2 Volvo Ads Rev Up Controversy

Volvo advertising suddenly appears stuck in reverse.

Just one day after Volvo pulled an advertisement for what company officials conceded were misleading statements over how well Volvo cars can stand up to giant trucks rolling over them, a spokesman for the Swedish car maker said Tuesday that yet another of its newest TV spots is raising the ire of abortion rights activists.

That commercial features a video of a fetus--inside a woman’s body--that appears to be waving at the camera. An off-camera spokesman asks, “Is something inside you telling you to buy a Volvo?”

That has upset some who favor abortion rights. “My gut reaction is the ad is ridiculous,” said Renee Schwalberg, a board member of the San Francisco-based Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights. “It definitely gives a fetus a greater autonomy than it really has. It’s clearly a distortion.”

Although Volvo has received complaints about the ad from both abortion rights activists and abortion foes, it says it will continue to run the spot created by the New York ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves. “We have no plans to pull the spot,” said Robert Austin, manager of public relations at Rockleigh, N.J.-based Volvo Cars of North America. “Corporately, Volvo does not have a position on abortion.”

Meanwhile, Volvo has pulled from television and magazines an advertisement that shows a so-called monster truck attempting to crush a row of cars with only a Volvo car remaining intact. Following a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas, where the ad was filmed, the company ran an advertisement Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, U.S.A Today and 19 Texas newspapers that acknowledged the demonstration in the ad was rigged.

“The advertisement . . . inaccurately characterized the event as a car-crushing exhibition when in fact it was a dramatization of the actual event,” said an open letter from Joseph L. Nicolato, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars of North America. “It was never the intention of Volvo to produce an advertisement that deceived or misled.”