Chevy Unleashes A Bear Attack To Call Ford’s Aluminum F-150 Wimpy

For all its competition, there’s long been a sort of Marquess of Queensberry rules among Detroit automakers about what kind of marketing punches should be thrown. Today, Chevrolet took to the Internets with a set of rule-breaking haymakers for its Silverado pickups targeting Ford’s aluminum-bodied F-150 as wimpy, even unleashing a bear on unsuspecting volunteers to prove its point.

Of the three videos posted online, the most effective features a real, non-CGI grizzly bear and a pair of cages — one made of steel, one of aluminum. The gentlemen subjects get to choose one cage when the bear emerges. Guess which one they run to?

The other two aim a bit higher. One, featuring long-time Chevy truck pitchman Howie Long, purports to put both trucks to a repair crash-test, ramming each in the side with a 1,700-lb. test sled at 9.1 mph. Four pickups from each brand were then sent to dealers for repairs; the aluminum F-150s went to Ford dealers trained to handle such jobs. Chevy’s claimed results: the F-150s cost more to repair ($7,720 vs. $5,965 on average) and while the Silverados were fixed in 18 days, the F-150s took a median of 53 days to fix. (In response to a question from Yahoo, Ford says the body parts themselves cost roughly the same versus the previous steel trucks, and that time to repair should be similar as well.)