For decades the Super Bowl has come down to three things: the actual game, the halftime show, and the ads. Companies spend millions every year to produce and air a spot (or series of spots) hoping to make a big enough impression on viewers to make their ad enter into the zeitgeist (like Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial) and maybe sell some of their wares.

Super Bowl Ads: Automakers in the Game

Volvo May Hand Out $2M in Cars at Super Bowl

Every Car Commercial from Super Bowl LIII 2019

It’s no surprise that automakers are keen to get in on this cash-burning attempt to lure us into parting with our hard-earned dollars. Sure, there are the typical ads showing cars driving down a winding back road while a famous actor spouts off about freedom and horsepower, but there are also some amazing pieces of advertising that have come out of the car world over the years. So while you’re waiting for the kickoff, take a rubber-melting trip with us down memory lane and check out our favorite Super Bowl ads.
Ford’s The One – 2004
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Sometimes you just want to see a fast car go fast, and that’s exactly what Ford gave us with the 2004 commercial for the Ford GT. A car, a track, and a lot of squealing tire action. It’s pure bliss.
VW’s The Force – 2011
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Nothing grabs us like Star Wars nostalgia. Even as adults, we remember what it was like to pretend we had the powers of a Jedi. Volkswagen took that premise and made a commercial that lets a young boy live out his Darth Vader dreams. Sure, it requires believing this child is on the Dark Side, but cute is cute and it made the not-that-exacting 2012 Passat a little bit cooler.
Chrysler’s Imported from Detroit – 2011

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The Chrysler 200 is long gone, but the emotions stirred up by this ad for a sedan featuring the Motor City remains. Aired during the 2011 Super Bowl, it reminded the rest of the United States that Detroit is tough enough to tackle anything. Starring Detroit native Eminem, the ad is less about a car and more about portraying the city as ready to battle its way back into the consciousness of the country, and more than a shadow of its former self.
Nissan’s Dream – 1990
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Nissan hired director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Legend) to make this commercial about a man dreaming he’s being chased by a motorcycle, a sports car, and eventually, a jet, but none could catch him because of his Nissan 300ZX Turbo. Does it make sense? No. But Scott directed some of the best science-fiction movies ever, so we’ll let him have this one.
Nissan’s Pigeons – 1997
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The Kenny Loggins song Danger Zone is more associated with the movie Top Gun than with this commercial. Still, we all know the frustration of washing our vehicle only to have a squadron of birds (in this case animatronic pigeons) ruin our efforts with a few well-placed “bombs.” The commercial is relatable, and while we only get fleeting shots of the Nissan Maxima, we know that it’s quick enough to outrun some rats with wings.
BMW’s Newfangled Idea – 2015
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Way back in 1994, Today Show hosts Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel famously tried to understand what the Internet was while on the air. It was a bit embarrassing for the hosts because they clearly had no idea what they were talking about. That interaction is the basis for a 2015 BMW i3 ad in which Couric and Gumbel try to parse what an electric vehicle is and how it’s built in a wind-powered factory. It’s meta and to be honest, we’re still having these EV conversations with friends.
Toyota’s The Longest Chase – 2016
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Toyota’s Prius isn’t known for its speed or agility, or really for being all that cool. Initially, the idea of using the hybrid as a bank-job getaway vehicle seems like a recipe for incarceration. But the vehicle’s ability to keep going while a fleet of cop cars have to stop for gas makes for an enjoyable series of ads that ran during the 2016 Super Bowl. Of course, the good guys win in the end by fighting fire with fire using a cop-car Prius.
Volkswagen’s Tree – 2001
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This commercial featuring the VW Golf GTI requires some patience, but it’s worth it. The single piece of dialogue—”Next time, let the clutch out easier”—is one of the best payoffs in automotive ad history.
Plymouth’s Road Runner – 1969
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Way back in 1969 during Super Bowl III, Plymouth aired this ad for the Plymouth Road Runner featuring Looney Tunes’cartoon characters Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. It might be a little too literal, using the animated critters to sell the car, but it was the ’60s, and any ad with a Plymouth Road Runner should be celebrated.
Jeep’s Snow – 1995
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You never see the Jeep, but you know what’s going on.
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Pricing for the 2024 Mazda CX-30 subcompact crossover is up a significant amount from last year.The base price rises $2045, to $26,370, and the top Turbo Premium Plus trim now starts at $38,625.The new brown-on-brown Carbon Turbo costs $34,165.Mazda’s upward push into the premium market continues to impact new-car prices, including the 2024 Mazda CX-30 subcompact crossover. For the new model year, the CX-30’s base price goes up by $2045 to $26,370, and other trim levels are up by between $500 and $1850. The new Carbon Turbo model (pictured at top), which has a brown-on-brown color scheme, starts at $34,165.There’s a bit of new standard equipment offered in the base CX-30 2.5 S model to offset the price hike, including blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert. The CX-30 comes standard with a 191-hp 2.5-liter inline-four, a six-speed automatic transmission, and all-wheel drive.The 2024 CX-30’s trim-level structure is a bit different than before, as the Select is renamed the Select Sport and now starts at $27,875. The Carbon Turbo, finished in Zircon Sand exterior paint and featuring Terra Cotta leather accents inside, is also new to the lineup and is now the cheapest way to get the more powerful turbocharged 2.5-liter inline-four with 250 horsepower. The Select, Preferred, Carbon Edition, and Premium models continue on with the naturally aspirated 2.5-liter, while the Turbo Premium and Turbo Premium Plus models start at $36,960 and $38,625, respectively—pushing well into luxury subcompact-crossover territory.All 2024 Turbo models get a larger, 10.3-inch infotainment screen instead of the 8.8-inch screen on lesser models. They also add a wireless phone charger and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Mazda says the updated CX-30 lineup will go on sale later in the fall.More on New MazdasSenior EditorDespite being raised on a steady diet of base-model Hondas and Toyotas—or perhaps because of it—Joey Capparella nonetheless cultivated an obsession for the automotive industry throughout his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee. He found a way to write about cars for the school newspaper during his college years at Rice University, which eventually led him to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for his first professional auto-writing gig at Automobile Magazine. He has been part of the Car and Driver team since 2016 and now lives in New York City.   More

Mercedes-Benz lightly updates the exterior styling of the regular E-class and the AMG-tuned E53 sedans. The E450 receives a six-cylinder engine to replace its previous V-6, and the plug-in-hybrid E350e finally makes its U.S. debut. Other upgrades include new steering wheel designs, an enhanced infotainment system, and the latest driver-assistance technology. Even with the focus […] More

Do not confuse it with Blue’s Clues, the children’s education show, or a booze cruise, the young adult adventure that’s happens when you combine a boat with tons of alcohol. No, this is BlueCriuse, Ford’s hands-free driving feature and answer to GM’s Super Cruise and Tesla’s Autopilot. It is available on some 2022 F-150s and Mustang Mach-Es.Long story short: it works as advertised. Ford isn’t promising commuters the chance to catch up on Instagram on their drive to work. But it is giving drivers the chance to lessen fatigue on the slog that is many Americans’ rush-hour drive home. BlueCruise may be able to keep the car in a lane and a safe distance from traffic in front, but that doesn’t mean it is driving. The driver still needs to pay attention and be ready to resume control if any number of virtually infinite possibilities arise that the computer can’t compute.

BlueCruise, much like Super Cruise, is geo-fenced and limited to divided highways. Ford calls them Blue Zones, but know that it includes over 100,000 miles in all 50 states and southern Canada. Activate adaptive cruise control and BlueCruise takes over once it has a good sense of its surroundings. Ford leveraged the digital instrument cluster to totally change its appearance when BlueCruise is active. This is one of the best uses of a digital cluster and it avoids any confusion. There’s a camera and two infrared light emitters in the cabin to keep track of what you’re keeping track of. If your eyes wander too long from the task at hand, which is driving, BlueCruise will shut down.

Ford

The system worked great for us. Only when we wore a mask and sunglasses did BlueCruise think we weren’t paying enough attention. In addition to tracking eyes, the camera tracks the whole face. (We had a minder from Ford in the car with us and we were trying to be respectful.) Once we removed the mask, there wasn’t a single warning to pay better attention.We got to sample the Level 2 autonomy system in Dearborn, Michigan, while behind the wheel of an F-150. The camera and dual IR emitters are totally integrated with the pickup’s dash. In the Mach-E, however, there is a camera wart on the steering column. There is no relative limit as to what speed you can set BlueCruise to maintain. We didn’t confirm that the F-150 could achieve it, but we did set the system to 106 mph while cruising at 55 mph behind a tractor trailer on the Southfield Freeway. We’re guessing the top speed of the pickup is 106 mph. If you have a 2021 F-150 or Mach-e with the ADA prep pack, you can pay a one-time $600 fee to upgrade your car to BlueCruise spec. This can be done over the air or at a dealership. Another over-the-air update—Ford calls them Power-Ups—that includes an automated lane-change feature will roll out at some point in the near future. For now, drivers will have to signal and initiate the lane change themselves.This is just one step of many more that need to happen on the path to full autonomy. Ford is confident it will be put more than 100,000 BlueCruise equipped cars on the road in the next year.
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General Motors is looking to help EV buyers leverage the energy of those big Ultium battery packs onboard—and to make some money from managing the use of the energy, too.The auto company has formed a GM Energy business unit to do just that, it announced today. It will be split into Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial, and Ultium Charge 360 divisions.Among the targets: backup power and lowering the cost of EV ownership by letting utilities use some of your EV’s energy.This morning, General Motors announced it has formed a new business unit called GM Energy, which will offer seamless “integrated energy management” products and services for homes and businesses to its electric-vehicle customers.Essentially, that means GM will help owners of Ultium-based EVs lower their energy costs, use their cars for emergency backup power, and—if they agree—perhaps even lower their lease payments by letting utilities draw small amounts of energy from their EVs when plugged in.Today’s EVs have large battery packs with capacities of 60 to 200 kilowatt-hours of energy, or two to seven times the daily usage by the average U.S. household. Road trips aside, average daily travels of 30 to 100 miles use up only half of that at most.GM’s new unit will build a business that links the distributed energy storage of millions of EVs to owners’ homes (as backup power, replacing gasoline-fueled generators) and, more ambitiously, to the broader electric grid. GM plans to “play across the entire energy ecosystem,” in the words of Mark Bole, head of V2X and Battery Solutions, during a press preview in advance of this announcement.GMSee Ya Later, Generator?Last year, Ford seemed to have been caught off guard by intense public interest in an aspect of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup. That was the ability to power a home at up to 19.2 kilowatts for up to several days on a fully charged battery—at least in the top version, with modifications to home wiring. Other EVs offer power-out capabilities, at lower rates: the latest EVs from Hyundai and Kia have conventional three-prong, 120-volt outlets at the base of the rear seat to run various consumer electronics. (Cue glossy advertisements of a silent EV parked next to a remote lake, powering a picnic-table lamp, an electric grill, a fridge, maybe even a portable stereo.) Their output of up to 6.6 kW won’t power your entire home, though it might keep your kitchen refrigerator running.Backup power for emergencies is one of two home applications GM discussed. The other is lower electric bills from charging the EV when rates are lowest, then using some of its energy to power the house during peak demand periods, substituting for grid electricity when rates are highest.Emergency backup power gets greater attention, though. As more frequent extreme weather events cause widespread, heavily publicized power outages, interest in simple, convenient, automatic backup for home energy will grow. Many homeowners don’t want to wrestle with a noisy gasoline-fired generator, which can’t be used indoors and produces exhaust emissions. EVs offer an alternative: Plug in the car at night and get the same backup. If there’s a grid outage, your charging station switches automatically from recharging the battery to using that battery to power your house.GM wants to help with that. Its new unit will provide a range of Ultium Home products and services, including bidirectional wall-mounted charging stations, to let any of its new EVs based on the Ultium platform provide backup power. Specific details of how that will work have yet to be spelled out. Its first products and services won’t go into production for a year, sometime in the fourth quarter of 2023. If successful, it’s not hard to imagine a future GM role in helping homeowners and commercial customers install solar panels or hydrogen fuel cells, set up microgrids, and participate more actively in all facets of energy generation and storage.The Energy Storage ProblemElectric utilities today have little way to store energy. For 100-plus years, they’ve generated just enough power to meet demand, turning plant output up and down as needed. The classic form of energy storage is a dam: You can use excess generation to pump water uphill, then release it through hydroelectric turbines to return that power to the grid. But building new dams in the U.S. is now very, very difficult. GMStorage is more needed than ever now, for the growing percentage of renewable energy, which doesn’t always provide steady, consistent power to the grid. Solar only comes on during the day, except for . . . clouds. Wind is strongest at night, but intermittent. So utilities are experimenting with climate-controlled battery bunkers to store and buffer that intermittent generation. Not only do batteries keep the grid stable against those fluctuations, they let utilities store renewably generated energy for the highest-demand periods: those hot, muggy Friday afternoons when everyone comes back home, cranks up the A/C, and turns on lots of electronics.To your local electric utility, your EV—and your neighbors’—represent a tantalizing pool of energy storage, with a relatively low total power draw if charged overnight, when demand is lowest. The most forward thinking of the nation’s 3500-plus electric utilities see EVs “more as a solution than as a problem to be solved,” said Travis Hester, vice president of GM EV Growth Operations.But those utilities often don’t know where EVs are located, let alone have the ability to connect to them “bidirectionally,” to pull out (small amounts of) energy for short periods to stabilize the grid or supplement their own generation during high demand.GM wants to help with that, too. It will know where every single Ultium vehicle is located, via the cars’ cellular connections. And it can communicate with the home stations it sells that charge them. Now the automaker is reaching out to hundreds of large utilities to start the lengthy process of negotiating deals to connect those EVs as storage resources—for which utilities will pay GM.To say that’s a complex task would be a gross understatement. But GM sees itself as perfectly positioned to be that middleman between EV owners and their various utilities—and, importantly, to do so at scale. This applies especially to fleet buyers who operate multiple EVs, providing greater scale from a single customer—which is why GM plans a separate suite of Ultium Commercial products and services as well. While Tesla provides battery storage products to homeowners and at utility scale, it has made no moves to connect the millions of EVs it’s sold to the grid or to act as home backup themselves.Lower EV Lease Payments?Individual buyers of Ultium-based EVs from Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, and Buick will be able to control the degree to which they allow any of these capabilities, Hester said: “They can play in as much or as little of this ecosystem as they like.” But, he suggested, they’ll want these products and services for several reasons. First is daily energy management: using EVs to store cheap energy, then substitute it for pricier peak-period energy. Second is backup power during emergencies. Third will be free energy management software—GM Energy Cloud—that lets homeowners look at data on when they use power and how much it costs. GM can offer advice on how to reduce overall energy spending if desired.Finally comes cash. Utilities today incentivize and even pay customers for “managed usage.” This may be setting your washing machine to run after midnight, or letting the utility switch off your home air conditioning for 15 minutes to reduce total load. From cheaper electric rates to actual cash bounties, demand management is worth a lot to utilities. EV owners will benefit, and GM will pass along to owners a cut of the increased load reduction and energy balancing fees their EVs enable. The same applies to fleet and commercial customers—in spades. Hester suggested consumers might see that cash in the form of lower lease payments for Ultium EVs. Will these products and services apply to other EVs as well? Maybe, later on. But right now, it’s all about GM’s electric vehicles—1 million by 2025, it says. This content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. More