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...Or a Chevy. Or a Chrysler. Or a whatever... Apparently no other automobile manufacturer exists.
In many shows, all the automobiles visible on screen (or at least in the foreground) are provided by a single manufacturer, usually as a Product Placement deal. In exchange for such a lucrative freebie, the manufacturer usually demands that no competing vehicles appear in the program, and the producers happily comply.
In addition, all characters own brand new late model cars, no matter their income level.
This can also apply to other reasonably-expensive household items; personal computers, for instance.
Note that owning a Ford is not a bad thing per se, unless it's a Pinto...
Examples:
- Chevrolet was one of the original sponsors of Bewitched, and subsequently almost every car visible on the show for the first six seasons was a Chevy. (And, reportedly, the show's theme music was a minor variation on the jingle being used by Chevrolet at the time!)
- Likewise My Three Sons; in some seasons, the closing credits run over stock footage of then-new Chevys on the open road.
- This was spoofed in the movie Superstar, in which every car that is seen throughout the entire movie is a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle.
- All the computerized cars (except that crazy twin motorcycle thing) in Team Knight Rider were Fords, thanks to a generous deal made with the producers. This alienated a number of original fans, who were also Pontiac fans.
- Ford made them another deal for the 2008 Pilot Movie. There was a five part ad for their new in-car computer system running throughout, the new KITT is an excuse to show off the new Shelby Mustang, and every car used by good guys and bad is a shiny Ford product.
- I Dream Of Jeannie, Pontiacs.
- Mister Ed, Studebakers.
- Averted and played with in the Lake Wobegon monologues and books by Garrison Keillor. Both Fords and Chevrolets are present, and the brand you buy is entirely a matter of what religion you are. In fact, going out of town to buy an import (or even a Chrysler product, presumably) is practically grounds for excommunication and exile (not to mention begging for a potato up the tailpipe).
- In American Dreams, the older brother returns from Vietnam and the dad gives him a new Mustang. That's very period, since this is supposed to be take place in the year the Mustang came out, and it was a must have for young men right from the beginning. But this one looked weird. And as the lighting came up, it was revealed as a brand new current model, not the original, an anachronistic example of product placement. This was echoed by the next commercial, which showed a young man returning from Iraq getting the same model from his father. The message seemed to be that once again, a generation of brave boys deserves our product.
- That same season, there was an episode of Alias in which Sydney yells "quick — to the F-150!"
- A fifth season episode features Jack commenting on the quietness of a new Ford.
- In Heroes Everybody Owns a Nissan — most prominently the Nissan Versa that Hiro and Ando rented, which they refer to conspicuously and which appears as a front-page advertisement in the downloadable comic series. The season 2 premiere has a 5 minute sequence where the cute cheerleader Claire is given a brand-new Nissan for her birthday. Way to keep inconspicuous, Mr. Bennet; yes, you could certainly afford that on a copy jockey's salary.
- In 2007's Transformers movie, almost all the Autobots transform into GM products (the sole exception being Optimus Prime, for aesthetic reasons). Meanwhile, a Decepticon transforms into a Ford.
- Meanwhile, it's still part of a franchise that came into existence purely to sell toys. If there wasn't Product Placement, it wouldn't be Transformers.
- Worth noting: Fans of the classic Transformers were initially upset that Bumblebee wasn't a Volkswagen Beetle like he was in the cartoon. However, this is because VW refuses to allow their cars to be used as weapons in media, attempting to downplay the fact that the company once manufactured vehicles for Nazi Germany.
- The director also expressed concern that the mostly silent Bumblebee would be mistaken for Disney's Herbie.
- The mostly forgettable Drowning Mona was set in a town that was used as a test market by the Zastava corporation. As such, everyone in town drives a Yugo.
- The I, Robot movie, where everybody drives an Audi. Futuristic Audis with spherical wheels...but still Audis.
- In Tomb Raider Legend, all cars are Jeeps, the bad guys get black Commanders, and one of Lara's allies gets a yellow Wrangler. All bikes are Ducatis. All the vehicles have very detailed texture maps from photos of the real deal, and nary a dirt spot or scratch on them. This makes them seem slightly out-of-place in the setting; the human characters, despite the developer's best efforts to squeeze stylization out in favor of bland realism, are sill kind of cartoonish.
- Not to mention the film series' aggressive use of Range Rover.
- This editor would thought 24 — where everyone in America drives black Fords — would've been one of the most obvious choices.
- Truth In Television — until the Dodge Charger started to make inroads, some 90% of passenger cars used by US law enforcement agencies were Ford Crown Victorias.
- Of course, now that Hyundai is the show's main sponsor, only the villains drive Fords.
- Iron Man is just chock full of Audis. Egregious since, while Audi are undoubtedly an excellent manufacturer of luxury cars, they don't exactly cater to the billionaire playboy market — why the hell would Tony Stark whizz around LA in an Audi rather than a Ferrari or a Bugatti?
- He likes the Audi? As Top Gear shows us, even people who could theoretically cruise around in supercars if they cared to will sometimes find less expensive but still high-end or nice vehicles more comfortable and thus are more likely to drive them. He'd only bust out the really high-end stuff (e.g. the aforementioned Ferrari) for really special occasions.
- Most Clive Owen films made this century feature him driving BMWs. This can be traced back to his role as the mysterious Driver in The Hire, a series of shorts made by... guess who? BMW.
- Ironically, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy makes this same assumption with Ford Prefect, one of the main characters whose alias is a joke based on this, and lost on most of the book's modern readership.
- Most likely because in a world of Zaphods and Trillians, Ford is a downright ordinary first name, and the Prefect isn't exactly a familiar model nowadays.
- The joke was also lost on US audiences, where the Prefect was sold in tiny numbers as a specialty import in The Fifties. The French translators changed the name to "Ford Escort" to preserve the joke; there is no adequately explored reason for this not having been done in the American version.
- The Thunderbirds movie went so far as to replace Lady Penelope's trademark pink Rolls Royce with a futuristic pink Ford. That the movie featured very blatant (and painful) Ford product placement throughout was bad enough...
- In Mad Max, All Bikers Are Hells Angels... and ride Kawasakis.
- All of the cars in The Matrix Reloaded were made by General Motors. The underground garage that the heroes get their car from is populated entirely by Cadillacs.
- Leading up to the recent two films, the James Bond series didn't actively participate in this. However, starting with Die Another Day, the producers signed Ford up as their primary vehicular sponsor and as a result, pretty much everything on screen is a Ford brand. James Bond in his Aston Martin Vanquish fights Zao in his Jaguar XKR. Meanwhile, Jinx rolls up to the big gala event in her Ford Thunderbird as Gustav Graves gets chauffeured around in a Range Rover. Oddly (but unsurprisingly), this blatant shilling on the part of the Ford Motor Company was kept in Casino Royale. It's not quite as blatant or noticeable this time around, at least.
- Note that during the period CR was in post-production, Ford sold off Jaguar and Aston Martin. (Will Bond be driving a Focus in the next movie?)
- Note way back with Goldfinger, nearly everybody owns a Ford - Tilly Masterson drives a Mustang, the CIA guys drive a Thunderbird, Oddjob drives a Country Squire, a Continental, and a Ranchero to haul said Continental when it's been cubed...and there's also an Aston-Martin and a Rolls...
- NCIS has the main team use an ever changing set of Dodge vehicles throughout the seasons. Seasons 1 and 2 has the Intrepid, Season three onward had the Charger, while between them was the Stratus. Slightly averted in the fact that the character's personal cars are a wide range of makes, from a Ford Mustang to an old Morgan.
- All jeeps in the Jurassic Park are Fords. By the second movie, though, it seems that In Gen got a better deal with Mercedes.
- Except for the actual Jeeps (Wranglers.) Hammond mentions them by name, when he sends out "Gas Jeeps" to retrieve his grandchildren, which are stranded in the electric-powered Ford Explorers when the power goes out.
- In the book, the vehicles are Toyota Land Cruisers, which is justified as the park is being bankrolled by Japanese investors. When writing the sequel, Chrichton obligingly changes the vehicles to a Jeep Wrangler and an Explorer, only to have the movie change sponsors again.
- In the live-action film version of The Cat In The Hat, everybody drives a yellow or lime-green Ford Focus hatchback... except the mother's boyfriend, who drives a yellow Thunderbird. In fairness, they do both sort of mesh with the set design, and VW Beetles might have been just too obvious.
- In School of Rock, all the parents' cars are Volvos. Probably done for laughs, not Product Placement, unless Volvo itself has a sense of humor about its' stereotypical owners.
- Perfectly averted in Burn Notice, the car sponsor is Chrysler leading a variety of cars from a normal Chrysler or jeep to a 1960s' Dodge charger (Also included Daimler vehicles before some messy economics split the companies)
Non-car Examples:
- An example of Personal Computers like said above: watch a movie with laptops in it. Any laptops. There is an 80% it was made by Apple, despite their roughly 10% market share in Real Life. This is actually not because of product placement; The same computers used as props are also used in the production of the show/movie, as Macs have very good media editing capabilities.
- Not strictly true anymore, on either count. This Troper is seeing more Dell laptop placements, and there's not really a difference in capabilities between PC and Mac anymore.
- While their products are seen in so many movies and TV shows, Apple claim that they do not pay for this. They are suspiciously secretive over how this ubiquity is achieved though.
- Maybe it's simply because Macs look cool.
- During the original mutlicolored iMac era, virtually every character in Newspaper Comics owned one.
- On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, every computer, laptop or desktop, is a mac.
- Sort of. The computers in the computer lab were Compaq Prolineas, but the screen graphics were from a Mac. The production crew created the graphics on a Mac and fed it to the monitor. The Compaqs were strictly props.
- Lampshaded in Demolition Man — "You missed the Franchise Wars. Now, all restaurants are Taco Bell."
- Similar to the cars mentioned above for Casino Royale, very nearly everything is a Sony product. Cell phones are Ericssons, laptops are Vaios, and the resort uses Blu-Ray players for their security footage. This carries over-toned down somewhat-into Quantum Of Solace.
- As a real-life example, Everyone Owns an HP at IKEA: Hewlett-Packard computers are shown as props in the photo layouts in the IKEA catalog. Plastic replicas are placed in the showroom displays in IKEA stores.
- Every time this troper notices a known brand of fixed-line phone in an American show, it's almost always a Panasonic. Obviously a very popular brand. Or maybe sponsoring many shows.
- Non-racing game example: All vehicles (parked in the parking lot or being given away as casino prizes) in Rainbow Six: Vegas are Dodge.
- When the G8 leaders meet in 2012, their laptops are all identical Sony Vaios. This creates a rather jarring effect, to this Troper anyway, perhaps enhanced by the fact that the leaders were basically cardboard cut-outs anyway.
Racing games
- Game developers cannot simply contact manufacturer X, pay some money and implement the cars in their game. There always seems to be a hidden clause if you deal with major manufacturers. Naturally the best way to circumvent this is to simply make up your own cars.
- It is very clear that Audi only does package deals: when a game has an Audi in it, you get a lot of different Audis. The worst examples are the normal Audi A4 (not even RS 4) in Need For Speed Most Wanted and the S4 convertible in Test Drive Unlimited, a game supposedly about supercars.
- Test Drive Unlimited isn't just supercars, it also has average cars and luxury cars (like the A4).
- It seems manufacturers exert pressure on game developers to adjust the ranking of the cars to their wishes. The Audi R8 is considered a "class A" supercar in both Need For Speed Carbon (where it is the end boss car, despite you driving a Porsche Carrera GT at this point) and Undercover. Needless to say, it fails to live up to expectations. The same applies to the Nissan GTR, which is mysteriously considered a competitor to a Veyron in Underground and is used by the city's 'elite' police force despite being pretty much an evolution of the Skyline.
- To be fair, the Nissan GTR is a genuinely fast car which can match a Ferrari F430 Scuderia on the track. It's perfectly reasonable for 'elite police', considering that it has an unsurpassed ratio of performance-to-price.
- The Lamborghini Murciélago is always in a faster class than the Gallardo even though the two are comparable in RL if you get one of the special editions of the Gallardo. The ingame result is that the Gallardo destroys cars in its class and the Murc is often too slow in its faster class to compete. Examples: NFS Most Wanted, Test Drive Unlimited.
- In racing games there are often cars no sane person would choose to race with because they are obviously useless at it or just too expensive for their performance. This is because the developers have to pay, say, Ferrari for the rights to implement their cars and crash them. Meanwhile manufacturers of cars the audience might actually buy will pay the developers for product placement. So you end up with cars like the Cadillac and various Mercedes vehicles in NFS Most Wanted, the four-door Hyundai in NFS Underground 2, the three different Lexus cars in the DLC for Test Drive Unlimited, the ubiquitous Camaro and Challenger prototypes in NFS Carbon, NFS Pro Street and GRID, that bizarre Chevrolet convertible pickup thing in Test Drive Unlimited, ...
- Of note, many car companies that pay for the Product Placement also seem to include a 'no damage' clause. If there's a racing game that features a specific manufacturer, there's a pretty good chance that those cars will never show damage. You can drive into a wall going 100 mph, and that car will still look brand new. Can't have your advertising goods looking sloppy now. Want to actually crash cars in your game? Then you have to pay. EA had to do so in order to have a damage model in the squad cars of Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Carbon, where the medium and top tier police cars are the Pontiac GTO and the Chevrolet Corvette.
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