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Volvo Tries to Bore Us into Submission with Safety Oriented Commercial

If you're like me, when the commercial break starts you want to be entertained. It doesn't mean TV advertisement should necessarily make us laugh, but it has to be clever, surprising or well-made to capture our interest.
Volvo XC90 safety commercial 1 photo
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube
When you're Volvo, the last thing you want to do is bore people with a boring commercial. When your cars are well known for being extremely safe for over three decades, making another commercial to tell them just that is the definition of redundancy.

We get it they want to convey a sense of serenity their new cars offer, but I personally felt slightly depressed after watching this clip, and I blame its atmosphere. It reminded me of two movies, and neither one of them was a comedy: "Requiem for a Dream" and "Insomnia".

It speaks about the future, and show us a lonely man traveling in his car at night, probably coming home late from work. He's so bored that when the voiceover talks about reading a book in the car, he glazes over the Volvo XC90 flyer - no matter how many pages they have, car brochures are not books.

You get the feeling the man is very sad and tired, and he's probably returning home to a very neat and elegant, but also empty house. He moves slowly, like a dying dream, he gazes out into the distance, but since it's dark outside, he's just blank staring. That man needs help.

When some other, more jubilant human figures come into play, all he manages to do is avoid hitting them. Well, not him, but rather the car. And it's also a bit repetitive, having seen the same thing just a few seconds earlier when the car braked for a pair of drones. I don't normally think of this when I see drones, but with the heavy atmosphere in this clip, I can't help but imagine those were surveillance drones used to keep the population in place by the power ruling in this dystopic future Volvo is unwillingly depicting.

And it's not a very distant future either. As they've said before, their aim is to prevent any deaths or serious injuries in a new Volvo car by 2020. If we're to look at XC90's safety rating at the EuroNCAP tests, they seem well on their way as the SUV registered the first ever 100% score.

We all want safe cars, but I think we can all agree we don't want to live in the future depicted in this ad. In fact, we don't want anywhere near this ad. Which is a strange thing for me to say, considering it's right below.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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