Al Root

For many, Super Bowl LIX, or 59, is as much about the commercials as the competition. This year, watchers looking for car commercials will be disappointed. Few are planned.

The industry looks to be preserving cash while stepping back from aggressively pushing new electric vehicle offerings.

This year, Super Bowl watchers can expect to see a lot of drug and food-related commercials and ads for sports betting. Car ads will be few and far between. Twisters and Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell has an advertisement for Dodge Ram trucks. (Chrysler parent Stellantis owns Dodge.)

The commercial is a typical trucks-are-awesome ad. It's a departure from a 2023 Ram ad called "premature electrification." That commercial showed an electric version of the Dodge Ram due for sale in late 2024 or early 2025. The truck still isn't on sale. Stellantis delayed its release.

The 2023 Super Bowl wasn't a big year for car ads, either. There were more last year, in 2024, but foreign auto makers dominated with offerings from Volkswagen, Kia, Toyota, and BMW. Most of those ads were mainly branding exercises with some EVs featured.

The 2022 Super Bowl ads were "peak EV." General Motors used Michael Myers as Dr. Evil in its "EVerbody In" campaign. Polestar took shots at Elon Musk, and Chevy featured the electric Silverado in a Sopranos riff.

The 2021 Super Bowl was the start of the EV theme with GM's Will Ferrell-themed EV commercial. The 2021 Big Game also featured generic ads from Toyota.

These days, it seems as if car companies are shying away from the ultra-expensive Super Bowl ads. A 30-second ad in 2024 is estimated to cost $8 million. There are a couple of likely reasons.

For starters, profits are down. Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Tesla earned a combined $63.3 billion in 2022 operating profit. Those four are expected to earn about $42.4 billion in 2025, down about one-third from 2022 levels.

Another reason: EVs are no longer novel. In 2022, Tesla's operating profit was up more than 100% compared with 2021, and auto makers were feverously launching competing profits to try to catch Elon Musk's company.

Now, there are dozens of EV models that sell thousands of units annually. Models have proliferated while sales growth has slowed. Americans bought more than 800,000 EVs in 2022, up 66% compared with 2021. EV sales jumped almost 50% in 2023, but sales growth decelerated to just 7% in 2024. Americans bought 1.3 million all-electric cars, representing about 8% of all new vehicles sold.

It seems car companies are more apt to use the Super Bowl when money isn't as tight, and there are new things to advertise. That isn't the case in 2025.

Ford and GM spent about $6.1 billion on advertising in 2024, down a little from the header days of 2022. Tesla, of course, spends almost nothing on traditional advertising.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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February 09, 2025 13:03 ET (18:03 GMT)

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