The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned two Land Rover ads for depicting its car parking on the edge of the cliff using parking sensors to guide the vehicle.
Two viewers of the ad complained to the ASA, branding the ad as misleading as they understood that parking sensors warned of objects behind the vehicle but not empty space.
The British car company, Jaguar Land Rover, agreed that parking sensors do not warn the driver of empty space but nevertheless claimed that the side shots of the vehicle clearly showed that it was reversing towards a boulder, “the size and height of which would have been picked up by the parking sensors”.
The vehicle brand also stated that Clearcast noted that rocks were indeed shown behind the vehicle and that the technology had alerted the driver to them.
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Despite this, the advertising authority recognised that the rocks were “small” and only “incidental” to the scene, considering that some viewers would therefore interpret that to mean that the car’s parking sensors could recognise when drivers might be reversing near a drop.
“Because we understood the car’s parking sensors reacted to objects behind the vehicle, rather than to empty space such as a drop, and the rocks were not sufficiently prominent to counter that interpretation, we concluded that the ads misleadingly represented the parking sensor feature,” the ASA said.
“The ads must not appear again in the forms complained of.”
“We told Jaguar Land Rover Ltd to ensure their ads did not mislead about the functionality of their parking sensor feature.”
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