These Were the Best Car Ads of the 2022 Super Bowl

If you're an American then there's a pretty good chance you watched the 2022 Super Bowl, or Super Bowl 56 if you're counting at home. The Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20 in front of an estimated 117 million pairs of eyeballs. But while many fans were in it for the football, many car fans were equally interested in what happened between the on-field action.

We're talking about commercial breaks. More specifically, whether the estimated $7 million automakers spent on 30 seconds (yes, you read that right) of airtime was worth it. Thanks to the magic of analytics, we've been able to compile data on which ads gave automakers the most bang for their buck. This data comes from within Edmunds and gives us a good idea of which ads made you curious enough to pull your phones out and do a little research.

The best Super Bowl car ads — by the numbers

The numbers you see here are what happened on our site yesterday compared to a normal Sunday at the same time. Big numbers mean some cars that are normally totally obscure to car buyers were now front and center. A good example of this phenomenon is what happened to Polestar. After its 30-second ad ran during the Super Bowl, the Polestar 2's traffic jumped by 1,732%. All that really means is that the automaker's actor-less, voiceover-less ad that took shots at both Volkswagen and Elon Musk clearly got some of your attention. And why not? The Polestar 2 is an EV we don't have a hard time recommending here at Edmunds.

Another huge jump (and we don't just mean in the commercial) was for the 2023 Nissan Z. The world is still eagerly anticipating the next Z car, and Nissan hasn't even officially announced pricing for its new sports car. Even so, its ad blew up traffic for the Z by over 3,000%, making the Z one of the most popular car pages on Edmunds for a while on Sunday. That's a bonafide win for Nissan and the ad clearly did what it was supposed to do: Get you interested in buying a sports car. Maybe you'll ditch your SUV-filled dreams and get into something with a little more zing the next time you're shopping around.

Chevrolet ran a Sopranos-themed ad for its new Silverado EV, but the all-electric truck wasn't the only car to get a boost. Sure, the new EV Silverado got the lion's share of new interest, but even the standard Silverado received revived interest, too. Maybe the ad will help Chevy steal some sales away from the Rivian R1T and the eventual Ford F-150 Lightning. Only time will tell, but what we know for sure is just how interested we are in the battle for electric truck supremacy.