Christopher White Revisits the Site of His Infamous Car Crash… But This Time the Car’s Driving Him

A commercial made by Mercedes-Benz in 1990 told the story of crash survivor Christopher White with the tagline “Engineered like no other car in the world". 

It was one of the decade’s most iconic ads, and most South Africans surely remember it. It even won South Africa’s first ever Gold Film Lion in Cannes. Launching the S-Class range of Intelligent Drive vehicles into the South African market demanded an advertising approach as groundbreaking as the cars themselves.

30 years later, Mercedes-Benz has revisited the infamous Chapman’s Peak crash. The same treacherous road, the same driver behind the wheel, but… an indescribably different drive.

 

The ad takes viewers through Christopher’s 1988 crash in agonising detail, breaking footage from the original ad up into jagged segments of action interspersed with Christopher remembering what he was seeing, feeling and thinking, along with media footage and comments from first responders to the accident scene.