“The monster of the midway. Unleash the beast yourself.”

An ad for a carnivalesque horror film? A description of the latest death-defying roller-coaster at Canada’s Wonderland?

Nope, it was a tweet from BMW Canada a few weeks ago hyping their new M8 Coupe. In the accompanying picture, the car, which starts at $123,500, was parked askew in the middle lane of a road not unlike Lake Shore Boulevard as it passes underneath the Gardiner Expressway. Windows tinted dark, its narrow headlights glowed beside its aggressive front maw. It was idling, ready, but for what?

The midway in this case is the city, the place we live, and the beast is a bull in a china shop. Consider the conditions city cars mostly drive in. The road is rarely as empty as depicted in the picture and full of things that may get in the way of the beast, such as pedestrians, strollers, slow moving older people, people with mobility issues, cyclists, pets, delivery people, traffic cops, construction workers, students, and so on. You know, all the stuff in a crowded city.

An aggressive ad like this is irresponsible in the face of the number of people being killed and injured by drivers here, including people in other cars, though those outside of steel safety cages are far more vulnerable. So much so it may be time to treat automobile companies like cigarette manufactures if they’re going to encourage this kind of reckless aggression.

BMW is not alone in using aggressive driving as a marketing tool, but it’s a shame for a company with such a long tradition of well-engineered cars. High-performance cars have always had a relationship with the track and corporate racing heritage, but our cities are more crowded than ever.

Often violent films and video games are accused of influencing behaviour, but those are fictional portrayals. Advertising is different: it’s aspirational, showing us a lifestyle we should, ostensibly, be striving for with the help of whatever product is being sold. The perfect kitchen. The cleanest floor. The most fashionable clothes. The fastest car.

What this ad and others like it are suggesting is that driver aggression is normal and should even be encouraged. In Toronto and other cities we’re familiar with the unleashed beast though, and it’s a killer.

Earlier in October, BMW Canada tweeted out what they called a “fan photo” taken by “Terry” of the cheaper M2 model parked in Toronto’s Underpass Park on Lower River Street. As it’s a fan photo, presumably Terry drove the car up onto the sidewalk and into the park himself. There is a pedestrian walking a dog behind the car suggesting this was a clandestine photo shoot to capture the park’s cool graffiti on the concrete pillars holding up Eastern Avenue. Are the roads so clogged with cars that spaces reserved for pedestrians are needed for marketing purposes now?

Notice the fine print on automobile advertisements that often say something along the lines of “professional driver, closed track or road.” The fantasy that car companies are selling isn’t just the car itself, but the wide-open conditions. There are usually no other cars present, pesky things that also get in the way of an unleashed beast. Indeed, even other drivers might also get annoyed if a beast was unleashed in the lane next to them.

Imagine for yourself what an honest car advertisement would look like. In the GTA it might involve crawling along with 16 lanes of traffic on the 401 or perhaps the ever-present slowdowns on the Don Valley Parkway around Eglinton Avenue or on the QEW at Ford Drive. This is the reality of driving here: there are too many cars that no unleashed beast can do anything about. It’s as if the aggressiveness of ads are overcompensating for the gridlocked reality.

Car advertising isn’t always like this. In 2000, a VW Cabrio commercial called the “Milky Way” became famous because of its beauty. Set to “Pink Moon,” a song by the late 1970s British troubadour Nick Drake, four young people in a convertible drive down a twisty road under the moon and stars. When they arrive at their destination, a raucous party at a cottage (the beast, if you will), they look at each other and choose to keep driving instead. They preferred beauty and ignored the beast. You can find the ad on YouTube and see it for yourself.

While cars themselves have become much safer for their occupants, more and more pedestrians are being killed by them. We don’t live on a closed track.

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Car companies boast of safety features, the ones that keep the occupants safe. What if a company like BMW pushed its precision engineering and control instead, boasting of how nimbly and delicately it could move through a crowded city?

One has to hope drivers don’t want to kill, and every driver has to get out of the car and walk at some point, so why not appeal to this humane instinct. It’s irresponsible to do otherwise.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef