BMW Trolls Volvo In Its Own Hometown With Massive M5 Ad — Are The Billboard Wars Back?

The billboard seen above has been put up in Gothenburg, Sweden, the city that houses Volvo's HQ. The ad shows the new M5 with the words - ‘A Fast Car Built In Gothenburg' in a veiled insult at the Swedish carmaker whose cars do not feature an engine with a displacement larger than 2-litres.

BMW's new troll billboard may seem odd to many considering the M5 hasn't ever been challenged by a fast Volvo before. With 592bhp and 750Nm of torque on offer to all four wheels, the M5 is one of the fastest sedans around with a 0-100kph sprint time of just 3.4 seconds and a top speed of 306kph.

However, the billboard is actually being used to promote the new Need For Speed Payback video game which was released on November 10. NFS Payback allows gamers to drive the new M5 in the virtual world of Fortune Valley and the German super sedan was one of the cars on the cover of the game. Also, NFS Payback was developed by Ghost Games, a video game developer owned by Electronic Arts and located in Gothenburg.

This isn't the first time that BMW has used billboards to taunt its rivals. In 2009, Audi and BMW took potshots at each other through billboards in the city of Santa Monica in the American state of California. Audi started the war by advertising its ‘entirely new A4' with the words ‘Your Move BMW.'

BMW's response was swift and decisive with the Bavarians showing an image of the M3 on a billboard near Audi's ad with a single word - Checkmate. A few days later, after seemingly finding no suitable reply in its sedan section, Audi came back swinging with its (then) new V8 hellion, the Audi R8 supercar.

The new billboard showed off the front silhouette of R8 supercar with the Audi badge in the limelight and the words, ‘Time to check your luxury badge. It may have expired.' While BMW did not reply to the ad, it was soon aiming its troll division at other rivals, the results of which were quite spectacular, to say the least.

DriveSpark Thinks!
BMW may have just reignited the Billboard wars of the late 2000s as it looks to promote its new M5 performance sedan. However, don't expect Volvo to ignore BMW's latest trolling attempt with a punch or two of its own, which we do hope happens as it would mean another round of the Billboard battles.