By Robert Emslie
By now even those of you outside the U.S., for whom the Super Bowl is something you order at Yoshinoya, have no doubt seen Volkswagen’s whimsical and silly commercial ‘Wings.” If you haven’t, we’re going to give you the opportunity to do so right after the jump. We want you to have another – or a first – look at the ad, and see if you can pick out something about it that struck us all as kind of strange. Come on and have a look, right after the jump.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-p0BdUB5o[/youtube]
So there it is, Dad and his sass-master of a daughter, and he’s passing along some German engineering lore about mileage that’s both snicker-worthy and kind of freaky if you’re into the Bible and all that. But did you see something weird about it – I mean other than wings not covered in delicious buffalo sauce?
Well first off, we’re not the only ones to take notice of this ad. Unsurprisingly, over at The Truth About Cars, Steven Lang takes issue with the concept of VWs even making it to 100,000 miles. He goes into all kinds of statistics and maths to prove that perhaps VW wouldn’t have all that many fine feathered friends.
Of course had that been reflected in this Super Bowl ad the very few winged engineers would have seemed more like something out of the Human Centipede than a German attempt at humor. Another take was from Mallory McMorrow over at Road & Track, who noted the lack of female engineers shown in the ad. In Volkswagen’s defense I did see at least one, and she did not like getting her butt winged in the elevator
Alas, I digress. What we started out discussing was what I found to be the most odd aspect of the VW Super Bowl ad which was that the Wonder Bread dad and his Tumbler-Vining Instatwitterer of an offspring were discussing the momentous event of their Passat turning over 100,000 miles…in a car that has only been on the market since the 2012 model year.
TTAC may consider that any Passat is unlikely to actually ever reach that goal, and Road & Track may lament the chances of the rainbow butt expecting daughter’s ever getting a job at VW that involves a slide rule, but for me what’s most incredulous is that this guy could put 50K a year on his car and still have it look that good. Maybe it has a guardian angel looking out for it?
Images: Volkswagen of America
Jeff Glucker