The Super Bowl Underlines the Fact that EVs have Gone Mainstream

In case you missed it (and judging by its 112 million viewership total, few did), electric vehicles made a HUGE impact at Super Bowl – especially in the $6.5 million per 30-second commercial realm.

I recently recapped the Top 5 EV ads from Super Bowl 2022 in our online blog section, and I’d rather avoid too much redundancy, but I’d like to summarize two specific ads that epitomize where EVs are as a technology and their mainstream dissemination, along with a new vehicle along those lines.

The first, from GM, brings back nearly entire Austin Powers gang – Mike Myers, Mindy Sterling, Seth Green, and Rob Lowe – in an ad that intentionally plays on Dr. Evil’s famously outdated views and goals.

Anyone who’s seen Austin Powers knows the good Doctor’s aim – to take over the world, seemingly for no other reason than he’s a (figurative) mustache-twirling supervillain, but since the ‘90s (and definitely since Dr. Evil’s heyday in the ‘60s), climate change has become a serious concern.

Therefore, it’s prudent for the villains to save the world so there’s something worthwhile to take over – and they do so by calling out GM’s Ultium EV platform, one of many spokes (albeit, an important one) in the forthcoming electric vehicle wheel.

And the other commercial is a bit more on-the-nose.

Jason Bateman takes us on a journey from caveman days through the present, highlighting the growing pains of each new technology – like how inaccurate early maps were or the simplicity of the first telephones.

And all of that swings back around to electric vehicles, which in the earliest iterations – tiny, cramped “smart cars” – definitely weren’t one-size-fits-all. But as Bob Dylan famously said, the times they are a-changin', and the modern slate of EVs (including the Hyundai Ioniq 5) look a lot more like gas-powered autos.

Speaking of which, Mercedes is pushing a luxury EV sedan, the AMG EQE 53 4Matic+, which underscores the fact that high-performance EVs are here to stay. In the future, if you can even find internal combustion engines, beefy stats won’t be the deciding factor between electric and gas-powered vehicles.

As for the AMG EQE 53 4Matic+, its all-wheel drives provides 617 horsepower and 701 pound-feet of torque (or 677 hp and 738 lb-ft of torque with the optional AMG Dynamic Plus Package), and it can go zero to 60 mph in 3.4 seconds, with a top speed of 149 mph with the add-on. Its range will likely be somewhere in the vicinity of 275 to 321 miles per charge, though we’ll learn more soon.

All of these developments point to the fact that EVs have well and truly arrived in mainstream society.