If your dick joke lasts longer than 60 seconds, consult a physician

Remember: this cost Fiat nine million dollars.



It's sort of an interesting counterpoint to Chevy's "drive a truck or never get laid ever" pitch that small car makers often seem to go in a similar direction, especially when marketing their slightly larger models. During the 2011 Super Bowl, for instance, Mini ran an ad that winkingly compared the trunk space in its four-door Countryman model to anal sex. A year later, Fiat explicitly cast its Fiat 500 Abarth model as a sexy Italian woman. And here we have Fiat again, inviting you to think of its four-door 500X as the product of an erection pill falling into a smaller model. (Less obliquely, of course, it also shows you several women purring over it.) The pitch, it seems, is this: really tiny cars aren't sexy. But we also make SLIGHTLY larger cars! And those are TOTALLY sexy.

Per the Chicago Tribune, subcompact crossovers - the vehicle subsegment in which the 500X is classed - are the hot thing in the automobile world. With that in mind, an ad that pushes them as sexy - when "practical" seems more their speed - feels like an odd play. I understand that "practical" is usually reserved for cars that are being sold to parents, and this type of car is apparently chasing younger urban dwellers... but still. Sexy? The whole point is a car that's small but not TOO small. Easy to drive and park but you don't hear this in your head every time you see one go by. Useful. Not sexy.

Here's a five-year-old ad for the Nissan Juke, one of the first subcompact crossovers to hit the market (here sold as a "sport-cross"):



It's true that that ad also felt the need to have multiple women act impressed by our hero. But it does at least show a few things that the car, you know, can do - the turbo boost, the fact that it can fit into small parking spaces while still having some power (a concern that a lot of people have with small cars, clearly), Bluetooth and pop-up navigation. Even as the ad has plenty of... well, if not jokes per se, at least bits that are intended to be amusing, it still gets across the key points about the Juke.

Meanwhile, what do we know about the 500X after watching that Fiat ad? For one thing, the car doesn't show up for 40 seconds of a 60-second spot; by comparison, the Juke is literally the first thing we see in the Nissan ad. And in fact, the car that shows up at the 40-second mark ISN'T the 500X - we don't see that in full until the 49-second mark, after the smaller Fiat has had a chance to, uh, become engorged with... look, forget this. The point is, I count fewer than three seconds of seeing the car driving in the Fiat ad, and none of them are in an American city, which is a little odd considering that this car is presumably being marketed to urban Americans. (On the bright side, I'm very confident I'll be able to maneuver the 500X should I ever find myself driving one in Tuscany.)

I've never been a big fan of car ads that don't show the car driving (like the middle ad from that Dodge post, which is far too busy calling you gay to show you what you'd actually be getting if you succumbed to their sales pitch). Unless what you're really desperate to sell me on does not involve the driving experience itself - like that Mini ad, which really is just focused on the trunk space - you should probably try to show the car in motion for more than a couple seconds. I mean, this ad features an ersatz Viagra pinging around some Italian town for fully twenty seconds. It spends twenty more seconds just on horny old people. The car itself? Eh, who cares.

This isn't a really terrible ad by any means, but Fiat could easily have saved themselves $4.5 million and cut it down to 30 seconds by trimming the fat from the opening 45. Maybe they would have had room for a few more shots of the car actually driving? Or, I don't know, a second joke?

Incompetence comes standard

Apparently 2011 is the year of car sex. At least if you go by the Super Bowl ads.



This is a 30-second ad that really has no purpose other than to tell jokes... and I count four of them. Four! That's it! Also, they all suck.

Red Car: "Hey guys, the reviews are in on Cars.com!"
Silver Car: "Really? What'd they say?"
Red Car: "Well, let's see. It says Sheila looks great... topless. Heh heh..."
Convertible: "What's so funny?"
Red Car and Silver Car: "Nothing."

Ha ha ha! It's funny because convertibles are topless, but then we also made the convertible a female car and if a woman was topless her breasts would be showing! Yeah! Oh man, what a joke! Also, there's no reason for cars to find toplessness erotic because they are cars, and not humans.

Red Car: "And it says here Hank's a real gas guzzler."
Silver Car: "You hear that, Hank?"
Blue Car: [belches] "Whatever."

Wow, a burp joke. I guess I should be happy they didn't have him fart, but we're still talking jokes that are sub-Mater. Although I'm almost inclined not to even count this one as a joke, because, are you fucking serious?

Silver Car: "Hey, what about me?"
Red Car: "It says your ride is very smooth."
Silver Car: "Aww yeah! Hear that, Sheila?"
Convertible: "Never gonna happen."

I can think of a lot of reasons why it's never going to happen, the first one being that you are cars and are incapable of having sex with each other, and the rest of them being that any attempt on my part to try to think of what it might look like for cars to be having sex with each other is going to end with me finding out who wrote this ad and beating them with a tire iron.

Announcer: "With consumer and expert reviews, confidence comes standard."

I know they only had 30 seconds. But those are not very confidence-inspiring examples of your great reviews that will help me make a car-buying decision. Whoa, a convertible looks good with the top down? Holy shit! Car X has a smooth ride? Surely not something you could say about any of a hundred different models. Expert reviews, everyone! A huge SUV/truck thing does not get good gas mileage. Thank God I visited Cars.com for that fascinating insider nugget!

Woman: "See? Just like the review said - big rear end."
I'm Sure Coincidentally Black Minivan: "Excuse me?"

And we end with probably the best joke of the ad, which should tell you how bad all the others were. Also, again, useless information from Cars.com. I mean, if you don't want a car with a big rear end I'm sure it's nice to know which ones do and don't before you head to the showroom. But they're at the showroom and walking past the car they don't like anyway, so total time saved = zero. Also, it's a fucking minivan. If you want a minivan, the back is probably going to be kind of large. If that's not what you want, you don't get a minivan. You're not going to walk up to a convertible and be like, "Just like the review said - the top goes down. That is not what I want at all!" You're just going to avoid that section.

I'm sure Cars.com has plenty of useful things that it does. Kind of a shame they couldn't show any of them in their three-million-dollar ad that was seen by a third of the country. But hey, I'm sure the belching SUV made a lot of four-year-olds giggle. Now we just need to make sure they also learned the name Cars.com and will remember it for the next twenty years! It's all about the long-term, people.

I like ample cargo space and I cannot lie

Should I have expected better from Mini?



Host: "This is 'Cram It in the Boot!' Where we take the four-door, all-wheel-drive Mini Countryman and... cram it in the boot!"
[Model makes suggestive pushing gesture]

Really? Really.

Host: "Josh! Have you ever crammed it in the boot before?"
Josh: "Um."

This, of course, is the point at which it becomes literally impossible to think that this commercial isn't referring to anal sex. At first you're like, well, maybe this is just supposed to be a funny-sounding title. No. Look at Josh's face as he considers the question. This ad is about butt-fucking. (It's even more blatant in the 60-second version which didn't air during the Super Bowl when the host says to Josh, "Your fiancée Ashley says you can really cram a boot!" and Josh just stammers and looks uncomfortable.)

Host: "Cram it!!!"
Audience: "Cram it! Cram it!"
Host: "Golf clubs, cram it in the boot! Cram that robot in! Yeeeees! Cram it in there!"
[Josh crams a giant sub sandwich into the trunk, featuring an extremely suggestive angle on the "Cram Cam"]



Ha ha! Yeah, Josh! Go! Um... fuck that car with your party sub strap-on! Wait, what? Why the fuck is this happening?

Host: "Whoa!!!"

"He sure fucked that car in the ass! Daaaaamn!"

Announcer: "The bigger all-new Mini Countryman, with plenty of room to cram!"

I'm sorry, I just do not understand this angle at all. Why are they alluding to anal sex? Are they discreetly (a word I use very loosely in this case) trying to suggest that the larger Mini allows you to have sex in your car the way you couldn't in the original Mini without it being extremely uncomfortable (you know, like the back of a Volkswagen)? Are they really only trying to talk about trunk space but for some reason thought that making the car look like the recipient of anal sex would be a hilariously naughty joke to "slip out" to 100 million people?

Call me a square, but I'm of the opinion that if you're going to make your commercial "secretly" filthy, it had better be really hilarious. And this just isn't. It's one joke - "talking about packing the trunk of a car with stuff kind of sounds like you're talking about anal!" - that is at best mildly amusing to begin with, repeated ad nauseam for 30 seconds. (Or 60 seconds in the case of the extended version which, I assure you, has nothing new to contribute to the scenario.) I get trying to be edgy for the sake of being memorable, but I just don't think it worked. There's edgy funny, and then there's edgy repulsive, and this lands far too firmly on the side of the latter.

Auto erotic

Do you love your car? I mean really love it. I mean, love it so much that you would like to have sex with it, metaphorically? Then you need to be driving a Cadillac.



Woman: "In today's luxury game, the question isn't whether or not your car has available features like a 40 gig hard drive."

A what? What? A 40 gig hard drive?? We're still talking about a car here, right?

Woman: "It isn't about sunroofs, or Sapele wood accents, pop-up nav screens or any of that."

I rather enjoy the supremely bored inflection she puts on "pop-up nav screens" as though (a) it was like saying the car came with seat belts and (b) the list she just read was 200 items long. Also, it's funny that you feel a need to mention all these things that it isn't about. Guess what? I think you think it's about that. Can't anyone just brag anymore with having to be all arch about it? Fucking post-modernism.

Woman: "No, the real question is... when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?"

Okay, seriously? Gross. I can't believe the unnecessary purring with which that line was delivered. And guess what doesn't appear in this commercial, which spent its first 15 seconds or so listing the features that it wasn't about? Any listing of features that qualify for "car turning you on" status. Do the features listed not play into that? Are we talking about horsepower, 0-to-60 acceleration... what the fuck are we talking about, here? Wait, I know - nothing. Is it nothing? It's nothing, isn't it? I'm just impressed they were able to work in a couple unobstructed shots of the gear shift, given that she seems to spend the rest of the commercial sitting on it.

Here's the thing: the 2008 CTS has gas mileage of 16 city / 25 highway with its standard features. That's not good even by SUV standards, let alone "upscale sedan" standards. (Note that all the 2007 CTS models finish rather low on this list. The 2008s supposedly perform better relative to the competition, to be fair, although with 16/25, I'm not sure how.) So the real question is, when you spend 35 to 40 grand on a car, and then you have to spend 50 bucks on gas every ten days, does it return the favor by buying you dinner on occasion?