They look so good in late-night TV commercials: Gadgets for your car that say they can fix scratches and nicks, revive your battery, even enable you to drive on punctured tires. But do they really work? Rossen Reports investigates in the second part of "As Seen On TV," a three-part series.
In Thursday's segment, TODAY national investigative correspondent Jeff Rossen and the Rossen Reports team tested three car products well-known from TV to see if they would really perform "As Seen on TV":
- Fix It! Pro claims it can fix dings, scratches and nicks on contact. The commercial shows a shopping cart banging into a car, so Rossen shoves a cart into his own SUV and applies the product to it.
- Mighty Jump Pocket claims it can jump-start your battery, but when Rossen drained a brand-new battery, he couldn't get the device to work. The Rossen team tried four of the devices on five different cars with the same result, even though all five cars were successfully started with jumper cables. The company that makes Mighty Jump Pocket told NBC News it has many "satisfied customers" and "stands behind" its product, and sent a lab certification. The company said it is "reviewing" the Rossen team's experience to determine "why it did not function." The company said it has a newer model, but it's more expensive, and the model the Rossen team tested is still for sale on the company's website.
- Bridgestone DriveGuard Tires are claimed to be engineered to take a puncture and then drive up to 50 miles. In the Arizona desert, the Rossen team had a certified mechanic put four brand-new DriveGuard tires on a car. Then Rossen drove the car over a spike strip like the one in the Bridgestone commercial and kept on driving to see how far the punctured tires would take him.
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FULL STATEMENT FROM VIATEK, MAKER OF “MIGHTY JUMP POCKET”:
"Viatek stands behind Mighty Jump Pocket as a safe, easy way to jumpstart a vehicle and charge portable electronic devices. We have sold hundreds of thousands of these units to satisfied customers with positive reviews. Attached you will find our UL testing report for reference. In order to better understand your experience with our product, we are reviewing the issue you experienced with the green LED and will conduct the necessary research to determine why it did not function as noted in the instructions. To date, our Customer Service team has only received 3 reports of this issue.
"It is also important to note that we are no longer manufacturing the model you tested. For 2016, we have made improvements to the circuitry and increased the boosting power from 3000 mAh in the MJ06 model to 4400 mAh in the new MJ07. We constantly strive to improve the customer experience with our product and garner feedback whenever possible."
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