Why a 2003 Ad for Saturn Cars Makes the Case for Public Transportation

A car ad that shows all of the space cars take up! Screenshot from YouTube

The ad portrays a number of auto-related scenarios—a car backing out a driveway, bad traffic on a highway, children on a school bus—with no cars involved. Instead, we see hundreds of people moving slowly forward on an overpass, children filing behind a guy dressed as a bus driver. At the end of the spot a voiceover drives home the underlying point: "When we design our cars, we don't see sheet metal. We see the people who may one day drive them."

"Sheet Metal" is a curious but very informative 2003 automobile advertisement. Saturn Corporation, which no longer exists (its parent company, General Motors, brought its life to an end in 2009, the year that followed the crash, the revelation of GM's exposure to the financial crisis, and the beginning of the Great Recession), was the client for this ad, which many in the industry consider to be "one of the most imaginative car spots" of its time. Here is an accurate description of the spot What we see in the ad, however, is the amount of space cars take up in a city. What surrounds each driver is a lot of wasted space.

The advertisement is supposed to show us the corporation's primary concern: not the car, but the people in the car. How touching. How considerate of them. How original this kind of thinking is. But maybe there is too much originality in this ad, because what we end up seeing is a very strong argument against the car altogether, an argument that in many ways is like the one once made by General Electric, an argument that exposes the rationality of public forms of transportation.