Automotive Ads and Brochures

ab348

I find myself wondering what Overland was trying to get across when they described their Red Bird as being like an "English type car". Does that mean it broke down often and would not run in wet weather?

Mr_Shiftright

Not sure what they mean by "an English type car", unless they were referring obliquely to Rolls Royce. Overland was, at one time, a highly successful company and they pumped out a lot of cars.

ab348

Another ad from the '60s that I always remembered, more for the nomenclature they used than anything else. Never heard motor oil described that way before or since.

Mr_Shiftright

Mouse Milk: -- It's a slang term, not used so much anymore. It means something like "you get very little for a lot of exertion or effort".

fintail

I like how the high mileage Marmon owner took it in for painting every year. Finishes have came a long way in the past century, or even in the past 30 years.

ab348

Here's another example of Fitz and Van taking considerable artistic license in their 1960s Pontiac illustrations:

ab348

fintail said:

I like how the high mileage Marmon owner took it in for painting every year. Finishes have came a long way in the past century, or even in the past 30 years.

Painted with a brush most likely as well.

sda

Reviewing these ads I am reminded about the large number of independent vehicle manufacturers early on. The depression, and later economic forces really thinned out the pack. Still going on today!

omarman

sda said:

Reviewing these ads I am reminded about the large number of independent vehicle manufacturers early on. The depression, and later economic forces really thinned out the pack. Still going on today!

And Detroit plans to cut car production to stay in the car biz. I wonder if Japan Inc is going to stop building passenger cars.

ab348

sda said:

Reviewing these ads I am reminded about the large number of independent vehicle manufacturers early on. The depression, and later economic forces really thinned out the pack. Still going on today!

It was still a pretty new industry and in the early years the barriers to entry were not huge, hence the "assembled car" that was made up of largely purchased component parts. In some ways it was like the advent of the clone PC makers once those component parts became readily available. Over time some get bought up, some fail and a few grow and do well.

berri

I don't think Japan Inc will get out of cars yet because they have such a wide worldwide market position. Also, as long as Camry and Corolla maintain their quality and reliability rep, there will still be a market for them here as Detroit exits.

benjaminh

ab348 said:

Here's another example of Fitz and Van taking considerable artistic license in their 1960s Pontiac illustrations:

I really like the car art from this era.++

benjaminh

It's still 1923 in the pages I'm looking over in the Saturday Evening Post. Even though very few people had college degrees back in 1923 it seems like some of the ads back then had more respect for the intelligence of the car buyer than the average car ad today.

benjaminh

The circulation of the Post was over 2 million in 1923, and I'm guessing that an average copy might have had as many as five readers before it was thrown away. If that guess is more or less on target that would mean that each ad had a chance of being seen by maybe as many as ten million people—out of a total population of about 110 million at the time.

benjaminh

1923....

benjaminh

1923.

benjaminh

1923

sda

Ben—thank you for sharing these ads, and your son for the program that enables these to be easily enlarged. Father, son effort, how rewarding!

Mr_Shiftright

The problem with assembled cars is that they were generally not cost-competitive. You got a decent car but there were equally good cars at a lesser price from the "Big Five or Six"

Yes, cars were often painted by brush until I think the late 1920s. If you had a high quality brush and took your time, you could actually have yourself a very nice finish.

ab348

Probably wouldn't see this in an ad today:

benjaminh

ab348 said:

Probably wouldn't see this in an ad today:

When I was a kid a a family down the street from us owned one of these amazing cars. Before the parents passed away they gave the car to their daughter. I'm still in touch with her today and she's so proud of it that she sometimes posts pix of it on fb. Maybe worth some money now?

texases

One of my first car memories was one of those Mercuries with the ‘backwards’ rear windows in the neighbor’s driveway. 

berri

Those breezeway rear windows started with the 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser and 58 Lincoln Continental. They took off in 63 when you could get a mass product line Monterey with it and lasted just a few years. Not sure it worked near as well as advertised, A/C was getting a little more common, they could be a problem in snow, rear sunlight could be a hassle for rear passengers in summer, and the big killer may have been no real usable parcel shelf. Made the cars stick out a bit though and upped sales in the mid 60's for awhile.

benjaminh

4-wheel brakes were clearly the big deal of 1923. Were they hydraulic already?

I wonder if the Pierce-Arrow engine was the only one with four valves per cylinder....

Cars are starting to get more in the way of styling. The Franklin looks slightly sleek for the time....

omarman

2,700 Indian dealers will supply you with the exact counterpart of the machine that Baker rode in his record-breaking trip. (2,700 Indian dealers in 1914?)

Your stock Ford could do the same if fitted with the same equipment. (Driver not included.)

Think what you could do with the Gardner in your town. (Was Larry Gardner still in Cleveland in 1924?)

benjaminh

1923. A Marmon in Yosemite National Park.

Mr_Shiftright

Most cars didn't have 4-wheel hydraulic brakes in 1923. The first car to have them was in 1921--the Duesenberg. Chrysler was one of the first early adapters.

benjaminh

1923. As the Sunoco ad points out changing your oil regularly and on schedule—then and now—is probably the single most important thing you can do. The cost is so low compared to the other costs of car ownership. The Overland's seats would fold down into a bed! Nice feature imho. If you double click on that one and blow it up to max size you can see a little drawing of that. $750 for an Olds seems like a very nice price. I imagine that a lot of people back then used their thermos to bring some soup for to work lunch. Coffee was probably also essential.

Mr_Shiftright

Willys-Overland produced about 196,000 car in 1923, and a whoppin' 315,000 in 1928. By 1934 the total production was 7,916 !! The Great Depression hit them really hard.

benjaminh

Mr_Shiftright said:

Willys-Overland produced about 196,000 car in 1923, and a whoppin' 315,000 in 1928. By 1934 the total production was 7,916 !! The Great Depression hit them really hard.

Yikes. I had no idea they fell so far and so fast. What a disaster.

Mr_Shiftright

Pierce - Arrow: 1929/ 8,386 cars 1937/ 167 cars

Durant/Star: 1923 / 105,288 cars 1932 / 1,135 cars

Marmon: 1929/ 22,323 cars 1933/ 86 cars

imidazol97

Thanks to @benjaminh and ab348 and others for the ads. I have been enjoyig the ads that were posted months ago. I noticed then how the ads were educational about how the modern (then modern) car worked and was being improved.

Even here the ads for other things tie into the attitudes in the country shown in the car ads. Some of the ads moved from facts to puffery. Just like today's ad--selling the sizzle and not the steak.

It's marvelous to be seeing these things.

benjaminh

1923 The third ad is of a Wills that shows men with tall top hats inside the car. My wife and I were trying to describe to our kids (ages 22 and 17) that back then some cars were (I think) almost c. 6 feet tall.

benjaminh

Mr_Shiftright said:

Pierce - Arrow: 1929/ 8,386 cars 1937/ 167 cars

Durant/Star: 1923 / 105,288 cars 1932 / 1,135 cars

Marmon: 1929/ 22,323 cars 1933/ 86 cars

Grim almost beyond belief. How depressing things must have been for those who worked at these (and other) car companies during the early 1930s.

benjaminh

1923. The Lincoln Memorial had just been finished at this time.

benjaminh

The Lincoln Memorial looks like a Greek or Roman temple, but its foundation is made out of massive amounts of concrete and steel I-beams.

benjaminh

1923: Perhaps one of the first car ads suggesting that a family have more than one car....

Mr_Shiftright

No foul. The Romans used concrete, too!

benjaminh

Based on this Rickenbacker ad I'm guessing air filters were quite rare at this time. But I'm also guessing that in a few years they would be found in a lot of cars....? And what about oil filters?

ab348

Oil filters were optional on some cars into the 1950s IIRC.

Mr_Shiftright

VW Beetles had an oil cooler and a funky little screen in the crankcase, but no oil filter that I can recall. You could add one, of course, from the aftermarket.

benjaminh

For the Saturday Evening Post time machine we're getting to the end of 1923....

benjaminh

Farewell to 1923....Another car that converts to a bed, which was convenient for camping—and probably for traveling salesmen. In this year 1948 was the far off future, and the young couple aged (and gaining a few pounds) now looks to retirement as they still use the fine Parker fountain pen given this xmas. As a kid looking at old National Geographics from the 1950s with Parker pen ads I gained an anachronistic like for fountain pens when I was in grade school in the early to mid 1970s. By that point Parker pens had gone to a plastic cartridge system which was less messy—but I still got some blue ink on my fingers quite a lot.

benjaminh

January of 1924. The first image shows sales of Auto Lite, but also tracks closely the overall economy. There's a collapse of demand in 1920-21 during the severe recession of those two years, but then the economy comes roaring back. The all-new Chrysler was a big deal in 1924, and if I was buying a car back then this is probably the one I'd get. It was fairly advanced in terms of its engineering for the time.

benjaminh

In early 1924 the reporter from the Post saw new dangers already emerging in Europe, including in Soviet Russia. Over the previous year there were several articles I didn't post speculating about what was going to happen in the USSR after Lenin's death. Balloon tires were the new big thing. If I'm understanding balloon tires correctly, they had lower pressure than previous tires leading to greater ride comfort. The last ad in this set is worth blowing up by double clicking imho because it details some of the advances of the new Chrysler, which for the time was a fast car. You could go 70 mph in a Chrysler in early 1924—although I would want to do that!

benjaminh

Iirc synchromesh transmission wasn't invented until a few years after this. Does anyone here know what it's like to use a transmission that isn't a synchromesh?? I assume that grinding gears is impossible to avoid, which sounds so painful. I mean it's an unpleasant noise, but just thinking about the damage to those beautiful gears that the grinding sound represents is cringe-worthy. Imagine a huge traffic jam in 1924 with hundreds of cars grinding their gears! That's probably a sound that hasn't been heard since about 1940 or so—and so it's pretty much out of living memory....Still the non-synchromesh transmission can't have been that difficult to use since tens of millions of people did it. And the non-synchromesh probably didn't grind gears as badly as I'm imagining, because otherwise transmissions would probably fail at a spectacular rate after a few years of use. Hmmm....

benjaminh

I mentioned that I'd probably get the new Chrysler if I was buying a new car back in 1924. Anyone else care to say what car or cars they might have be interested in back in 1923-24?

sda

I believe one learned to double clutch to make for a smooth quiet shift of gears. I know my 62 Galaxie had a non synchro 1st gear. I had to either be at a full stop to put it in 1st or double clutch to downshift to first if the car was moving, say 5 mph. Boy it made a nasty sound if not done correctly! The 62 Galaxie was my first car that I bought from a friend for $100 in 77.

ab348

Maybe we can blame Willys-Knight for planting the seed that led to Lexus and their "December to Remember" campaign with the red bows.

ab348

Mercury seemed to lead the industry in what would today be politically-incorrect advertising in the 1960s. First the one I posted earlier with the woman smoking in the rear seat. Now this, where apparently no women need apply at all:




I do wonder if anybody at the company or the ad agency even thought of how perhaps they were limiting their marketplace appeal by using this slogan.

I always thought the '67 and '68 Cougar was one of the best-looking cars of the time. I found the styling to be very well done. I would have loved to own one but alas, I wasn't yet old enough to drive!