Mercedes-Benz has always had an uncomfortable association with the Third Reich, but a group of film students from the Film Academy in Ludwigsburg, Germany think they’ve found a way around that.
For their final thesis the students made a fake commercial for Mercedes’ Collision Prevention Assist, an automated braking system that can stop a car from low speeds if it detects an obstacle, such as a pedestrian.
That makes the commercial’s tagline, “Detects dangers before they come up,” very appropriate. However, the students decided to take things one step further.
The commercial features a Mercedes C-Class driving through the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, where Adolf Hitler was born. You can probably see where this is going.
Yup, the future mass murderer doesn’t get spared by Collision Prevention Assist, adding yet another thread to the going-back-in-time-and-killing-Hitler meme.
Mercedes called the video, which generated over one million Youtube and Vimeo hits in its first three days online, “inappropriate,” but has not tried to get it taken down.
