Sex and Cars

Sex and Cars -Lewis Jones

The saying sex sells has never been more relevant than today with swimsuits getting smaller and the body parts they’re supposed to be covering getting bigger. Advertisers have been taking full advantage of less strict FCC rules and putting more revealing clothing on both women and men in their commercials to sell their products. Car companies’ use tons of women and in the 1970’s a scandalous commercial would be one like dodge released for the Charger 500.[1]

In this commercial you can see how these girls would have been very well clothed by today’s standards but in the 70’s it was banned because it showed too much skin and it. While one woman was in her bikini you couldn’t see any cleavage and the other woman had pants on. Chargers are still driven to this day and new Chargers continue to sell at high rates. Then only a short ten years later Chevy released a commercial of an attractive woman getting dressed where you can see her in her evening wear and then she walks out and show a little bit of cleavage[2]. Despite having terrible gas mileage and being in the middle of one of Americas first gas crisis the Trans Am was still one of the highest selling and one of most popular cars of the 80’s.

Now even though the two previous cars are American muscle car classics, and mostly driven by men the Fiat 500 is a small coup type car that came over from Italy. They released many commercials of women in bikinis and even topless. Yet this car is still mostly driven by young women[3]. This is because most people who have driven smaller cars such as the Mini-Copper or a Toyota Yaris.

In this there is no doubt that this commercial is aimed at men[4]. My theory is that the commercial gets the man’s attention and then the actual look of the smaller car drives the wife or girlfriend to purchase the car and the male is so numbed by the commercial that it doesn’t bother him anymore.

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[1] USAutoIndustry, 1970 Dodge Charger 500 Commercial, May 25, 2011

[2] VintageTVCommercials, Sexy 1986 Trans Am Car Commercial, Apr 1, 2009

[3] Bradford Wernle, . N.p.. Web. 31 Jan 2014. <http://www.autonews.com/article/20110418/RETAIL07/304189980/1306>.

[4] CelebrityCommercials, “Catrinel Menghia Topless Fiat 500 Sexy Commercial Abarth 2013 Celebrity Commercials TV”, Published on Dec 3, 2012