The Cog (TV Commercial)

The Cog was a dramatic television commercial for the Honda Accord, made (almost completely) without any CGI or trick photography. It was created in 2003 by the London office of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy.

The two-minute commercial appears as a single, long camera pan along a Heath Robinson / Rube Goldberg-like chain-reaction arrangement of parts from the car but is in fact two stitched together, the join being at the moment where the muffler/exhaust box rolls across the floor (this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change). The commercial took 606 different takes to complete, and only minuscule CGI was used, simply for fixing the lighting on the final car's window. The cars featured, one disassembled for the pieces and the other on the trailer, were two of the six hand-built pre-mass production Accords.

The sequence starts with a transmission bearing rolling into a synchro hub. This sets off a cascade of movement; windscreen wipers 'walk' across the floor, valves roll down a bonnet and carefully weighted tyres roll uphill. The commercial ends when the central locking on a complete Accord is triggered, causing the boot to close, tipping the car off a balanced trailer and into a final pose in front of the camera. The voice of US author Garrison Keillor queries "Isn't it nice... when things just... work?", while the song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang plays in the background.

The version of the advertisement that originally aired in Australia had an alternate ending that replaces the keyless-entry remote with a seatbelt retractor, which retracts toward the car and allows it to roll forward instead of the boot offsetting the balancing of the ramp. (This version of the ad began at the point where the exhaust muffler rolls across the floor.)

According to Snopes, "in May 2003, filmmakers Peter Fischli and David Weiss threatened legal action against Honda over similarities between the Cog commercial and The Way Things Go, a 30-minute film they produced in 1987 involving '100 feet of physical interactions, chemical reactions, and precisely crafted chaos worthy of Rube Goldberg or Alfred Hitchcock.'"

In 2006, Honda UK continued the crafted theme with a new advertisement for their Civic using a choir as Foley artists.