So these two guys on TV are rolling down the road, chatting about this and that and just generally chillin' when out of the blue comes this red pickup. Car meets truck. Tires shriek, metal bends with a concussive thud, glass shatters and sprays. The two guys fly out of their seats like flour sacks, faces planted into the spreading white of the car's airbags.

The violent crash isn't part of a shoot'em-up film or a cop show. It's one of two much-debated commercials from Volkswagen of America for its Jetta sedan.

The German automaker says it is selling the durability and safety of its product; the crashes are followed by shots of the passengers walking away, dazed but uninjured. Viewers, however, might be forgiven if the ads jolt them off the couch much like the two guys in the commercial.

Love 'em or hate 'em -- and VW says it's gotten strong reactions both ways -- the Jetta commercials represent new territory in car advertising, a line crossed. After steering clear of safety pitches for decades, carmakers began to tout safety in earnest in the 1980s with the advent of family-friendly minivans and government crash test ratings, says Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Auto Safety. The ads went from static comparisons to more explicit imagery in the 1990s, with driverless cars and crash test dummies slamming into walls in test labs.

But safety and advertising pros cannot remember any car company going so far as to show people being banged around in such shocking and violent circumstances as VW has. BMW even declined to air an ad five years ago because its slow-motion footage of a crash dummy being crunched in a crash was deemed "too scary," says Claudia Caplan of Mendelsohn Zien Advertising in Santa Monica, Calif., which handled the campaign.

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