Kids love crashing toy cars. It’s a well-known fact of life. Whether launching them off of walls or simply smashing them into each other, put a child in a room with a bunch of toy cars and a collision is pretty much guaranteed to happen.
But what happens when you give a child two cars that can’t be crashed?
Mercedes-Benz wanted to promote the anti-collision technology that lies inside its vehicles, and needed to reach an audience with very high safety demands: the family market. To do this, the car manufacturer created some nifty miniature vehicles that were impossible to crash and handed them out to children.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go down well.
Using super strong opposing magnets behind the grille of the toy cars, it was impossible to make the cars crash into one another. No matter how intent the kids were on causing a collision, they simply couldn’t cause the vehicles to make contact.
Mercedes-Benz’s technology uses radar systems to detect other vehicles on the road and, when necessary, applies the brake. It’s not an easy concept to communicate in an engaging fashion, but the animated responses of the children involved in this experiment certainly gets the point across!
Catch all the frustration in the video below:
It reminds us of Fiat’s Parking billboard, another car brand that used motion sensor technology in a creative way to show off a product’s benefits. Using children to inject an element of fun, Mercedes Benz’s brand experience perfectly paints the difference between child-like imagination and adult danger.