More Car Dealerships Going Green
Welcome to the first Environmental Design Research Association blog entry! The purpose of this blog is to spread information concerning green design and to examine green aspects of industry. This first post is about the automotive industry, specifically about how car dealerships are going green.
Automotive companies aren’t forcing their dealers to go green, but they are giving them guidelines on how to become green. More dealerships are going green because it is becoming profitable. It is well known that having a green building will limit utility costs and therefore, over time, profit could be had. However, a lot of car dealers are realizing that being green is good for business in other ways.
Joe Chrzanowski, executive director of dealer network planning and investment at General Motors, said in “Automotive News”, “They can put the certification sticker on the door or use the environmentally friendly aspect of their facility as part of their marketing.”
While there aren’t many LEED certified dealers because of the long inspection times and over $200,000 in paperwork many are going green. Car companies are embracing green design with their office buildings and their plants and they want the green way of doing things to filter down to the dealerships. Toyota announced at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit that there will six LEED certified Toyota dealerships in the U.S. by the end of the first quarter of 2008. The first car dealership to go green was Pat Lobb’s Toyota dealership in McKinney, Texas.
If you would like more information on green design in the automotive industry please go to our podcast and if you want more information on green architecture please go to our website at EDRA.org. Thank you for reading and check back next week for the next post!
EDRA advances and disseminates behavior and design research toward improving understanding of the relationships between people and their environments.