Top Gear's Top 9: viral car adverts

“Isn’t it nice when things just work?” That was the tag line for Honda’s Cog advert for the seventh-gen Accord in 2003. Although it was only broadcast 10 times in full, author Mark Earls credits it with increasing Honda’s revenue by nearly £400m.

Another Honda ad. The Impossible Dream was part of Honda’s wider ‘Power of Dreams’ campaign. It featured a single actor and myriad Honda vehicles from a monkey bike to F1 cars and powerboats, all set to ‘The Impossible Dream’ sung by Andy Williams. Rousing stuff.

Can’t recall this series of US ads for the MkV VW Golf GTI? We implore you to head straight to YouTube. Aired in 2006, the three adverts parodied MTV’s Pimp My Ride. Swedish actor Peter Stormare is hilarious as three modified cars are destroyed and replaced by GTIs.

In Ford’s advert, a pigeon flies towards a parked SportKa before being punted into the road by the car’s bonnet. The line ‘The Ka’s evil twin’ appears and that’s that. Or would’ve been, had an ad with the SportKa’s sunroof decapitating a cat not been leaked. Animal rights activists were not impressed.

Renault needed to make a splash when it launched the second-gen Megane hatch. The car had a rather controversial rear end, so Renault deployed the song ‘I See You Baby’ along with lots of shaking bums. The UK’s TV watchdog slapped a ban on the ad being played before 7:30pm.

Audi’s recreation of the iconic horse’s head scene from The Godfather was shown during the Super Bowl in 2008. Actor Alex Rocco wakes up covered in oil and finds the front bumper of his old school luxury car in his bed, before the ad cuts to the R8 making its escape.

Volvo roped in none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme to perform his iconic splits between two trucks back in 2013. The stunt was to demonstrate Volvo’s new dynamic steering tech that apparently made the FM truck easier to drive – Van Damme only needed one take to nail it.

In early 2014, Jaguar premiered its first ever Super Bowl commercial to help launch the F-Type coupe in the US. The 60-second ad featured Sir Ben Kingsley, Tom Hiddleston and Mark Strong explaining why Brits made the best villains in Hollywood movies.

BMW’s series of eight short films featuring Clive Owen as The Driver were directed by some of the world’s biggest filmmakers, but the greatest has to be Star. Directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Madonna, the real star of the show is the E39 M5 hero car.