Just Eat It: When automakers poking fun at the competition backfires

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Remember that time you made fun of your parents for eating kale, only to try it yourself and find it was actually kinda tasty? Or pooh-poohed a sibling’s idea only to secretly wish you’d come up with it yourself?

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Turns out, automakers have a history of that same behaviour — except instead of kale, when they do it they’re typically trashing a competitor’s new feature or innovation.

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Yes, multi-million-dollar corporations can act like children, especially when one becomes miffed at prospectively being outdone by a crosstown rival. It’d be amusing if it weren’t for the optics or potential for internal boardroom fallout.

Actually, scratch that. It is entertaining to watch an automaker pull the ultimate Sooky Baby and execute a 180-degree turn on a topic which was once the object of their scorn. Here are a few times when car companies decided (or were forced to) pick up a knife and fork and eat their words.

The Time GM Talked Smack About Aluminum Trucks

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Back in the autumn of 2014, the Blue Oval engineers took the biggest gambles in the history of Ford Motor Company. They decided to transition their cash-cow, the mighty F-150 pickup, from a steel body to one made largely of aluminum. A huge marketing push accompanied this switch, of course, designed to reassure buyers they’d be getting a lighter but equally tough truck for their hard-earned dollar.

It didn’t take long for GM to respond, showing up with a round of ads depicting an aluminum Ford bed being punctured by heavy sharp items when dropped from excessive height. Critics of the day called them out on the fact 99-and-a-bunch-more-9s per cent of truck owners install some sort of box liner anyway. In a reversal, The General then began using aluminum in its own trucks, albeit not on the bed floor. They also now offer a carbon-fibre box which, absent its price, may just have been the answer all along.

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The Time BMW Harangued Front-Wheel-Drive

We’ve hurled verbal abuse at Munich over the past few months about its decision to endow variants of the new 3- and 4-Series with a grille doing its best Bugs Bunny impersonation . They’ve also engineered some driver engagement out of their machines in recent years, a claim we could not have made when this ad popped up fifteen years ago.

Here’s the idea: A rabbit or horse wouldn’t be as agile with most of its power being funneled through its front legs, geddit ? It’s rear-wheel-drive for the win, Bimmer was boasting. Now, these ads are a bit of internet lore, with more than a few people squawking they are the work of a Photoshop prankster and not from the offices of BMW’s marketing agency for the Turkish market . We’ll let you decide.

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What is irrefutable, however, is that BMW now makes a range of models based on front-wheel-drive platforms. Talk about eating your words. However, it must be said Munich is raking in money by easily selling every single vehicle it can build — including the front-wheel-drivers.

The Time GM Stepped Down to Step Up

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If you’re searching for an example of a company making fun of someone else’s very handy invention following what was surely a come-to-Jesus “ why didn’t you bozos think of that? ” board room meeting in which Sharpie pens and Swingline staplers were hurled around the room with wild abandon, look no further than the 2009-era Chevy ad shown above. In it, actor Howie Long sarcastically taunts Ford’s then-new tailgate step, calling it a “Man Step” in what’s surely a veiled reference to Man Bag.

Thing is, the Man Step was a great idea. How great? Not only did Ford refine the thing in future iterations, but GM itself introduced its own take on the concept with the MultiPro tailgate. Now fans of both brands can heave themselves into (and out of) their truck beds with greater ease. Turns out that actual innovation beats pretending someone else’s good idea is only good for unmanly weaklings.

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The Time Dodge Stopped Being Cute

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Anyone with a television in the ’90s knows of the ‘Hi’ advertising campaign produced by Dodge for its then-new Neon. With a set of round expressive headlights making for what some thought to be a precious face on its little compact car, most advertisements for the Neon were very fluffy and airy.

Contrast this with its replacement, the Caliber. Not merely enough to bear a weapons-grade name, the company decided to walk back years of cute-inspired advertising with a level of aggression not generally seen outside an MMA ring.

The ad above shows a cuddly focus group getting the bejeebers scared out of them by a Caliber, much to the delight of The Man. Hey, at least it isn’t this maybe-it’s-real-maybe-it-isn’t ad in which Caliber is suggested to have murdered a pair of cartoon characters, presumably with a barbed-wire baseball bat and roaring chainsaw.

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The Time Porsche Put Pen to Paper

When the gearheads in Stuttgart introduced the 918 Spyder back in 2013, it was rightfully hailed as a new take on the Porsche ethos. The task faced by its development team was to create a super-sports car for the next decade featuring a highly efficient and powerful hybrid drive, one which would go on to produce a whopping 887 hp and 944 lb-ft of torque from its mid-mounted V8 and electric motors.

It was, in the words of the accompanying press release, a result of “developing the car from scratch, appropriately beginning with a sheet of white paper.” What’s wrong with that, you say? Ask the Porsche marketing team in the ’90s, a group who spent many words and an untold amount of money on magazine ads declaring that the only reason one should start from a clean sheet of paper is if they have nothing worth keeping. Oops.

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The Time Olds Tried to Outdo the Explorer

All you young’uns in the audience may only remember Oldsmobile as a purveyor of beige sedans for those who think a game of shuffleboard is high adventure. There was a time, however, when the brand produced some of the nation’s most powerful muscle cars and had a swagger all its own. That’s a long way from minivans and gormless economy cars, eh?

Someone in the Olds marketing department apparently decided to attempt a renaissance of those days, using – of all things – the Bravada SUV, a badge-engineered Chevy S10 Blazer. In the salty magazine ad shown above, it compared itself to a Swiss Army knife while calling the Ford Explorer, a direct competitor, a melon baller. Ostensibly, this was in an effort to portray Bravada as a useful and rugged tool, with the Explorer taking the role as a single-use and pretentious item. It’ll escape no one’s notice that the Explorer is still around and doing brisk business in 2021, while Oldsmobile was relegated to the dustbin of history nearly twenty years ago.