Honda’s Most Iconic Ad Borrowed a Little Too Much From 1987 Art Film

Honda’s “The Cog” commercial is the kind of ad that lives rent-free in your head for two decades. Two minutes of meticulously choreographed chaos—Accord parts spinning, rolling, and careening into each other with balletic precision—all leading to a pristine 2003 Honda Accord station wagon materializing at the end. It’s a masterclass in automotive marketing theater. It won a Gold Lion at Cannes in 2003. It’s the kind of thing you’d show someone to prove that car advertising used to be actually creative.

There’s just one problem: Honda basically stole the idea.

The Setup: Seven Generations of Accord, One Dramatic Redesign

By 2003, the Honda Accord had been shuffling along since 1976—27 years of incremental evolution. The seventh-generation redesign that year was supposed to shake things up, and Honda wanted its marketing to match that ambition. So the automaker’s creative team dreamed up “The Cog,” a Rube Goldberg-style spectacle that would demonstrate the precision engineering of the new sedan.

The concept itself wasn’t new—Rube Goldberg became famous enough to get his name in the 1931 Merriam-Webster dictionary, and the cultural touchstones of chain-reaction contraptions were everywhere from the Milton Bradley game Mousetrap (1963) onward. But Honda’s execution was undeniably slick. Except for stitching together two separate takes and some lighting adjustments near the end, the whole thing was shot practically—no fancy CGI, just actual Accord components arranged across a massive set with military-level precision.

The Accusation: Swiss Artists Cry Foul

Enter Peter Fischli and David Weiss, two Swiss artists who’d created their own celebrated 30-minute Rube Goldberg film back in 1987 called “The Way Things Go.” When they saw Honda’s commercial, something clicked—or rather, something suspiciously clicked in exactly the same way their own work had.

Fischli and Weiss weren’t petty about it. They didn’t claim to have invented chain-reaction contraptions. What they did claim was that Honda had lifted specific scenes directly from their film. The smoking gun? Scenes where tires mysteriously rolled uphill, an effect achieved through carefully hidden weights in both videos. It’s the kind of detail that stops being coincidence after you point it out.

One member of Honda’s creative team eventually admitted the whole thing: yes, they’d seen “The Way Things Go,” and yes, that tire-rolling-uphill moment was directly inspired by it. Not homage. Not “influenced by.” Directly taken.

The Outcome: No Lawsuit, Just Awkwardness

Here’s where the story gets interesting—or depressing, depending on your perspective. Despite having a legitimate beef, Fischli and Weiss never filed a lawsuit. Why? Because copyright infringement cases in advertising are notoriously difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to prosecute. The legal burden is brutal. So instead, they went public with their concerns and watched as Honda, once caught, acknowledged its debt to their earlier work.

That was apparently enough. The artists seem to have decided that a public admission of guilt from one of the world’s largest automotive companies was worth more than years of legal warfare. They got their vindication without the legal fees. Meanwhile, the ad that partially plagiarized their work went on to win one of advertising’s most prestigious awards.

The Larger Problem With This Story

What’s genuinely infuriating about “The Cog” situation is how little it mattered. The 2003 Honda Accord moved 397,750 units that year, making it the second-best-selling car in America. It was named Japan Car of the Year. Car and Driver put it on their 10Best list. The plagiarism accusations? A blip. A footnote. The art world noticed. Advertising critics noted it. The general public? They saw a cool commercial and bought the car.

This is the paradox of corporate creative theft: the consequences are weirdly minimal. Honda got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, admitted it, and faced basically no meaningful penalty. No recall of the award. No legal settlement. No revenue impact. Fischli and Weiss got their names attached to the conversation around Honda’s most famous ad, which is something, but it’s not the same as getting paid for your intellectual property or having the dominant narrative credit you for the original concept.

The real legacy here isn’t that Honda’s advertising was innovative—it’s that Honda proved innovation in corporate America often means “borrow liberally from actual artists, and if you get caught, just say sorry.” The Accord itself was fine, respectable even, though it never quite cracked the “greatest Japanese cars” conversation according to enthusiasts. But that commercial? It’ll always be remembered as the one that was just a little bit too inspired by something that came before.

Sources: Jalopnik