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.
Accuracy check: that’s not the back of the station wagon, that’s the way back. Officially.
Back in the mid-80s, my family spent a summer building our new house in Southwest CO. By the end of summer, we all needed a break, so we took a family road trip from the 4 corners area to the northwest, Seattle, and Vancouver.
We camped the whole way, with dad’s ’74 VW bus pulling a trailer full of camping gear because mom was a camping maximalist. With no second-row seat in the van, my sisters rode the third row bench.
I got a lawn chair.
So yeah, I rode from the Southwest to Seattle and back in an unsecured lawn chair in the middle of a Volkswagen bus. Trying that now would likely result in a slew of traffic tickets and some visits from child protective services.
I should add – I lobbied for riding in the trailer, because teenager with sisters, but that’s where mom drew the line.
Finally someone else who has endured that crap! lol. Our 2 Bus’s had the seat out 90% of the time.
With 5 kids, (sometimes many more) there were always at least 2 or 3 folding chairs in there.
Can state that lawn chairs in the Colorado Rockies is not the safest thing.
Remember being flipped out of the chair many times as a kid when doing mountain curves well above recommended speeds.
It was a totally different world.
2CVs come with lawn chair seating from the factory.
I got flipped over and dumped on the floor of the van many times. I’m not sure which was worse, my riding the lawn chair or when my little sister would sit on top of the plywood console dad built between the two front seats.
My upbringing was about 1/2 hippie, 1/2 redneck.
Back in the early ’90s I drove my wife and sister 20 miles downtown to a 4th of July fireworks show in my Miata. Wifey and I were belted in the seats while my sister sat in the middle of the rear deck.
But she did have a rollbar to hold onto, you know, for safety.
Alas, the Miata has never featured a glovebox wet bar.
As an only child and adoptee, I had a very nervous, non-driving mom who was afraid of everything. I was put in the back seat of dad’s Dart Sport, right in the middle, perched on an old 5″ thick Chicago phone book, with BOTH rear lap belts hooked across me to the opposite side’s buckle.
It was so cool when I got to go out with just dad and ride in the front seat. With no belt, cuz dad said “you want to be thrown clear” of the collision.
The 70s were fucking nuts.
When I was a youngster in Ireland I was in the passenger seat of an old split-window Beetle with my Dad on a narrow country road when a huge pig strolled out in front of us. We hit the pig at maybe 20 MPH.
The pig got up, shook itself-had a few scratches and wandered away. Front of VW stove in, headlights gone .My first experience of crumple zones .No damage to us.
At least it was a pig and not a Kenworth.
Yes, that pig had excellent crumple zones.
Angus steers on our farm would occasionally decide to go play in the traffic. The cars always lost.
Man, the gloomy faces of the kids in the red Plymouth wagon. Either they are coming back to the sect temple, or mommy ate really bad tacos that morning and locked the windows.
Much of this article immediately brought to mind this legendary routine from the late great comedian Tim Wilson: “Hot-Ass Station Wagons.” https://youtu.be/gXyyJj8qLOQ?si=FFWOliY18n414bnD “Nobody gave a f**k about kids back in them days.”
Pair with “Grocery Store Lady” for a complete description of a family outing in the 60s/70s. https://youtu.be/seF0-5RtCTk?si=sOjmaU3VvRI1fbxd
Well shit. RIP Tim.
Yes, great stuff he had.
We’ve sacrificed so much fun in the name of safety yet I am not sure if value of life really increased all that much.
We’re driving personal mini-tanks with visibility so bad you need a camera to back up safely, and recently there are now front and side cameras.
Kid seats these days are so huge you can barely fit them in a normal midsize sedan.
It’s absurd.
The only sliver of hope is cars like the Wrangler are still allowed…for now.
And sure, cars are safer but if we take the US as an example, practically anyone is free to roam around with guns if they want, not to mention the lack of free health care, either of these possibly costing more lives than personal transportation.
It’s fascinating to me, that seeming conservation of overall good that you cite. Like how in the 70s and 80s, people generally weighed less. Sure, there was a lot more smoking, but people also ate less (and less processed stuff) and got more excercise. Now, smoking is fairly uncommon, but we’ve both gotten heavier and less fit. Interesting how progress is often less linear than we think.
Ok, DAD
A lot of survivor bias here.
I’ll take the safety, so I can survive and hopefully learn from my mistakes.
Yeah, most of my friends in high school died in car crashes.
On the other hand my grandfather would gather up empty cans of nitroglycerin in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania, drain the last few drops from each can until he had a half pint or so, then run around with his friends playing hilarious practical jokes that only a band of ten year olds with nitroglycerin would think of.
As a very young child I was standing in the front seat of our early 60s Ford station wagon. We got rear ended at a light and my head bounced off the windshield. I only remember waking up in a stranger’s house. A woman said, “He’s awake. Call the doctor back and tell him he doesn’t need to come.” The next day I had a knot on my head and they sent me home from school with a note suggesting that maybe I should see a doctor. My folks laughed at these “busy-bodies” and sent me back after the swelling went down. They weren’t evil, just misinformed products of their time. I’ll take all the safety features, thank you.
Do you still piss your pants when someone uses the microwave?
Nope. I’m KO now.
When I was an infant, my parents were T-boned in their Dodge Lancer small car. My father was fine but my mother was cut up and injured but recovered. I was being held in her arms and landed in the rear seat with the baby basket over me which protected me from the flying glass.
Close call all around but that set the tone for my life of vehicular adventure, intrigue, and danger.
Jason, have you ever looked up the Great Car Hunt videos?
I think vehicle (un)safety wasn’t a visible or very understood issue at the time? Cars were just getting affordable enough for the common people to have them and the wonder and amazement of driving was much more alluring than the consequences. And you were riding around in a high tech steel box! How could that be unsafe?
The death rate from crashes in the 50s/60s was actually horrendous, and the safety movements all probably started around that time.
To VW, safety wasn’t a Thing (bum bum tiss)
How about tv depictions of driving back then? Even in the 80s (the era of Volvo-means-safety), you’d never see anyone buckle up unless it was a sitcom driver’s ed episode.
Thomas Magnum uses the seatbelts in the Ferrari exactly once, at the very end when he discovers his thought-dead daughter is still alive. And he buckles only *her* in. Even Higgins, who’d you expect would be safety conscious to a fault, always just hops in the Audi and casually motors away.
You will never see one seat belt in use in one frame of “Smokey And The Bandit,” “Vanishing Point,” “The Dukes Of Hazzard,” or any other Autopian film or TV of a certain age.
There’s one exception: you do see a driver engage his seat belt in “Bullitt” – but it’s the bad guy driving the black Charger. You don’t want to be like the bad guy, do you? Steve McQueen didn’t need no damn seat belt.
And another “safety feature” of the past that blew my mind, that I learned about in an article about the birth of NASCAR: in the early days, when the cars on the track were still mostly post sedans, it was not uncommon in a crash (or even in hard cornering to the right!) for the driver’s side door to fly open. So drivers would take their belts out of their pants and wrap them around the post and the front and rear driver side window frames, to hold them shut just in case.
Batman and Robin, circa 1966, ALWAYS used the seatbelts. But then, unlike kids, they were indispensable.
Interesting point! I wonder if they might have done that specifically because kids were watching or if maybe it was that they were suspicious of the build quality of a Barris creation (even if it was originally a Lincoln show car).
It was a joke.
they were wusses.
That’s wild. I’m always struck by the pictures of the cockpits, even into the late 70s – a bare metal safety cage, usually with a little upholstered pillow attached as a headrest. Must have seemed the height of protection back then.
To be fair that charger didn’t have particularly supportive seats – with that sort of cornering he would have been ejected as violently as all of those hubcaps.
That was, unless the cars were convertibles. Particularly on Daytona Beach, where half the race was on the sand at low tide.
While being reflective of the time, it might also have a practical reason: it doesn’t make for good entertainment to show someone buckling up and that time takes away from the story, the ultimate time of which might be restricted, like with TV that has to fit a specific time slot with commercials. Today, you don’t usually see headrests in cars as they get in the way of the camera or of the view of any action that might be going on behind the driver.
Usually no inside rear view mirrors either
To say nothing of an automatic column shifter clearly visible in “park.”
I first noticed this as a teenager watching “Lethal Weapon,” when Danny Glover was “driving” while arguing with Mel Gibson, with the shifter knob plainly visible above the dashboard. LOL
And convertibles made up nearly 100 percent of the car market in TV land back then, even though their best year in the real US was 1963 at around nine percent.
one of the themes i’ve found in many of stephen jay gould’s books is that it is intellectually dishonest to judge past behavior by current standards.
Ok, I’m not proud of this… and I’m definitely not gonna do it again ever. Buuuuut… one time I drove while hammered and my shifts were Ayrton Senna smooth
Alcohol makes you feel more attractive, funnier, a better dancer and a better lover.
Then it makes you ugly, annoying, clumsy and impotent. (And now it is known that it’s about as carcinogenic as cigarette smoke.)
Based on land area and population I would argue riding in the back of a pickup is legal in more places than not.
In California, even in a topper, I had to be disguised as a dog in the back of a pickup to avoid arrest.
This was to the relentless delight of the dogs in the back with me, convinced that I was a dog, or was pretending for their enjoyment.
I have often expected to be stopped driving people in the open bed, but it has never happened to me in free states.
They were usually adults and not on freeways, but still a bit surprised.
As for past safety, my uncle was moving a small pony in an open truck with nothing but light baling rope to keep her in.
For some reason, I was the only other person there, so it was my idea to ride in the back holding the horse steady and calming her.
The bed wasn’t deep, so the whole thing alarmed me, even though I was very small.
This was an exceptionally docile pony, but she approached this idea and leaving home with great skepticism.
I’m sorry I can’t identify the truck, but some on the farm dated back to war surplus.
I looked straight at the horse the whole time and talked to her and somehow kept her in the truck.
Even then, I couldn’t believe I was allowed to do this.
Reality is safety third.
The ponys name was Snowflake.
On the New York State thruway in 1985, I was driving three friends from Kingston to NYC in a pickup. We got stopped and the state trooper made two of my friends sit in the back, because there were only two seatbelts in the cab.
I think BRATS had rear seat belts? It has been 45 years, but a frat bro had one
BRATs absolutely HAVE SEAT BELTS and they can even be seen (barely) in the photo above, at the base of the seats in the corners of the bed. As a post-1968 vehicle seat belts were mandated so it would have to have them to be classified as a passenger car & avoid the Chicken Tax! Cc @Jason Torchinsky
“Did any parents before, say, 1990 actually want kids?”
Considering the amount of guilt and intense pressure against abortion and birth control various religions assert including the threat of eternal suffering I’ll say no, a LOT of kids were born to parents who didn’t really want them but got stuck with them.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
In that case let me see the value menu.
A lot of kids were labeled “happy accidents” with the “happy” part sometimes being stressed in a seemingly forced way.
Wow, the pic w/ all the kids in the station wagon…that pale kid looks like a demon vampire or something! That wagon is definitely haunted
You want to see some really dangerous cars, look up one of the vintage Nurburgring accident videos. People have been crashing on that track for decades, and seeing that makes even me, a guy who only drives deathtraps, pause.
That VW Thing ad is nearly a dead ringer for a picture taken in my senior year of high school when all of the seniors on the track team piled into and upon a Thing and drove down Main Street. There were 14 bodies in all and some of us kept our clothes on. Streaking was a big thing then, so streaking in a Thing and showing off our little things seemed like the thing to do. Life is different when you’re immortal.
Simply a more optimistic era where more people believed that if you did die, you’d go to a better place anyway.
I wonder if this mightn’t be the case today – going to a better place.
Maybe we should be out having more fun.
Do you mean Canada?
Sometimes a better place was fifty miles in any direction!
Tracy Chapman: Fast Car
“You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we can make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOAlaACuv4
Harsh words about Bulgarian travel. I guess at a certain point you have to wonder did they not care or was it just the case of it’s fine I did the same thing or worse. There are still a number of people who refuse to wear seatbelts because they feel like if they crash the seat belt will cause more damage then just going through the windshield. Maybe the whole cold war we could be nuked anytime played into it a bit too. Old ads are definitely creepy almost always. That and food poisoning is why I refuse to go into cracker barrels.