Two Automotive Ads: A Meditation on Rebellion

by Ted Kluck

Perhaps the most immediately jarring thing about the ad for the new Volvo EX90 is the fact that it features a white, heterosexual couple, which is like a +10000 on DraftKings rarity in American advertising circles. Whether you’re selling grease-defying dish soap or toilet paper or a drug to cure moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, it’s very important to never have two white people together unless they’re gay.

Said white, heterosexual couple is about to have a baby, and in fact (narrative-wise) said couple goes through the whole birth-process and lifespan of said baby (pregnancy-test-through-adulthood) in the span of about 120 seconds, before in the third act, the driver of the Volvo EX90 brakes suddenly, sparing the lives of everybody in the above birth-to-adulthood narrative in the process before the superscript “For Life” appears on the screen. As ads go, it’s a good-looking, soft-focus, almost-Terrence-Malick-ish heartstring-puller. As cars go, it is pretty cool looking and very “Volvo” which is to say only kind of cool-looking and very safe-looking.

Contrast this with a recent Jaguar ad in which a whole bunch of androgynous models of all shapes, sizes, and races step out of an elevator dressed like “Zoolander” extras (or the cover of a sociology textbook), accompanied by a word-salad of dumb corporatisms like “delete ordinary” and, “break moulds” (spelled like the former Bills wide receiver Eric Moulds), and “live vivid.” Erstwhile car-show legend James May called the ad “marketing bollocks” on Twitter. It’s also a car ad in which you never actually see a car.

“What’s the deal with Jaguar?” my teenage son asked, apart from the ad. We were driving around one day and saw one before the ad was even a glimmer in anyone’s jaundiced eye.

“I can’t decide if they’re awesome or trash,” was my response, inasmuch as they’re British (maybe trash), distinctive looking (maybe awesome), and completely nonsensical in terms of who drives them and why. Like, you know who drives Ford Mustangs (community college baseball players), who drives Cadillacs (awesome old people) and who drives Teslas (the kind of guy who wants a tablet computer surrounded by four wheels and a seat). I have no idea who drives Jaguars.

Ford owned Jaguar for a while, before selling the brand to Tata Motors (yeah, no idea). Per its website, the company is re-launching as an “electric-only” brand by 2025, which may be coded language for “By 2030 this company will no longer exist.”

The androgynous “Zoolander” ad seems like a pre-death-rattle death-rattle.

But lest this column turn into some kind of “Volvo is virtuous while Jaguar is godless and Bud-Light-ish,” this might be a helpful time to remember that car companies use a variety of techniques to sell cars, but they almost always involve seeing the car itself. And I guess if the point of the Jaguar ad was to create “buzz” it is working, in that the ad is being roundly murdered and bodybagged all over the Internet, even by traditionally non-conservative media types. Maybe the dumbest thing about the Jaguar ad is that it’s trying to sell rebellion in an age when literally nothing is transgressive anymore. There’s no “tradition” left to rebel against. There are no more molds (moulds?) left to break.

This is, then, a story about knowing exactly what kind of story you’re telling, to whom you’re telling it, and why you’re telling it. Volvos (full disclosure, I own one, but it’s a 1975 model) have always appealed to people who want a safe, reliable car, and people who want safe, reliable cars also tend to not be people who want to step out of elevators wearing a red bodysuit that is made of rubber.

The Volvo ad seems revolutionary in its ordinariness. The idea of someone getting married and having a baby and then wanting to parent that baby well until the baby is a productive and self-reliant adult herself, maybe the only rebellious thing left in 2024.