TEASER: Super Bowl Roundup

The War on Cars

The War on Cars, LLC

Cars, Society & Culture, Culture, Bicycling, Politics, Urbanism, Walking, Transportation, Cities, Transit, News Commentary, News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's our annual Super Bowl roundup, where we analyze the car ads that ran during the Big Game and ask what they say about driving and, more importantly, U.S. culture. This year's ads included Will Ferrell cruising through a post-zombie-apocalyptic Las Vegas in a shiny GMC EV, a heroic "Binky Dad" who drives a KIA Telluride like no one would ever drive one in real life, and a parody ad that we thought won the night — and said a lot about how male fragility and big trucks are interconnected.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, but let's get on to like the real car ads, the kind of traditional car company ads.
0:04.7	There weren't that many this year, but I think there were two threads running through the few ads that did run.
0:10.3	Number one, it's all EVs. The discussion is over. We're all buying EVs now.
0:15.0	Number two, men are fragile. They're little tiny insecure babies and we have to handle them with
0:21.0	little pillows and gloves, which I guess is sort of always the theme of
0:25.2	Super Bowl ads in some ways, but it was very, very explicit in one ad, somewhat explicit in another
0:32.4	and a little less so in one of the ones we're going to talk about.
0:35.0	Yeah, and there is the irony of watching these, you know, two to three hundred pound guys
0:41.0	smashing into each other repeatedly and then in the ad breaks being
0:47.1	reminded that they're very fragile people anyway but yes let's get started with the EV angle.
0:55.0	Yeah. This was our buddy Will Farrell, right?
0:58.0	Right. So you may remember two years ago, there was the Will Farrell Norway ad,
1:02.0	where basically the premises
1:03.4	Norway is beating the US at EVs and we can't let that happen because America is
1:08.8	the best and we're gonna we're gonna tell the world that we're the best.
1:12.0	Will Ferrell is back.
1:13.0	And that was a funny ad to years.
1:15.0	That was like a favorite.
1:16.0	Yeah, it was really, I mean, who doesn't love Will Farrell.
1:18.0	He's just like Will Farrell being goofy, I think we said,
1:20.0	like Will Farrell being goofy is worth your six million dollar ad
1:24.0	And yet this year so this year the premise of this ad it was a tie-in it was GM and
	...

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