Life Was Once Cheap To Carmakers As These Gleefully Dangerous Press Photos And Ads Show

For as safety-obsessed as the world seems to be now, it’s easy to forget that once, not all that long ago, life was cheap. Or at least that’s how it seemed, because as far as I have been able to tell, nobody gave a brace of BMs about automotive safety until sometime around 1990 or so. When I was a kid, car safety was treated with something bordering on contempt, with new cars having their seat belts connected and then shoved down deep into the uncharted depths of the seats within the first few hours of ownership, to be forgotten, forever. That’s just how it was! And car brochures and press photos of the era reflected this in ways that seem kind of shocking to us now.

If you’re as miserably old as I am, you likely remember this era; being a kid, sitting perched on the armrest in the middle of a front bench seat, ideally positioned to be launched dramatically through the windshield if one of the neighborhood’s many free-roaming, white-dog-shit-producing dogs comes running out in front of the car. All of this in a car with no airbags or real crumple zones and crappy drum brakes all around.

Sometimes I come across an old brochure or press photo that encapsulates some of these old attitudes, approaches to safety that are not just forgotten now, but seen as impossibly irresponsible today. The one that caught my attention first was this press photo for the European version of the Volkswagen Type 181, which we knew as the VW Thing here in America:

Wow, right? In the early ’70s, things were very different. You could have photos that showed off how fun a car was by sticking in two extra people than it was designed to hold, and perch one of them backwards on the hood, with the windshield folded down, like they’re bothering/mildly harassing a co-worker at their desk.

You wouldn’t want to be in a big wreck in a Thing even fully belted into the seat, but this is another level. I mean, the Thing wasn’t really all that much worse than most ’70s cars, when everything was a deathtrap, but the thing was pretty stingy with padding, having an interior of mostly hose-off-able metal.

Point is, even a short stop would send at least half of those carefree teens flying like salamis launched from a catapult. That press picture also reminded me of this VW Iltis – the liquid-cooled successor to the Type 181 – press photo I saw in the great Volkswagens of the World book:

I have to admit, it’s the “dangerously skylarking” commentary that I really remembered, but, again, this is not the kind of thing any modern automaker would even come close to publishing today, even if it was completely slathered with “Professional driver on closed course; Do Not Attempt” warnings. This image brings to mind the title of a Nabokov book that’s not Lolita.

I suppose for obvious reasons, but fun/offroad/open cars tended to get more press photos with dangerous goings-on than other cars, because, let’s be honest here, danger is fun. It just is! Sure, it can end up in something that’s about as un-fun as can be, but that road to getting to that point sure is a good time.

Like, check out these Subaru BRAT brochure pics:

Those seats in the bed were a work-around to get around the Chicken Tax (see, with the seats in the bed, its a passenger car, not a truck!) and those seats had no belts, just a pair of BMX-style grab handles:

Driving around unbelted in the back of a pickup truck is pretty illegal in most places now, though to be fair, these pics do show the BRAT driving on a beach, which may be the safest choice in these pictures.

The Citroën 2CV also had some fantastic safety-be-damned promotions, like these two famous images. Up top, there’s seven people in that 2CV, and only two of them are even inside the car, which is being driven. But fuck it, la liberté, am I right? I’m sure once they hit 40 mph after a minute or so, they’ll drop down into the car. At least most of them, probably.

The one of the heavily-leaden 2Cv is, of course, another iconic image, and is also delightfully free of giving even the mildest of merdes about safety. That grandfather clock alone has to be pretty heavy, and it’s just jammed in there; a good bump and that thing would be pirouetting down the road like an acrobat on ‘shrooms.

Then out pours the birdcage and viola and rocking horse and wagon wheel and then we’ve got a legitimate pileup. Fantastic!

One of the most annoying things about our safety-obsessed era is how often children are invoked, usually to guilt you. I used to get so much shit taking my little kid in my old technically a deathtrap of a Beetle, but I mean, I get it. Nobody wants anything bad to happen to their kids, of course. I mean, now they don’t; when I was growing up, I’m not sure anyone really gave that much of a shit. I mean, this was normal:

Have a lot of kids? Shove ’em into the back of a station wagon, unbelted, and let them bounce around in there like an animation atoms in a gas. Good enough! They’ll be fine.

And, usually, they were! And if not, well, ads like this sure made it seem like your parents wouldn’t have been too broken up by things. Just read this Ford ad and you’ll see what I mean.

How is this a real ad? That quote from Robert Benchley – one of the wiseacres from the Algonquin Roundtable – is saying that traveling with kids is like “third-class Bulgarian travel,” and Ford seems to only disagree to the point that their top-notch station wagons “elevate travel with children to at least second-class!”

Did any parents before, say, 1990 actually want kids?

Oh, and this may be one of the creepier unsafe-kid-related car ads I’ve seen, for reasons that I sure as hell hope were entirely unintentional:

That’s from an Oldsmobile brochure, and I don’t actually think what we’re seeing here is all that unsafe. Sure, there’s not a seat belt to be seen, but at least the kid is in the car and surrounded by thick foam cushions and the finest, richest velour a GM parts supplier could craft.

What’s weird about the picture is how, um, funereal it all looks. The kid’s dress, the gloves, the flower – there’s something deeply unsettling about the image. And the caption just makes it all so much worse:

“Judy, how do you like Daddy’s new 98 Regency… Judy? … Judy?”

The repetition of the name, that’s the part that gets me. I don’t like that at all.

Man, this started out so fun, and now look where we are. Oy, I’m sorry about that.

Let’s liven it up a bit with this other little reminder about how fast-and-loose we used to be with, you know, disaster:

I think we’ve mentioned this before, but the ’57 Cadillac Eldorado featured a little wet bar in the glovebox! With magnetic tumblers and a bottle for your booze! This is from the days when people said you probably shouldn’t drink and drive, but what could a couple of shots of bourbon from your dashboard bar hurt? I mean, you probably drive better that way!

I think we can all agree that absolutely none of these brochures and ads and press photos would be acceptable today. And maybe that’s a good thing? Less fun, though. Maybe a lot less fun. I’m not sure I appreciated the all-encompassing not-give-a-shittery when I was living through this era, but it feels positively magical now.

Dodge Once Made Taillights So Bad They Tried To Sell You Optional Better Ones: Today’s Taillight

I Bet You Don’t Know The What The First Car Crash Tested By The NHTSA Was

The Cadillac Eldorado’s Rear Side Windows Open In A Weirder Way Than You Think

The post Life Was Once Cheap To Carmakers As These Gleefully Dangerous Press Photos And Ads Show appeared first on The Autopian.