Carbon fiber is strong and lightweight, making it a favored component in race cars and exotic road vehicles, and GMC is out to prove the material’s worth to the masses. GMC, you see, recently introduced the carbon-fiber CarbonPro bed for its mainstream Sierra full-size pickup, and the brand is using a new commercial to show off the truck bed’s strength. After all, it seems any time a pickup-truck manufacturer introduces a new material for its beds that isn’t steel—like when Ford‘s aluminum-bodied F-150 debuted—it feels the need to advertise how stout that material is.
To that end, the 30-second spot (below) airing during the NFL playoff games consists almost entirely of various projectiles being flung at the GMC CarbonPro bed, including a high-speed watermelon, brick, TV, and even a sofa! So, should your pickup-truck needs involve trips through weather systems dropping and/or hurling those items and other detritus, GMC’s got your bed covered.
Actually, we’re only half-joking about the weather system part. Before producing the ad, GMC went to Miami, Florida to witness how hurricane-force winds turn everyday objects into deadly projectiles. The brand then sent a bare CarbonPro bed, as well as the beds of its competition (presumably those of a Ram 1500 and Ford F-150), to Los Angeles, California to test how each box fares in collisions with potential projectiles from a hurricane by hurling such projectiles at it at simulated hurricane speeds.
Needless to say, the CarbonPro takes everything like a champ. A brick breaks into a thousand pieces, a watermelon unceremoniously explodes, and the couch bounces off the bed like a child on a trampoline. It’s quite a show, and we’re sure the ad will convince a few consumers to spring for the exotic bed. And just as Ford’s aluminum bed inspired General Motors to run ads showing it to be weak and puncturable—take it with a grain of salt, GM is a competitor, after all—GMC’s ad could spur Ford or Ram to exploit any CarbonPro weakness real or imagined for TV commercials of their own.
The CarbonPro Edition guise is limited to Sierra 1500 Crew Cab AT4 and Denali models with the short box, which sticker for $61,905 and $71,450, respectively. That’s a far cry from the base Sierra’s $31,195 price. Then again, what other truck’s bed offers a built-in juice business? Fling enough watermelons into the CarbonPro Edition’s bed and you might just find yourself with enough sellable juice to make up for its high cost of entry.
