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Some humourless dork on Pistonheads reports Ling Valentine to the ASA - and she loves it

Topics:  Ling Valentine, Ling's Cars, DeLorean DMC-12, Pistonheads

Some humourless dork on Pistonheads reports Ling Valentine to the ASA - and she loves it

Matt Hubbard
Speedmonkey
April 12, 2013

Ling Valentine owns www.lingscars.com, a car leasing company and website. Ling is a colourful character who often stages publicity stunts to promote her business.

Some of these stunts involve advertising new car deals of obviously fake cars for a joke. One was a Reliant Robin (Reliant went bust in 2002) and another was a DeLorean DMC-12 (DeLorean went bust in 1982).

But somebody on the Pistonheads forums decided that they didn't understand the joke (not for the first time) and reported Ling to the Advertising Standards Authority for advertising the DeLorean, who also didn't understand the joke and found the advert in breach of the Advertising Code.

Fortunately for Ling she treated the whole thing as a massive publicity coup. Also fortunately the ASA's actions are no more than a slap on the wrist: "The claims must not appear again in their current form. We told Lingscars.com to ensure they only advertised cars on their website which were available for hire."

So, according to the ASA, Ling is not the messiah, she's a very naughty girl.

Ling has published all correspondence with the ASA here. You can find the ASA Adjudication here.

Does anybody involved with Pistonheads have a sense of humour?