4

“CAN AN ENGINE PUMP THE VALVES IN YOUR HEART?”

Crazy for Cars

NOWHERE IS IT CLEARER THAT ADVERTISING ENCOURAGES US TO FEEL WE ARE in a relationship with our products than in car advertising. “Rekindle the romance,” says a newspaper ad for a Jaguar. “Young, breathtaking beauty seeks sophisticated, self-assured individual who likes long drives and lasting relationships.” Romance and rebellion are, broadly speaking, the two main themes. The romantic ads tell us the car will make us feel sexy and safe and loved, that it will give us passion and security in a world that is both humdrum and dangerous, and sometimes that it will substitute for human relationships. The rebellious ads emphasize how the car will make us feel tough, in control, free. “Goats understand your need to climb mountains,” says an ad for a Toyota truck. “At least, male goats do.”

The automobile is the basis for our economy. One-third of the land in our cities is devoted to cars, and Americans spend more money on driving each year than we do on health, education, or food. Although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population, we generate 50 percent of the world’s vehicle mileage and use 40 percent of the oil being produced in the world.

No wonder car advertising is such big business. As an ad in Advertising Age tells us, “Automotive marketers are what’s behind $12.8 billion in media spending every year.” The top three automakers spend about six billion dollars a year on advertising, so much in fact that most major magazines have sales offices in Detroit. And “relationship marketing,” in which companies use data from customers to increase loyalty and profits, is gaining momentum in the auto industry. Jeep runs an annual weekend event for owners in Colorado called Camp Jeep, which features speakers, entertainment, and children’s activities. Attendees fill out questionnaires, which allow Jeep to create a database. Carmakers used to leave relationship-building to dealers, but now, according to auto consultant David Kalmus, “They realize they can profit by it, so they’re paying attention to it.”

Just as the car companies want us to think of ourselves as part of their big happy families, they also encourage us to think of our cars as family members. “It has its mother’s eyes, its father’s stature and its brother’s appetite for mischief,” says an ad for a new Jaguar. “It’s not a family car. It’s family,” a Mazda ad declares, while a Toyota ad introduces a new make of car with the copy, “The new family member with a great set of genes.”

As is often the case in the world of advertising, however, the product is more important than the people. In a strange perversion of a typical family scene, a commercial for Toyota’s Tacoma pickup truck features a man showing home movies . . . of his truck’s achievements. As the camera shifts, we see that his audience is the photo of a magazine model taped to a chair.

“If anybody should ask, go ahead and show them your pride and joy,” says a Honda ad. We assume the ad is referring to the children in the photo in the wallet. But no, it’s the car. Of course, children are so much trouble compared to cars.

“Chances are their teeth will need more work than your Lumina,” another ad tells us. It continues, “Being a parent isn’t easy or cheap. So it’s got to be a relief to drive a car that could need a lot less attention than your children’s teeth.” Of course, it might be better still to skip the children altogether and just have a nicer car. In a way that is what a Chevrolet ad suggests: An out-of-focus photo of a woman holding a baby is juxtaposed with a clear shot of the car, while the headline says, “Don’t spend the next six years wondering if you did the right thing.” The ad absurdly compares the decision to have a baby with the decision to buy a car and suggests that the car is a clearer choice. After all, it comes with a warranty.

In ad after ad, we are told that buying a car is like falling in love and getting married. “We don’t sell cars,” a Lexus ad tells us, “We merely facilitate love connections.” And an ad for Mercedes-Benz begins, “Buying a car is like getting married. It’s a good idea to get to know the family first,” while an ad for Acura promises “communication between road and driver that would make even a marriage counselor happy.”

A Toyota Paseo ad pictures the car with the headline “Makes a better first impression than your last date.” The copy continues, “Finding the ‘right’ one isn’t always easy. You want to be comfortable, have similar tastes and at the same time find it easy to be yourself. Choosing the right car isn’t much different.” Another ad in the same campaign features a woman standing very happily next to her car, with the copy “Stylish. Responsive. Fun. If it were a man you’d marry it.” (Let’s not even touch the idea of marrying someone because he’s stylish and fun.) The ad continues, “Let’s face it, there are a lot of similarities when it comes to choosing a car and a mate. While this may seem surprising to some, even more surprising is that in today’s society the chances for a lasting relationship just may be greater with a car. . . . Drive the new Paseo. Fall in love.” And a 1999 Toyota commercial begins with the camera caressing a car while a woman’s sexy voice says, “If a car has its own personality, you’d want it to be soft but strong, frugal, and worthy of your respect.” As we see closeups of headlights and cup-holders, the woman continues, “It should remember the little things that are important to you and be reasonable always. Like a best friend, it should be there for you every day.”

“Hannah fell in love yesterday,” says an ad for Ford Mustang. “Which came as a big surprise to her boyfriend, Rick. But that’s the way it’s been since ‘64. Mustang = Love. It’s hard to explain. Hannah says it’s the spirit. Whatever it is, she loves her new Mustang. Oh, and whatshisname too.” It is probably true that our chances for a lasting relationship are greater with our cars than our partners—but surely the solution can’t be to fall in love with our cars, to depend on them rather than on each other.

Indeed, the ads tell us our cars are more likely to be true-blue and loyal than our mates. A Honda ad pictures a snazzy red car with the following sentences above it: “It’s not you, it’s me. I need more space. I’m just going through a stage. I can’t go out with one person now. I need a break. I’m not ready for a commitment. Can we just be friends?” The copy below the car says, “Lots of significant others. One car.” And a Mazda ad with the tagline “A change from your high maintenance relationships” says, “European good looks. Athletic. Stable. Strong, silent type. Sounds like a good personals ad. Difference is, it’s true.”

Given the nature of the product, it makes sense that car advertisers mostly sell long-term commitment. Sometimes, however, they offer the automotive equivalent of a one-night stand. Since the beginning, cars have been advertised as a way to impress and seduce women. (As one ad says, “It’s not a car. It’s an aphrodisiac.”) For several years, the car itself has been featured as the driver’s passionate lover (in the words of one ad, “What happens when you cross sheet metal and desire”). “Deny yourself an obvious love affair?” asks an Audi ad, featuring a picture of the car. “Didn’t you read Romeo & Juliet?”

Until recently the car was always symbolized as a woman. A Toyota Celica is described as having “vivacious curves, a shimmering body and . . . striking good looks.” And Mercedes-Benz ran an ad featuring a photo of Marilyn Monroe’s face, with the Mercedes-Benz symbol replacing her famous mole. No words were necessary. It was clear from the image that the car and the sex goddess were somehow one and the same. Sales increased by 35 percent. Vespa, the Italian motorcycle, also exploited Monroe in an ad entitled “Marilyn Vespoe,” which features the motorcyle on pink satin sheets.

This is taken a step further in a newspaper ad for Autique stores in which the car is a nude woman “accessorized” with automobile parts, such as tires and headlights. The objectification of the woman is particularly chilling in this ad, as she is barely human. There is also implicit violence in the metal chain around her neck, her extreme passivity, the blood-red background. Once again, lovers are things and things are lovers.

Of course, this has been going on a long time. Ever since Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, we’ve known that cars are often men’s symbolic mistresses. Sometimes the copy for car ads reads like pornography. A Subaru ad from the 1970s, headlined “Like a Spirited Woman Who Yearns to Be Tamed,” says, “Sleek. Agile. The sculptured lines of the one-piece body invite you in. . . . Go to her. . . . Surround yourself with the lushness of her interior appointments. . . . Now. Turn her on. . . . ”

These days there’s more equal opportunity for objectification, so while Mercury suggests we “think of it as a steel bikini,” a BMW is advertised with the headline “Imagine Hercules in a steel tuxedo.” And a tire ad tells us that “the most potent versions come equipped with Pirelli tires.” Robyn Meredith suggests that Detroit’s metal has had a sex change operation and describes the Dodge Durango as follows: “Muscles seem to ripple under its shiny sheet metal, causing its fenders to bulge. Its hood is lifted above the brawn, like the short neck of a wrestler rising from beefy trapezius muscles.” Nissan’s Pathfinder was nicknamed the “hardbody” and designers described the “triceps” around each wheel. Some think the change is due to more women buying cars, others that people have come to think of their cars as bodyguards in a dangerous world.

An ad for the Oldsmobile Intrigue features a woman looking in her compact mirror at a car parked not coincidentally outside a hotel. The copy says, “Intrigued? A quick glance. You immediately notice the catlike eyes, the muscular lines. . . . You stare, knowing that only when you drive it will all its secrets be told.” This ad is really amazing when we pay attention to it. The woman seemingly is putting on lipstick to prepare for her encounter with a car, a car that will appraise her with “catlike eyes.” A car with “muscular lines” that is about to reveal secrets to her when she slips inside and starts to drive it. As is usually the case in advertising, the woman is preparing herself to be looked at, to be the object of the male gaze. In a Mercury ad, the man is the gazer and the car the object of his affection (or at least his obsessive attention), as he ignores the gorgeous landscape behind him and turns the binoculars toward the car.

Countless ads today offer the car not only as a sex symbol, for women as well as for men, but as a substitute for sex. Chevrolet promises that “after Lumina satisfies what you need, it quickly responds to what you want.” And an Infiniti ad asks, “What makes you happy? . . . Is it the sparkle in a lover’s smile? . . . Or the warmth of a kiss goodnight? . . . But could it be a car?” “Is it wrong to be in love with a car?” asks an ad for the Honda Accord. It continues, “There’s no reason to hide your true feelings. The deep, consuming passion you may now be experiencing for the 1999 Accord Coupe is perfectly normal. After all, who could blame you for giving in to the seductive powers of this sleek, sexy automobile?”

A television commercial, shot in black and white, begins with the words onscreen, “How to build a lasting relationship.” Immediately we see a closeup of a car and hear racy music in the background. More words appear onscreen, interspersed with more closeup shots of the car: “Instant attraction,” “Ooh, that first touch” (hand on the gearshift), “Your heart races” (closeup of the speedometer), “And then . . . bam!” (foot on the gas pedal). The car zips along the road, through the countryside, and through the inevitable tunnel (to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a car is just a car, but a tunnel in a car ad is never just a tunnel). The commercial ends with the words, “You’ll never want to look at another car again.”

“Dim the lights, put on some music, and it’s just you and 280 horses,” says a Lincoln ad, promising “the perfect setting for an intimate meeting between you, your favorite road and the 280 horses of the Lincoln Mark VIII luxury coupe.” And a BMW ad says, “If you do shiver, it’ll be from excitement.” Exactly what are these ads promising? What is the nature of the intimate meeting? Are we supposed literally to be turned on by the experience of driving these cars (or simply being inside them)? Is it progress that both men and women can now experience the thrill of having sex with their cars? Will people go parking by themselves before long? I can picture cars lined up by a beach on a moonlit night, the drivers in ecstasy, each one alone.

Sometimes straight sex isn’t enough. “People who drive the Bravada are into leather,” says one ad. Lest one think I am reading too much into this, the sentence is highlighted in red and the copy concludes, “People who drive the Bravada are basically into everything except letting someone else drive.” If this were a “personals ad,” would there be any doubt? As another ad, this one for the Toyota Camry, says, “Any more leather might arouse suspicions.”

At least one woman’s magazine has identified the problem of “Autoeroticism: When His Car Excites Him More Than You Do.” Given that the magazine is Cosmopolitan, it not surprisingly suggests as a remedy: “Perfume the bedroom with an auto air freshener. Attach fuzzy dice, like tassels, to your breasts. Tie him to the bed with jumper cables and whisper that your battery needs a charge too.” At least Cosmo is bringing the attention back to human beings—it’s no doubt better to turn your lover into a car than your car into a lover. There remains the possibility of intimacy.

Sometimes people are no longer necessary at all. The passionate relationship is between the car and the sky or the car and the road. “Hugs the road. Kisses the sky,” says a Mitsubishi ad, while an Oldsmobile ad tells us, “While some cars can hug the road, very few can actually seduce it.” One of the most erotic ads I’ve ever seen is a 1999 television commercial for BMW. It begins with a sensuous closeup of a car driving along a road. There is no sound but music, and the ad is shot in black and white with a split screen. We see that the car is a convertible and that a man is driving. As the car goes around a curve, the word “Hug” appears on the screen. Next there is a closeup of the wheel against the road and the word “Kiss” appears. And then “Caress.” In the climax of the commercial, so to speak, the car whooshes through a dark tunnel, while “The driver loves the car” appears on the screen. Next we see “The car loves the road.” And then “The car loves the driver.” The message continues to change—“The driver loves the car,” and so forth. The commercial is so sexy, I longed for a cigarette ad afterward.

A Lexus campaign, similarly but less breathtakingly, describes sexy encounters between the car and asphalt, the car and a bridge, and so forth. In the print version, the road curves beautifully into the hills and the headline says, “Hug me.” The copy continues, “The road is calling. It’s a siren song from a sliver of asphalt that crosses the Mississippi. . . . The road is stretched before you. How will you embrace it?”

This Lexus campaign also epitomizes the theme of control and competition. One commercial begins with the road breathing, heaving, while a German-accented creepy voice says, “Hi, I’m Autobahn, lord of the highways. Do you think you have what it takes to tame me? Hmm? Do you? Try me. I dare you.” The camera caresses the curves of the road and approaches a dark tunnel with a light at the end. A Lexus roars into view. The announcer says, “The all-new ES300. The road is calling. Answer it.” As the car zooms away, the road says with an eerie laugh, “Come back. I let you win that time.” In a world in which we so often feel powerless, how seductive is this promise of overpowering, not just other drivers but the road itself. We may be locked into our dull jobs, our mortgage payments, our disappointing spouses and needy children, but we become rulers of the world when we get into our cars.

Certainly the craze for sport utility vehicles has something to do with this need to feel more powerful and more secure in a time of widespread worries about corporate downsizing, family breakups, and crime. According to Nissan’s president of North American design, “There’s a feeling, ‘When I’m in this car, I’m in command of my future.’ Home and work have not been symbols of stability.” One auto design and marketing consultant thinks men buy the rugged vehicles to compensate for loss of masculine power and women buy them to flaunt the power they’ve achieved. Conversely, sociology professor Pepper Schwartz describes the image projected by minivans as “I’ve no fangs left, I’ve been declawed.”

Certainly that’s the image portrayed in a Mitsubishi commercial that opens in a health club. A group of handsome, muscular men are pumping iron. A woman announces over the loudspeaker, “The owner of a tan minivan—you left your lights on.” The camera zooms around the zoom . . . no one makes a move. The announcer repeats her message. Again, no one moves. The camera stops on a guy who looks sheepish. No way is he going to admit to owning the dreaded feminized minivan. The commercial switches to a scene of a Mitsubishi SUV roaring across the landscape. Real men drive SUVs.

Sales for these light trucks nearly quadrupled between 1992 and 1998. Suddenly in the mid-1990s people found they must have automobiles designed for the desert and the jungle and clothing meant for Arctic expeditions just to get to the mall. Sometimes it seems as if everyone has fallen for the advertising image of the lone soul conquering the wilderness. And make no mistake: The wilderness is to be conquered. Nature, often personified as female, is dangerous. As one SUV ad says, “She will freeze you, she will burn you, she will try to blow you away.” One ad after another tells us that the best way to relate to nature is to run over it (or, more symbolically, her).

We drive vehicles made for off-road adventures to the supermarket, where we shop in clothing designed to keep us alive in a blizzard on a mountaintop. Talk about virtual reality. Ads for SUVs almost always show the vehicle perched on a mountaintop or barreling over rocky terrain and then equate this with courage. “Goodbye yellow striped road,” says one (and we all know what it means to have a yellow stripe). “To go off-road, you’ve gotta have backbone,” says another. “Tread softly and carry a big V-8,” says yet another. Such advertising has an impact. One marketing consultant says, “People will argue SUVs are bought for functionality and utility. But our focus groups state the overriding reason is image.”

Are there consequences to any of this? The 13 percent of SUVs that are used off-road cause a disastrous combination of soil erosion and compaction, killing plants and destroying animal habitats. In addition, advertising that encourages us to personify and identify with our cars may well affect our driving behavior. More people die in automobile crashes than from homicide, yet many people are resistant to prevention measures such as seat belts and lower speed limits that are guaranteed to save lives, because they feel “controlled” by such measures. Risky driving without consequences is as common in advertising and throughout the media as is risky sex. Surely an ad like the one for a Grand Prix featuring a closeup of the front of the car and the tagline “In your face” doesn’t help.

Sport utility vehicles are especially dangerous . . . to people in cars. So dangerous that they are sometimes referred to as Somebody’s Under the Vehicle. The three-ton vehicles are a serious threat to smaller cars. When cars and SUVs collide, the person in the car is four times more likely to die than the person in the truck. And if a car is hit in the side, that brings the odds to twenty-seven to one. At the moment, the drivers of SUVs tend to be older, married, and therefore safer drivers. However, there is likely to be increasing trouble when these drivers sell their expensive toys to reckless youths and heavy drinkers who have high accident rates and can seldom afford new cars. Sport utility vehicles are three times more likely to roll over during crashes than are passenger cars (and two-thirds of all spinal injuries in crashes occur when vehicles roll over). SUV drivers are two and a half times more likely to die in a rollover crash than car drivers.

In spite of all this, the trend is definitely toward bigger SUVs and even big-cab pickup trucks. In 1998, Americans bought more vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs than they did cars. The 2000 Ford Excursion, which weighs two thousand pounds more than the Chevrolet Suburban and gets around ten miles per gallon, is dubbed the Ford Valdez by those who are appalled by its creation and threat to the earth.

We seem increasingly territorial when in our cars. A 1997 study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology of behavior in parking lots found that a person who normally takes about thirty-two seconds to vacate a parking space will take thirty-nine seconds if another driver is waiting, and forty-three seconds if that driver beeps. The study also found that male drivers will pull out of parking spaces more quickly for expensive prestige cars, whereas women don’t care. An editorial about this study concluded, “Perhaps a man, having served more time as ancient hunter and hunted, sees an Infiniti as lion and a station wagon as hyena. A woman figures they’re all animals.”

In 1996 a study by the American Automobile Association reported that violence by hostile drivers had increased by 51 percent since 1990. Most aggressive drivers were men (mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six); about 4 percent were women. Calling the problem at least as dangerous as drunken driving, the article suggested promoting “socially responsible driving” and avoiding confrontations with aggressive drivers. Since then the media have focused extensively on the growing problem of “road rage,” which one pundit called “a cultural illness rooted in our hectic, hostile way of life.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, violent, aggressive driving contributes to two-thirds of all traffic deaths.

People sometimes feel exempt from the laws of civilized behavior in their cars and thus wield them in a way they would wield no other “weapon.” Ads that encourage drivers to break the rules certainly contribute to this attitude. “The engineers of the Pontiac Grand Am see no shame in gutsy driving. Only in timid cars,” declares one such ad. The copy continues, “If you’re not exactly the shy type on the road, you belong in a Pontiac Grand Am. Because . . . it suits your driving style to a ‘T.’ As in ‘tough.’ Not as in ‘tame.’” And an Audi ad says, “Why push the envelope when you can shred it?”

A 1997 Lexus campaign, introduced just before Halloween, looks like an ad for a slasher film. In one version, the car emerges, as if from flames, from a forest of bare, blackened trees against an orange sky. The copy, in the script of witchcraft and alluding to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, says:

 

Distant thunder, cold as stone,

a V8 screams down from its throne.

One by one, each car succumbs.

Something wicked

This way comes.

 

Additional copy describes the car as “a fixture of intimidation” that “seethes within . . . the fiercest, fastest automatic sedan in the world.” The slogan for this car from hell? “Faster, sleeker, meaner.” Of course, this is overkill, so to speak, intended to be funny, ironic, at least on one level. But do we need advertising like this when people are literally killing each other with their cars?

Ad critic Bob Garfield apparently thinks so. He gave the campaign a rave in his column, saying that “the listless, vanilla Lexus is finally imbued with a fearsome character with which to battle the brawny German competition.” Garfield presumably is personifying German cars such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz as the enemy, the competition. It may be precisely this personification of cars that leads to the extreme sensitivity to insult that some drivers feel.

Car ads often encourage this overidentification of owners with their automobiles. “Infiniti. Own one and you’ll understand,” says an ad featuring a woman asleep outdoors in a sleeping bag, while her car resides inside a spacious tent. Many ads encourage us to feel that the car has a soul as well as a personality. “Born again,” says a Toyota ad for used cars. And Chrysler tells us, in an ad picturing a car, “They say the soul lives on. And it does.”

“If they made a movie about your life, who would you want to star as your car?” asks an ad for BMW. “You and your M3 are locked in an embrace with the road. Cut to a close-up of your gaping jaw as you feel the power of its engine. . . . The two of you ride off into the sunset.” Who among us would want a movie about our life to end with us going off into the sunset, alone in our car?

Some ads go even further. The car is no longer a close companion or a lover. It becomes the self. “Can an engine pump the valves in your heart?” asks an ad for Lexus, which features a man’s body superimposed on the front of a car. “When was the last time you felt this connected to a car?” the ad concludes. Another ad in the campaign features the interior of the car, with a man’s hand and arm becoming the gearshift. The copy says, “The symmetry is uncanny. It has a heart. . . . You have a heart. It has a conscience. . . . You have a conscience. . . . It’s not simply a car you drive, it’s one that gets under your skin.”

The television version of the campaign goes even further. The man’s hand merges with the gearshift and then the steering wheel, his skin becomes leather, while the voiceover says, “Its beauty will draw you in. Its new engine will pump the valves of your heart. And the line that separates man from machine will disappear … completely. . . . You’ve never felt so connected to a car.”

A woman paints her toenails—with silver metallic touch-up paint for a Honda. A British ad for Pirelli tires features Olympic athlete Carl Lewis running over mountains and leaping over rooftops. Toward the end, we see a closeup of his feet and his soles are treaded rubber, like tires. “Power is nothing without control,” the announcer tells us.

Do we want the line that separates man from machine to disappear? If a man feels that the car engine is his heart, that the tires are his feet, and that “power is nothing without control,” no wonder he overreacts to “disrespectful” or “threatening” moves from another driver.

As always, taken individually, the car ads are funny, silly, exciting, sometimes breathtakingly clever, and seemingly insignificant. However, they have a cumulative direction and a cumulative impact. As is the case with many other products, the car in commercials has gone from being a symbol of power to the actual source of power (the engine that pumps the valves in our hearts), from a symbol of sex to an actual lover, from a conduit to relationships to the important relationship itself, and from a prized possession to the very emblem of oneself. The car ads are an important part of a world in which things are becoming ever more, and people ever less, important.