/ Rob Beschizza / 6:37 am Tue Jul 13, 2010

Gary Numan performs "Cars" with an orchestra of actual cars.

It's an ad for the car battery used to run the setup. Next: "Are Friends Electric" performed on refrigerators with iffy compressors. [Die Hard] Update: Adam Sadowsky, president of Synn Labs, writes in to explain how they created the "corgan":
We're the same folks who built the Rube Goldberg Machine for OK Go's music video for "This Too Shall Pass". In fact, both shared the same director, the amazing James Frost of Zoo Films who brought us in to build the "corgan" for them. FWIW, we installed new horns in each car that we'd tuned to honk the correct note for their placement on the keyboard. This proved to be easier than modifying the stock horns already on the cars - not to mention easier to return to "normal" before returning them to the various owners!

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  1. It’s a very cute concept. But I would be a lot more impressed if they started 24 cars at the same time instead of one by one.

    I wonder if they auto-tuned the horns?

    1. T-Pain can also manually be tuned, but he insists on letting the machines do it for him.

  5. Maybe this will cut down on the number of people who think “Cars” was performed by The Cars.

    1. I’m afraid to think what he’s planning to perform “Down In The Park” on.

      That, or “Stormtrooper in Drag”

  7. That’s freaking awesome!

    Very clever marketing.

    Although, I can’t say it’s too impressive, because any fully charged battery should be able to sequentially start a car 24 times.
    Also, horns and lights use far less energy than a starter.
    And once the first car started, it’s alternator was feeding back into the circuit.

    Still very clever video though, and it had my full attention, so, good work.

  10. Clever marketing. At about :34 in there’s an amazing shot of the fog swirling around Gary.

  12. This was put together by Syyn Labs (www.synnlabs.com), the same guys who did the OK Go Rube Goldberg Machine video.

  14. Even though I know enough about electronics to know that the commercial shows absolutely nothing special about the battery and I’m generally cynical about advertising, I still find myself thinking this ad is kinda awesome. I loved the song as a teenager, though, so maybe that’s not a surprise.

  16. Yeah, when the second car is started, you can see the lights on the first one dim. It’s pulling the juice from the other cars from that point on.

    Still a fun idea, though.

  18. BTW, GARY NUMAN is performing the entire album ‘The Pleasure Principle’ in Seattle at Neumos this Halloween. (already bought my tickets)

  21. meh, it’s a standard party piece for Formula One teams to play the national anthem with the F1 car’s engine.

  24. I can see I’m not the only geek who noticed that only the first engine took real effort, and from then out everyone was jumpstarting everyone else. The final car was being jumpstarted by all the rest simultaneously.

    But have you considered this as a metaphor for torrent propagation when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know computers very well? I think it’s apt.

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