OPINION: Old car TV ads were far better than news ones

There was a time when car advertising on TV made you want to drive the cars they were trying to persuade you to buy. The earliest one I remember was for the Peugeot 405. It was a riot of excitement with a burning cornfield and Berlin’s Take My Breath Away lifted straight from Top Gun. (Well, it was in my memory. Having just rewatched it, I realise it’s slower and a little more pedestrian than it seemed to pre-school me – but it still has a burning field, and that’s better than something that looks like an AI version of the A4 out of Chiswick.)

Then there was the Austin Montego advert, where a dry voiceover read out reasons you’d choose one over a Ford Sierra or Vauxhall Cavalier before stunt driver Russ Swift took over to two-wheel, J-turn and handbrake its way into an office car park space. That one particularly resonated because my dad had a series of Montego company cars...

One of the Montego’s benefits, we’re told, was that it had a faster 0-60mph time than the equivalent Sierra, but as the years rolled by speed was outlawed as a means of selling a car. MG Rover got into trouble with this with its advertising of the ZR, ZS and ZT in the early 2000s, but performance wasn’t the only way to make advertising memorable. It could just be fun.

A Vauxhall Corsa C doesn’t provide its driver with much joie de vivre, but you’d never guess that from the TV advert. A gaggle of small GM hatchbacks have a game of hide and seek, making not only the car seem like fun, but also the urban environment where most of them were driven. There’s nothing here about status or performance yet it sticks in the memory. Who doesn’t want to see a Corsa jump into a skip full of binbags? By comparison, the ad for the latest generation car (“Yes, of Corsa”) makes me cringe inside out.

There was a time when car ads stuck in the memory. The divorcee and her Volkswagen Golf Mk2 or the long-running Nicole and Papa series for the Renault Clio being just a couple that linger in the memory banks longer than many of the cars themselves survived. History is laden with great car adverts, but there are very few now.

The most recent advert I recall that struck me as being clever was for the Audi R8 V10, but it’s from more than a decade ago. It showed the car being taken through the gears on a rolling road, cleverly alluding to its performance without any demonstration of speed because the car didn’t move. Brave, too, to show the car with some of its body panels removed to more clearly depict the open exhausts spitting blue flames. Watch it with the volume turned up. 

Today’s car adverts always seem to comprise anodyne B-roll footage of a new model being driven through a clean cityscape or mountain range with a dreary voiceover that could easily instead be persuading you to buy a perfume or a watch. It all feels as though things are being taken too seriously and the response is to create pseudo-arty films that say nothing. There’s no fun, no excitement. Scared to offend anybody, they appeal to nobody. They fade into the background as white noise never to be thought of again. Ask yourself this: can you name any distinctive element of the last BMW advert you saw?

Perhaps it’s merely a reflection of the way most consumers buy new cars these days – not as any kind of expression of self, but rather as a means of mobility that’s paid for monthly. In an age of autonomous driving and electrification, maybe taglines like The Ultimate Driving Machine have lost their currency.