When Los Angeles resident, Max Lanman, wanted to sell his girlfriend’s used Honda, he spared no expense (or so it seemed) to produce a mock-luxury car commercial.
Lanman, who runs a creative agency in LA, leveraged his network to make the commercial come together. The video, featuring a 1996 Honda Accord, a lovely actress, and her kitty cat, went up on Reddit and eBay the first week of November.
Even Lanman couldn’t have anticipated the attention his commercial would garner. On YouTube, it went top ten. As of this writing, it’s nearing the 4-million views mark.
Worth every drop of sweat and penny spent, the commercial produced by Lanman was the smartest idea for pushing a used car since the brutally honest Craiglist ad trend. (It’s worth a Google if you’re not familiar.)
Lanman Commercial
The commercial begins simply enough…
“My girlfriend needs to sell her car,” reads the caption. “To help her I made this commercial.” Lanman came up with the idea driving up California’s famous Pacific Coast Highway (PCH).
“I had this like loose idea that I thought was funny,” he told Autoblog. “Just this s****y car done as a luxury car commercial.”
The commercial features an actress, Anne Marie Avey, a friend of Lanman’s, acting as his girlfriend, although Lanman doesn’t actually appear in the commercial. It’s only Avey.
The premise is that this is the sort of car someone who doesn’t buy cars for self-image would buy.
“You don’t do it for appearances,” the commercial suggests as Avey pours coffee from a drip carafe belted to the passenger seat. “You do it because it works.”
On the seat of the car, and in one part on Avey’s lap, sits her longhaired cat; a cat who is now internet famous.
The rest of the commercial toggles between sweeping shots of the car taken from a drone camera, as the car carves the PCH, and images of Avey going about her life, dancing in the driver seat, sitting on the hood.
1996 Honda Accord
The backstory on the car is real. Lanman’s girlfriend, now his fiancé according to AutoBlog, was ready to sell her favorite car.
“… She’s driven this car from high school,” he told Autoblog. “She has a job and she could afford to buy a better car, but she drove it until this year.”
The Accord, nicknamed “Green” per the original paint job, had 141,095 miles on it when they shot the commercial.
It’s a nice car for being two-decades old. The engine is a four-cylinder VTEC, 2.2.-liter, a peppy one for Honda. The seats are beige leather. Shoot… It even has a sunroof.
Still, the bidding on eBay started at $500. It didn’t take long for the internet to push the bidding gas pedal.
The Internet Effect
Lanman published his video on YouTube and shared the YouTube link on Reddit. He also listed it on eBay, as mentioned.
The Reddit post blew up in an hour, and the YouTube views acted like someone dropped a concrete block on the like button.
The eBay listing? After bids crossed the $150,000 mark, eBay admins yanked the listing. They couldn’t believe someone would pay that much for a used Honda.
Lanman relisted the Accord on eBay. It’s no longer fetching what it was before, but those early bids may have been BS. As of this writing, the highest bid is $3,300.00, but bidding closes in a few days.
Anything could happen before then.
Is this the new face of selling a used vehicle? If one wants to get more than the value of a car, it seems she must be willing to let her boyfriend bully her into shooting a luxury car commercial.
It takes an internet to raise a car value.
Here is the short in all its glory: