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. Still, I think it’s overall better to have a vastly smaller chance of ending up, you know, dead.
Note! Dry bar. A wet bar has a sink with running water. A dry bar just has alcohol and cups.
I grew up through the transition of no seatbelts to mandatory. I remember riding in the bed of many a pickup as a kid. Same with being in the back of a wagon sliding around during corners along with the grocery bags. And, just like the napping girl, I used many a backseat as a bed on the longer trips.
Now, I’m close to 50, and can’t image what could have happened to me, had we ever got into even the slightest of accidents while I was basically unsecured luggage.
Both the Thing and the Iltis were originally designed to transport cannon fodder, so what would you expect?
As someone with a lot of contemporaries who have small children, I think I can say that a lot of parents in 2025 don’t actually want kids. Everything old is new again. 😉
My parents had a 1972 Ford Super Cab truck. The back seat would fold down to a flat platform about maybe 1 foot from the tops of the front seats. My parents threw a foam mattress back there and my brother and I would ride back there on trips, or any time both my parent were in the vehicle. No doubt we’d be launched through the windshield in an accident, thus free and safe from the smashed truck. /s
I remember wearing a seatbelt while riding in the front of the truck. Not in case of an accident, but the passenger door popped open from time to time. After the door opened in mid left turn, with me swinging from the armrest (I had surprising grip strength that day), my Mom decided that I needed to be strapped in. Lots of memories in that old truck.
The BRAT did have seat belts for those rear in-bed seats, at least on the later models. But they were lap belts only. Not that those would save you from being decapitated in a rollover…
traveling with kids is like “third-class Bulgarian travel”
They must never have been to Ostend Hoverport.
I miss my Thing…it was glorious.
I drove four friends to the beach in my 2CV. Roof rolled back as it was a sunny day.
The three in the back had no seatbelts, and therefore no real reason to sit down. So they just stood up, and waved at all the boring passengers going the other way.
I still got it to 60mph. Cornering ability was reduced considerably, because the body roll was terrifying.
This was in the 90’s.
You have no real control over your passengers, so I took to leaving the back seat at home when I went to Uni, making the 2CV a four-door two-seater.
I remember a trip with six of us, plus a driver, crammed into a W123 Mercedes for a few hundred miles through the mountains, and this was in 2005. It was in Morocco though, which might explain it. When you hire a taxi, you hire the whole thing, so the more people you can cram in, the cheaper it is.
No rumble seats? Those were great at turning passengers in charcuterie.
Fun fact: The colloquial German word for “rumble seat” is “Schwiegermuttersitz” which translates as “mother-in-law-seat”
Wow, even ze Germans have mutter-in-law jokes.
This is great. I remember my Dad once having a panel van (a Dodge 50). My sister and I soon got over the novelty of sitting 3 abreast up front and preferred to sit on the wheel arch tubs in the back of the van.
I can’t explain why we preferred this bumpy and noisy way to travel to chilling out in the back of a entirely nice Saab 900 that was his actual daily.
But back then no one ever asked why my Dad was loading kids in the back of a van…
I remember the summers in Maine with my cousins. I was 11 and didn’t wear my seatbelt in their 1968 Oldsmobile something. Not safe. Of course, it was compounded by the fact that they would let me drive it all the time. I think I was in 5th grade.
In the 80’s I drove a doorless 63 beetle in the summertime and was pulled over by a cop.. He asked where’s my doors and was about to give me a ticket.. till I said, I’m legal, I have my side mirrors and jeeps do it so why can’t I.. he left me with a warning. Later I sold those doors cause I had painted pink floyd the wall with the marching hammers and butt judge looking down on the dummy leaning on the wall and this kid just had to have them as art..
Speaking of the kids piling up in the station wagons, The Brady Bunch did one noteworthy highlight: showing close-up shot of Mike and Bobby unbuckling their seat belts (Tiger! Tiger!, S01E18). That was only incidence of seat belt use in its entire five-year run. In every episode, you’d see the family members piling up in the station wagons, convertible, and such, oblivious to the danger of being metal balls in the pinball machine during the collision.
When I was five, my two year old sister and I would sit on little wicker chairs wedged between the seats and the gas tank of our parents MG TD.
They didn’t think the front seat was safe because the door kept popping open.
I mean, that seems reasonable..
Had a Dodge short wheelbase, sorta-hippy van w/ a bed-bench seat in the back and 2 swiveling, domed cushion, Captain’s chairs up front. A trip to Disneyland had my brother riding in a lawn chair between the front seats and several others (including wife, 2 kids and mom scattered somewhere in the back. It was “interesting”.
Later had a couple of Ford country squires w/ the 2 way door-gate and seats in the back. As I recall it, the way back seats only had 2 seatbelts. Though the seats were wide enough for 2 bums, 4 people back there would have had their knees interlaced like a pair of Air Jordan’s shoelaces. W/ 3 in the front and middle rows, the max capacity would be 8 not 10.
I can’t believe no one here is old enough to remember “sorry officer I think I may have had to much to drink” was a way to get out of a ticket instead of being arrested, losing their license, and having their insurance dropped. I knew a guy that back in the day had the cops drive him home because he was drunk and worked for the local newspaper. I myself when arrested was allowed to sacrifice my laces and watch the entire Barney Miller series instead of being locked up. However my name was printed as arrested in the newspaper I worked for before I was let go. The editors contacted the publisher and asked should we publish his name and he said yes. Journalism has lost their edge
Jason I must sarcasticly protest. First the planet has far too many inhabitants than it can support. The lack of safety belts is just a green approach to stopping over population. The overloaded 2CV, well I doubt it is going faster than a senior with a walker. I know I’ll be attacked by the left but I believe there is a real reason for the Darwin Rule. The safer we make the world the more stupid people have a chance to breed.
Parents had a 69 Dodge dart “swinger”
I was about 6 years old riding in the passenger seat on a booster block.
Seat belt was not long enough, so beltless.
Mom took a 90 degree left turn. I was pressed against the passenger door and it opened.
I was ejected with the foam seat and tumbled onto the roadway.
Perhaps youthful elasticity, but not a scratch on me.
She begged me for days not to tell my Father.
OMG! I was about 6 years old riding in the passenger seat of my folks’ ~’72 Plymouth Duster (same car) and the same thing happened to me!
This article is why I’m a member. Thank you.
One of my major hates about humanity is that they’re seemingly only capable of swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another in regards to nearly everything. What I’d like to see is some damn sensible equilibrium. As it pertains to cars, I’d like to at least expunge the highly dubious electronic “safety” systems that cross well over into the realm of harassment, never mind the standard breathalyzer interlock they want to mandate (and I say this as someone who doesn’t drink or do drugs). Facing and overcoming a little bit of danger builds internal resilience (if it doesn’t kill you, but that’s what makes it dangerous). What is the value of life lived as a coddled doormat? We didn’t evolve on this brutal planet—I don’t think any organism has—to be comfortable with being coddled and controlled. Even Bradypus sloths fight over mates and many will seemingly choose to die in captivity rather than being free (that’s why you don’t see them in zoos, you see the Choloepus, which diverged evolutionarily from the Bradypus about 35mya). I had PTSD for several decades, which results in reactions that are inappropriate for society’s gossamer veil of civility (though, this has actually helped as much as it’s hindered me with personal interactions even above the veil as, while I’ve often scared the wrong people, I’ve also scared the right ones), but well suited to more traditionally hostile environments (or life underneath the civil veil). Even after years of therapy resulted in the lifting of the weight of constant hypervigilance and instant-rage switch, I feel most comfortable in certain kinds of dangerous situations as they feel more real to me, like home for lack of a better word. Self-declared ISIS terrorist shot dead by FBI and BPD in the parking lot at work? Ah, that’s like taking off a tux to slip on pajamas and sip tea in a quiet room. Dodging a car barrel-rolling in front of me on the highway? That’s practically a blue pill.
Well Torch, time to have another kid (the shaming is better the younger they are) and put a wet bar in your Beetle. Maybe saw the greenhouse off so your spouse can skylark in the passenger seat?
Back in the 80s my mom somehow accidentally had toddler me on her lap while driving. ‘Oops!’ she said. Everyone laughed.