disney tell more stories about sustainability.
And they want to see it happen faster.
Maybe that means Disney adopts my pitch to revitalize Tomorrowland as a hotbed for clean energy progress. Maybe it means the Burbank company produces more movies and TV shows that showcase
climate solutions. Whatever it looks like, many Disney fans want to see the world’s most influential storytellers stand as leaders in this space, not laggards.
They don’t want to wait for “in the next few years.” They know human civilization doesn’t have that much time.
Fortunately, Disney’s powerful chief executive, Bob Iger — who has a history of standing up for climate action — is looking extra-powerful right now. He won an overwhelming victory this month against a shareholder uprising led by investor Nelson Peltz, who slammed Iger as “woke” for producing Marvel superhero films led by Black and female stars. The shareholder victory should help insulate Iger from the inevitable unfair criticism if he decides to sign off on climateor sustainabilityflavored storytelling.
To be clear, Disney is already doing that kind of storytelling in its theme parks — bits and pieces of it, scattered about.
The best example I’ve seen is at Disney World’s Epcot, in the “Awesome Planet” film narrated by “Modern Family” actor Ty Burrell. Sadly, the film doesn’t explicitly mention climate change. But it does highlight the horrors of worsening heat waves and droughts, rising oceans, more extreme storms and more destructive fires. It also features a montage showing wind and solar energy.
I’ve found a few other small examples, mostly at Epcot and Florida’s Animal Kingdom — typically informational signs, some of which do mention global warming. What’s needed now is bigger, bolder and more systemic thinking, across the Walt Disney Co.
On the clean energy solutions front, Epcot’s Test Track attraction is probably the strongest example. It’s sponsored by Chevrolet, and when I visited last summer, the post-ride showroom featured two Chevy electric vehicles, alongside several gasoline models.
I’d love to see an all-EV showroom the next time I make it to Orlando.
As I’ve written previously, I agree with Iger that for Disney, entertainment must come before messaging. But I also agree with fellow Times columnist Mary McNamara, who urged Iger after this month’s shareholder vote not to “hand Peltz a cultural victory by embracing his antiquated (read: racist, sexist, homo-/transphobic) notions of what future Disney products should look like.”
Referring to Peltz’s insistence that “people go to watch a movie or a show to be entertained,” not to get a message, McNamara rightfully noted that every story sends a message: “Love conquers all, adversity can be overcome, with great power comes great responsibility, sometimes the bad guy wins, just because we can doesn’t mean we should, we’re all in this together.”
“Without messages, storytelling cannot exist,” McNamara wrote.
It’s so true, and so relevant to climate. When Autopia opened in 1955, one year before President Eisenhower signed the FederalAid Highway Act, it sent a message that we should dream of oil. Today, and for “the next few years,” it sends the same message.
We need new messages, new stories, new dreams.
Disney, you can’t move fast enough.
This column is the latest edition of Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X.