Advertising: No people - BMW's got a silver machine

In the world of machines, increasingly intimate things go on. We know it, don't we? Whether we want to or not. They talk to each other, they respond to each other. Bleeping and tweeting, they're wavelengthed up to each other. It's positively macho with the big machines fondling the little ones, presenting their little bottoms just like real politicians.

In that great jungle of innovation, nothing could be more alpha-maley than a new car. A new German car. Where I live, the silvery German car is the dominant beast. There are others - crouching Frogs, posey Italians, the occasional over-sized Range Rovers - but still the main mode, the hegemonic type, is any kind of German brute.

So it stands to reason that when the Germans bring out a new car, there's a rumour in the forest and a lot of anthropomorphic tributes. Or something like that.

The new BMW 5 series launch commercial is all about a magic silvery world without people to mess up the picture.

It starts with bleepy sounds as background to a deserted office where the machines are asserting themselves; computers are booting themselves up. There are sinister dark puddles spreading in a deserted library (reminiscent of that oil pond installation they had in the first Saatchi Gallery - it's all dead arty).

Then the oil creeps upstairs (like the staircase in Sketch, most ambitious of London restaurant designs). Then there are great shapes gathering in dark waters and then the car rises from the waves, just like Venus.

The backdrop to this tremendous event is a riverbank full of tidy silvery buildings - a Perfect World Canary Wharf of a place but clearly hygienic and unpopulated and deeply Germanic.

The printers start printing. The ink runs off the printout in little black drops that collect like scary black blood stranding down furniture and shutters (of course, it's black and white).

It's tempting to make a German car launch all arty and Metropolis-y. It's tempting to make it Futures Past-ish and a bit opaque. And of course it's right for BMW. This kind of thing rekindles the myth very effectively, with TV spending lower, I suspect, than Hyundai or Daewoo.

Peter@sru.co.uk