The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Your Motoring Fantasies Uh, not applicable in New York

No, in the new ads you'll stay in that traffic-laden urban area in which you're already driving. But this time around, the fantasy is that driving the new car will give you some magic power over all the other people on the road. And on the sidewalk, for that matter.

We're talking, of course, about the TV commercials currently running for Nissan's (NSANY Quote) Infiniti and the Toyota (TM Quote) Camry.

In the Infiniti ad, to refresh your memory, a whole city street -- both cars and pedestrians -- freezes motionless as the AOD weaves through traffic. Only after the AOD departs the scene does the rest of the world dare to start moving again.

The more elaborate Camry ad features a young man tooling along in some urban area as he undergoes a Sorcerer's Apprentice-type discovery: He can make anyone outside his vehicle do whatever he's doing inside it. When he drops an empty coffee cup, a shopper drops a shopping bag. When he cuts a hard right turn, so do all the pedestrians. And when he backs up, so do all the people walking by and all the other cars on the street.

The message here is that if you buy this car, you'll have supernatural power over the people around you. Which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what actually happens when you drive your shiny new car into the city.

Sealed inside your vehicle, inching along crowded city streets at an average rate of 5.4 mph, you're helpless. You're stuck. You're fighting for parking spaces with all those other shiny new cars bought by people who saw the same ad you did. You're at the mercy of the elements, both natural and unnatural: the double-parked garbage truck, the rush-hour gridlock at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue, and the inevitable backup on the Cross Bronx Expressway.