From shock absorbers to shock-horror - Hugh Linehan wonders if it's the end of the road for twisty-scenery car adverts

A FALLEN jockey curls on the turf as hooves thunder perilously close;

a refugee cowers in fear as attack-dogs snap at him at a border crossing; rioters flinch and huddle from the water canon and batons of charging police. What are these images advertising - life insurance? Amnesty International? No, it's a commercial for the Volkswagen Polo, the smallest model in the German car manufacturer's range. The message is simple, if rather ominous - if you huddle up small, you might not die, so buy a Polo.

God be with the days when car commercials consisted of a few pretty helicopter shots of the object of desire going through its paces in some romantically mountainous location.

In a way, the Polo commercial is a logical extension of other Volkswagen campaigns based on the idea of safety - notably the Passat advert of a couple of years back, featuring an angelic little girl on the mean streets of New York, with Billie Holiday singing God Bless The Child on the soundtrack. It's an effective strategy in an era when public spaces are increasingly seen as threatening, and the car can be portrayed as a mobile extension of the safe, sealed suburban home.

Playing on people's fears and prejudices can backfire, though. Rover's current UK campaign ran into serious trouble when one of the adverts for its 600 series was severely criticised for insensitivity and bad taste. The commercial in question showed blindfolded Western hostages being rescued in a diplomatic exchange with turbaned tribesmen. Among those who attacked the commercial for trivialising the ordeals of hostages were Terry Waite and the relatives of four Europeans who have been held hostage in Kashmir since 1995. Rover withdrew the commercial last month, putting a major dent in its campaign at the most crucial time of the car advertising year in the UK, the run-up to the new registration plates in August. Another commercial in the same series, still running, shows a bomb-disposal expert speeding in his Rover to the site of an unexploded Second World War bomb. What's most no table about both of these adverts, apart from their somewhat dubious premises, is that it takes a while to figure out what's actually going on - it's difficult to see anything at all through the filters, smoke and jump cuts.

If anyone should be blamed for this, it's Volvo - the Swedish manufacturer was noted for years for its boring crash test dummy adverts, but broke new ground with its Twister campaign, which featured sexy photographers chasing tornadoes in their rugged Swedish chariots. Twister has now been supplanted by the even more implausible Stuntman. It's all ridiculous stuff, especially for a car which is rarely required to do anything more demanding than pick up little Nigel and Samantha from tennis practice, but as an exercise in pure style, the Twister advert in particular is rather exhilarating, and won a bagful of awards. It also helped Volvo to begin moving away from its image as the Arsenal of car manufacturers.

These are all British commercials, produced by London-based advertising agencies for the UK market, but inevitably they spill over into Ireland. Chris Cawley of Cawley Nea, Volvo's advertising agency in Ireland, sees Twister and Stuntman as a highly successful change of direction for Volvo, but is critical of the number of commercials at the moment that are "technique-led rather than content-led". Cawley is particularly critical of the Polo advert which shows a woman falling over on a busy city street. "They're trying to make a point, but it's very inappropriate imagery to use."

For most people, a car is the second biggest purchase of their lives, after buying a house, so they don't want to take any risks. Until fairly recently, most car adverts recognised this by sticking to tried, tested and conservative marketing strategies, emphasising solidity and reliability, with just a hint of testosterone for the ageing boy racer.

"For years they all looked the same," agrees account director Mark Hogan of Peter Owens Advertising, who handle the Volkswagen campaign in Ireland (Volkswagen, like Rover and most of the other marques, runs separate campaigns in Ireland and the UK). "You would have been hard-pushed to try to remember which one was which," says Hogan, who cites Renault's long- running Papa And Nicole commercials, and its current "talking car" campaign for the Megane (surely the most irritating car advert currently doing the rounds) as examples of other ways in which advertisers are moving away from the old mountain-roads-at-sunset routines.

But is there a move towards shock-tactics in car adverts, and in advertising generally? The current Murphy's Stout campaign, with that unfortunate old Japanese gent tossing his turnip till the day he dies, certainly has a mean streak to it. Chris Cawley believes "it's very much a London trend. Advertising in general is going through a revolution and, as other elements in the marketing mix become more important, TV advertising is becoming self-indulgent. To me, advertising is a means to an end. If the creative team is looking for a vehicle for social or cultural comment then they should become fine artists or poets."

Joe Clancy of Bates Advertising Ireland, who handles Rover here (but who is also keen to point out that Rover's current TV campaign is produced by a company in the UK for that market), believes "it's easy to shock, but it's open to question whether that actually helps to sell the product". He points out that even Third World charities are moving away from traditional shock images of hunger and sickness in their advertising campaigns.

Almost invariably, these big-budget campaigns are produced for a UK audience, says Hogan, who believes that the Irish market is very different in some respects from the British one. "I think cars are taken more seriously in the UK than in Ireland," he says, pointing out that from an Irish perspective the most shocking British car commercials of all may be those Volkswagen adverts, the ones which reveal just how much cheaper a Golf is on the other side of the Irish Sea.