How They Made Those Toyota Tundra Super Bowl Ads

Yesterday, we posted a recap of the car commercials that aired during the Super Bowl. Overall they were pretty boring, with the best ones, promoting the Toyota Tundra, seemingly faked. We didn’t even notice the “actual demonstration” disclaimer at the beginning of each one. Come on, you didn’t think they were really going to drive straight off a cliff and trust the brakes, right? Well, umm … it looks like that’s just what they did.

On a company website, Toyota talks up the “actual demonstration” part of the ads and you can view both commercials in their entirety. There’s also a “making of” video for the seesaw ad which we thought would lead to the trailer flipping over. After seeing the “making of” video, you can guess the speed of the descent a lot more than you could in the finished commercial, which made everything seem a little faster. OK, one down.

Now, the speeding through a closing gate and braking before driving off a cliff commercial: How did they do that in an actual demonstration? According to Cindy Knight, marketing and communications PR manager for Toyota, the stuntmen did a lot of measuring and practicing before trying the real thing. The expert stunt driver also assured the company it could be done without incident. That doesn’t mean they weren’t a tad worried. Knight says she actually felt afraid watching them for the first time and she certainly wouldn’t have looked forward to fielding the press calls if anything had gone wrong.

In the end everything went right. Now we know how they did it.