Safety Groups Decry Power Pitches

An ad from traditionally staid Volvo shows its S40 sedan racing and crashing in a video game. (Volvo)

"When we were talking to a younger audience, they said, hey, we know Volvo is safe . . . tell us something else about the brand," Maloney said. The something else was performance, and Volvo asked the makers of the Xbox game RalliSport Challenge 2 for permission to use game footage in its commercial.

The entire ad is computer-animated, a fact that Maloney said gives it license to be more outrageous. A few viewers have complained about the reckless driving, he said, but most have understood that it represents video game play and not the real world.

Today's consumers, saturated with video games and movie special effects, have a heartier appetite for such over-the-top images in advertising, said Brian Moody, an automotive expert with Edmunds.com. People also have higher expectations for their automobiles than ever before. While enthusiasts had limited choices during the muscle-car craze of the 1960s, today's technology makes most every vehicle a potential muscle car, from entry-level coupes such as the Ford Focus and Honda Civic to mighty pickups and SUVs.

It's not just horsepower that gooses up all those new cars and trucks, said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. It's handling, lighter and stronger materials, traction control, stability control -- "so many factors have changed," he said.

The addition of so much technology to improve driver control makes the vehicles safer even as they go faster, he said.

In fact, Toyota's Michels argued that greater speed and performance are themselves safety features. "There are plenty of times when a squirt of horsepower is real handy," he said.

O'Neill disagrees. "That is absolute and utter nonsense," he said. "Why is it then that performance cars and sports cars are the ones that have the most crashes and more insurance claims? . . . Those speeds and capabilities get you into trouble, they don't get you out of trouble."

The Governors Highway Safety Alliance has written Runge and asked him to do something about the trend, and invited him to a forum later this year along with the insurance institute. Adkins said the alliance doesn't want Runge to ban advertising or place limits on carmakers, but that the group wants him to use his position to influence the industry to tone things down. The group also wants the Bush administration to fund efforts to step up speed enforcement, noting that many states have had to cut back on state troopers because of lack of money.

Runge is "adding speeding to the list of concerns, but setting speed limits and enforcement is the domain of state governments," NHTSA's Tyson said. "There are only a limited amount of things we can do from Washington. We can only work with the tools that are given to us."