I am going to call a technical foul on Subaru for its recent TV commercial entitled “Stick Shift.” It shows a father instructing his teenage son in how to drive a stick shift, while the boy’s twin brother sits in the back seat. The car lurches forward as the father pleads with his son to put the car in second gear. The twin in the back accuses his brother of wrecking the car. The message is that Subaru’s are built tough enough to handle training a teen driver.
By showing a sibling in the back seat during driving instruction, the commercial shows conduct that is illegal in several states, and that most of the driving instructors I have talked to say is a bad idea. They say that a driving lesson should be a driving lesson, undistracted by siblings or any other passenger. The ad also implies that there is nothing wrong with having a sibling as a passenger, which is not so. As the saying goes, “Do you want to trust your most precious cargo to your least experienced driver?” Recently in Minnesota, one of a teen driver’s three younger sibling passengers was killed on the way to school. Lastly, how many teens today drive a stick shift, and isn’t a stick shift one more challenge that a new driver doesn’t need?
