Here we have a post car-accident scenario, where two
teenagers are standing on a sidewalk discussing (or, rather, panicking about)
the anticipated repercussions from the damage to the car. But luckily for them,
it’s a VW, so they’re all safe and well (and ripe for a killing by dad!). Well,
that and the fact that they just dented in the front fender and the bumper a
little bit, which would mean you’d be fine in any car. But this is immaterial, since Volkswagens are indestructible
life-saving miracles on wheels!
And so then, after this shameless display of wanton
car-carnage (that is to say, showing us a car with a dented passenger-side
fender, the front bumper hanging down a little bit, and perhaps a broken headlight),
this panicked teenage reckless driver says: “My dad’s going to kill me, dude!”
(At which point his friend says: “Not if we kill him first!”, and then they go
buy a black market gun and conspire to… Oh, I’m kidding: that doesn’t happen!)
And then the ad says: “He can only kill you if you’re OK.” (Oh, my God: VW
owners are all wanton murderers who kill even their own family members! Aaaaa!
But at least they’re admitting it in this commercial, so now we can’t say
they haven’t warned us.) But this is a scam and a lie, for this statement is
not true at all! His father could kill him so long as he was alive, however
barely, and no matter how grievously injured he may have been!
Look, let’s just consider a few scenarios to illustrate
this point that this commercial’s ending message is a complete fabrication,
shall we? Okay. So let’s say this kid has had a violent collision into a tree
or a parking meter or something, and the kid barely survives the accident, but
he’s also really drunk, which caused the accident, so he calls his father
rather than the police or 911. Well, his father may be so angry upon finding
out his car is totaled and his son was drunk driving that he beats his kid to
death and makes it look like it was the wreck that did it. So in this case, the
kid was not “OK”, but the father was able to kill his son anyway. See?
Okay, so let’s look at another scenario. In this case, the
kid has been involved in a head-on drunk-driving accident that has killed
people in another car. The driver, the hero reckless driver of this ad, has
barely survived the crash and is in the Intensive Care Unit of a local
hospital, and the people he killed are the children of his parents’ best
friends, or his cousins or something like that. So the father, upon learning
the circumstances of the accident, and knowing that, in fact, he forbade his
son to drive his car, but this delinquent brat got drunk and stole it anyway,
gets so angry that he walks into where his son is being kept in the ICU and
secretly turns off the life-support system. See? The kid was barely clinging to
life, being almost fatally injured in the accident, but still, even so, and
even though this kid is far from being “OK”, his dad was able to kill him
anyway. So once again, the blatant inaccuracy of this VW commercial becomes
apparent.
And here’s another scenario: Let’s say that this kid, the
reckless-driving son, has inherited an enormous sum of money from his
grandparents, but that they froze out the kid’s father, because they hate him.
And let’s say the kid is not allowed to touch the money until his 25th
birthday, but that if something happens to him and he dies before that, the
money would go to his father (And this is also why he would be driving his
father’s car: because he can’t use the inherited money yet to buy his own
car.). And then let’s suppose that his father already hated this kid for always
talking back to him, being lazy all the time, flunking out of school because he
knows he’s going to inherit a fortune anyway, etc., and he’s constantly rubbing
it in to his dad that the money’s all his, and his dad can’t have any, etc.
Okay? Okay. So in this situation, his father could snap, and tamper with the
brakes or something, and then chase his kid with some big dark SUV with tinted
windows, causing the kid to drive really fast, lose control and crash. So then
the kid is injured, but his dad can go deliver the coup de grace himself, and kill his son while the kid lies injured
and unconscious in the wrecked VW, despite the fact that the car may have
protected him somewhat from serious injury. See? So once again, we have a
situation where the father can kill his son when he’s not “OK”, so this ad’s
message is becoming less and less believable all the time.
Okay, here’s another possibility: Let’s say this kid has
killed his father’s new bride, the kid’s stepmother, and his dad is really
angry and wants revenge. Well, what he could do is replace the VW’s
driver’s-side airbag with a razor-sharp dagger. And then he could beat his son
up until he’s unconscious, and then put the kid in the driver’s seat, place a
brick on the gas pedal, and send the car into a tree, deploying the dagger/air
bag, and kill the kid that way. And since he beat the kid up, he was not “OK”,
but the dad could still kill him anyway. So, again, I have proven this VW ad to
be completely dishonest in its claims! Ha! Liars!
Okay, I am just joking here, and I will admit this ad makes
a good claim, and is actually a good commercial. But the guys who thought this
spot up are not nearly murderous, savage, vengeful or criminal enough to
recognize that there are tons of opportunities to disprove their message, and
that’s just sloppy and shameful. So I suppose the lesson here is, if you’re
going to make a safely claim, you really have to go out and try to kill a bunch of
people first, just to make sure your claim holds up, or else nobody will take you seriously or believe your message.
Or it’s something like that, I guess.
Here’s the car crash commercial:
