Fuel economy? Safety? Advanced technology? When it comes to selling its full-sized Tundra truck in the U-nited States of America, Toyota has essentially said, "fuck that shit." (my paraphrase)

An excerpt from the NYT story:

The campaign for the Tundra, which began on Sunday with a pair of spots during the Super Bowl, is one of the few instances of Toyota’s strategy emulating that of its Detroit-based rivals.

“If you want to be a player in the full-size truck market, you can’t be subtle,” said James D. Farley, Toyota’s vice president for North American marketing. “We couldn’t out-emotionalize our competitors. What we could do is outperform them, and we think that’s emotional.”

The Tundra ads are certainly not subtle. For one ad, the company built a five-story steel seesaw in a desert. A Tundra pulling a 10,000-pound trailer speeds up the incline, then the seesaw swings down and the truck quickly brakes to a halt before it reaches the ground. The other spot shows a Tundra speeding toward the edge of a cliff before screeching to a halt inches from disaster.

The stunt driver hired by Toyota described it as “the scariest commercial he’d ever done,” Mr. Farley said.

In a third national ad, workers toss bags of manure into a Tundra, described by a voice-over as having “the biggest honkin’ bed.” The spot concludes by saying the truck “answers the age-old question of how to put a ton of ... whatever ... in a half-ton bag” referring to the traditional carrying capacity of standard full-size pickups.

This is from a company best known for refined ads like a 1989 spot depicting 10 Champagne flutes stacked on the hood of a Lexas LS400 sedan, unaffected by the smooth revs of the engine. During last year’s Super Bowl, Toyota showed a Hispanic father explaining the gas-electric hybrid engine of his Camry sedan as a metaphor for the benefits of learning both English and Spanish.