Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're technically not supposed to submerge your iPhone; it voids their warranty. (It drives me mad that they do this in their advertisements, but I guess showing people doing things that would void their device's warranty is not false advertising…)
Lots of car commercials show them performing well in an accident, but nobody expects crash damage to be covered by warranty. Why must phones be held to a different standard?
I'm curious because most of the commercials with car collisions I could find are actually safety PSAs, not commercials for a specific make and model.
Aside from those, I found some examples of a brand showing the aftermath of a collision (very briefly) in an ad that skirts the line between being a PSA and a testimonial. Interestingly, most of these were from Subaru.
In any case, that's still quite far from the phone commercial, where the phone is put into a situation that voids the warranty, but no physical damage or any indication thereof is shown. A comparable car commercial would need to show a car in a collision (or compromising condition) that performs unrealistically and ultimately gets away completely unscathed.
My intuition would be that most car advertisers wouldn't want to associate their vehicle with such a scenario, nor set unrealistic expectations around safety critical product features, outside of maybe product placement in a James Bond film.
So, I'm very curious, do you have any examples of comparable car commercials that you could share?