These days, car adverts are all basically the same. A car will drive through either a super-modern glassy cityscape or some untouched wilderness somewhere, and there’ll be some interspersed shots of somebody paragliding, or some running horses, or a breakdancing flashmob. At the end, a disjointed voice will say something like ‘ignite your emotionality’ or ‘engage your senses’, and we’ll sigh in despair and go back to looking at questionably-maintained E46 BMWs on Facebook marketplace.
This wasn’t always the way. Back in the ’70s, Fiat wanted to show off how safe and durable its cars were, so it brought in a professional stunt driver to put them through absolute hell.
The stunt driver in question was Rémy Julienne. The Frenchman was best known for co-ordinating the stunts of the iconic Mini chase in 1969’s The Italian Job, as well as doing plenty of the driving; and working on a series of Bond films in the ’80s. In the interim, though, he hooked up with Fiat for some of the best TV advertising we’ve ever seen.
In one ad, a Fiat 127 gets driven along the top of a moving train, jumping between carriages. In another, we see an X1/9 get yeeted off a steep hill, tumbling end-over-end, before Julienne casually drives off in the now-crumpled sports car.
A 131 jumping between rooftops? A 124 Spider pulling the classic car chase move of jumping through a gap in a moving train carriage? Another 131 just being casually driven off the top of a waterfall, for some reason? It’s all here.
Perhaps our favourite of these ads, though, is one for which Fiat seems to have somehow borrowed quite a bit of London to film a nine-minute promotion for the little rear-engined 126. It involves jugglers. And show jumping horses. And a very frantic, flute-heavy soundtrack. None of this makes any more sense if you watch it.
It’s hard to imagine any cars being advertised like this now – partly because modern cars, big and heavy and laden with complex electronics, probably couldn’t withstand most of this; and partly because we suspect some health and safety people might have something to say.
All of this deserves a watch, if nothing else, as a display of raw driving talent, though. It shows Julienne, who died in 2021, at the top of his game, taking some very ordinary cars and doing extraordinary things with them. Certainly beats a shot of somebody longboarding alongside some oddly-shaped hybrid crossover.
