Via Consumerist, an interesting bit of conspiracy-history:
If you want to sell a car, you put a hot person in it and shoot them skidding at high speeds across desert plains. This was like trailer for a sequel to The Ring.
Elongated shadows of a family spill across across pavement at a canted angle while a spectral chorus moans in the background. “How does it go without sparks or explosions?” asks the voice over. Right when it says “explosions,” the camera moves in on the baby carriage shadow. Then it fades to black, and when it fades back in, near where the baby carriage was there’s an explosiony-looking pock-mark on the ground.
You don’t have to have a PhD psychology to figure out that they were trying to scare consumers away from buying electric cars.
I’m probably more likely to buy a car if it comes with the promise that it will explode baby carriages (and presumably babies), but I suppose people like me weren’t the target audience.
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Posted by Mike on 2009.02.04 at 16:14
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Posted by Brenda on 2009.02.05 at 00:07
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Posted by David Herron on 2009.02.06 at 14:23
I’ve seen that commercial before, and there’s an allusion you missed. The shadows look somewhat like when people are vaporized in a nuclear explosion. In that time period the nuclear bugaboo was much stronger in the national consciousness than the terrorist bugaboo is today – it being important in the cold war era for the military industrial complex to scare us with evil Russia and their nukes. In any case no matter how you slice this ad it’s extremely eery. None of the EV1 ads made a decent attempt to sell the vehicle .. e.g. others extolled that there’s no transmission as if that’s an important selling point. The EV1 was a fun car to drive, and a beautiful machine. I got to test drive it a couple times and think it’s a horrible sin what GM did to it.
