I tend to grab a lot of mid-century car brochures for these Coldest of Starts, and there’s reasons for that: they’re fun. Plus, there’s certain conceits you see over and over in these things, and every now and then you find one that seems to have it all, or at least close to it. This 1965 NSU 1000L brochure is one of those, so let’s just take a moment here and really savor some of these details.
Look at the top image there: it’s got that old standby, some kind of nautical scene, with the car improbably and dangerously parked right on the edge of the dock there, while headband hands over a suspicious, possibly damp sack of something to Cap’n Creepy, who has that another hallmark of these brochures, Guy With Unsettling Expression on His Face:
Yeesh.
There’s so much more! Look at this, I love this:
The luggage-cramming photos! Musical instruments, thanks to their weird shapes and visual excitement, are some of the best things to show crammed in luggage areas. Here, we have a whole band, complete with saxophone (you know, like the Beatles before they got big) on the folded-down back seat, exposing the NSU 1000’s nice luggage well. It’s a good amount of room! But what about the trunk?
Oh yes, this brochure has my another favorite of mine, the Well-Packed Trunk, this time shown is clever and ghostly double-exposure! So satisfying! More, though, we want more! What about strangely-packed snacks packed into cubbyholes? Oh, bish, we got that!
Mmm, yes, a banana trapped in a plastic bag with an orange, a sleeve of Ritz-like crackers, some bottle of likely weird European pop like the strangely-herbal Almdudler and a Hostess something. All crammed in the rear seat armrest!
What other funny conceits do we have here? Oh! The strangely dainty driving-action picture!
Look at that shift! So elegant and refined, and that spindly-svelte shifter, in that chic gloved hand! Yes, let’s glide into third gear, why not?
Speaking of elegant, you have to have the Pretty Overdressed Lady, and NSU delivers, shoving her in the back seat, bedecked in either furs or with her pet Tribble, really enjoying everything that opening vent window has to offer.
What’s that? You think something is still missing? A kinda weird kid? You’re in luck! Little Lederhosen is here, with his boat, sort of, um, hiding behind the car? Dad’s got another one of those weird looks, too, Lots of great color, though, and, damn, that NSU 1000 is a cool little car, with those oblong headlights and clean, Corvair-cribbed lines!
Oh, I almost forgot another brochure favorite, the cramming a little car full to its technical maximum capacity, here meaning five people, well, four adults and a kid. This I bet actually happened all the time.
Okay, finally, one wonderful thing: a really nice cutaway diagram:
Man, that’s lovely.
The guy in the first photo reminds me of Calvin Trillin’s Greek Fisherman’s Hat Rule (paraphrasing): “No one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat unless he meets two requirements: (1) He is Greek, and (2) He is a fisherman.” Growing up in my small city south of Chicago, there was a cranky German guy who established an NSU dealership and repaired other German cars. I always liked the cars saw a few of them around town, so he apparently was doing OK.
Jason, have you ever done an article about oversized steering wheels on tiny cars? I think some of these NSUs might be good candidates (see also, original Fiat Multipla). Yes, I understand that big steering wheels provided additional leverage for cars w/o power steering, but still….
I am also intrigued by the license plates – is this all one brochure? I see Monaco and Gothenburg (Sweden) in the two photos where they’re visible. Are they trying to show how all-European the Prinz is? And did that same man go to several countries for this shot or did they stay in Neckarsulm and swap plates around? Fraud!
Kramer: “T.C.B.
You know, takin’ care o’ business”
Jerry: “What you got in there?”
Kramer: “Crackers”
I have fond memories thanks to actually having an NSU dealership in my ‘hood, better yet run by real gear heads who didn’t mind us broke teenagers hanging around and asking stupid questions. Was a very advanced car for the time with excellent build quality and performance, too bad nobody heard of them. For better or worse after the market failure of the RO80 VW bought NSU,
I think everyone has missed a very important detail: The car has a Monaco registration. Guy With Unsettling Expression is clearly Prince Rainier and Pretty Overdressed Lady is Grace Kelly
Those gloved fingers caressing a dainty shifter: 4-speed or foreplay?
Those headlights create a very mid-century conception of a robot’s face.
I think I’d load my instruments a bit differently, if you leave it like that it will sound like there was an explosion at the horn factory the moment you put it in gear. I appreciate the ample space in back though!
I’m a sucker for the “woman-applying-makeup-on-the-move” trope, and there she is, in the back seat, touching up her powder with probably 1/8″ of available elbow movement.
Also, I’m glad Larry B called out that Monaco license plate — easily the cheapest vehicle registered in the Principality.
The first car I ever saw with Monaco plates was a Fiat 126 BIS…
The top photo is obviously the last taken in the brochure series. The sack contains Little Lederhosen and that’s Dad’s mistress (next to the blue Poorvair he gifted her) handing over the boy to Louis Nye who will smuggle the kid into Hollywood where he’ll be forced to work for free as Jay North’s stunt double on “Dennis the Menace.” He’ll once again don lederhosen and achieve notoriety as the spokesbrat for the Wienerschnitzel fast food chain before a PCP addiction destroys his career and he briefly joins the Manson family. Later, using his Hollywood connections, he becomes a drug dealer to former and current child stars including teenaged Anissa Jones, who was Buffy on “Family Affair.” The two were found dead of a drug cocktail following an orgy of sex and drugs and rock and roll. Sadly, accounts of his death were omitted from news reports because no one knew who he was as he’d never learned English. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Few cries for help have ever been so well constructed.
A little known fact. Buffy on Family Affair never slayed a single vampire. Probably due to her drug problems.
Probably because she was so short and the stakes weren’t high enough.
bloody good
This is also what I come here to read…fuckin hilarious
For you young-uns, download and read the NSU Prinz manual. It is concise, well illustrated, and has a conversational narration that is fantastic. This is how manuals were done, especially in Europe.
https://s3cf792cad773e861.jimcontent.com/download/version/1509880614/module/14659423522/name/NSU%20Prinz%20PII%20Owners%20Manual.pdf
The front cover image: ‘Handling the Prinz’ with the girl in white gloves is worthy of this article!
Thanks for sharing, fun read, “melancholy Chinaman” temperature knob and all.
I feel like I already own an NSU Prinz. It is the exact average of my ’71 Fiat 500, ’64 Corvair Coupe, and ’76 BMW 2002.
The awkward pose in the Pretty Overdressed Lady photo is a lot like the people-in-car imaginations of Midjourney AI. Attractive folks driving with the steering wheel on the door, back to dash, head and shoulders protruding through the windshield…
Is that first picture the Prinz of Monaco?
What I like about this is almost not related to the brochure pics, other than how well they do at highlighting it.
Why did NSU have to print the ENTIRE name of the car on the front face? Were they ahead of the curve with such acts as “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince” or “A Pimp Named Slickback”? Where you have to say the entire thing for it to be their name? Or were they afraid a passerby would not get what they were looking at?
I kind of like it, brands already replace the front logo with the spelled out company name sometimes, but usually not the model name
I think having it all in one place is better than having the brand here, the model there, an engine displacement next to it, a technological feature opposite of that, the brand and model again, some gratuitous chrome bits…
Torch, you forgot one other common trope. In the Little Lederhosen pic, the woman handing someone a wicker basket. Seriously, the wicker basket industry must have been booming in the 60s-70s. If I ever go back in time, that’s where I’m investing my money.
Don’t forget the fishing rods, apparently no picnic in the mid-century was complete without the men popping off a few casts.
I know we usually joke a lot here on the Morning Dump, but I just want to say that the front graphic on this NSU is just lovely. The alignment of elements is great, and the use of the non-grill space between the headlights with the offset shield logo is particularly nice.
I agree! I love the look of these. Also, this is Cold Start! Morning Dump is coming soon!
Big fan of the offset logo. I think it needs to make a come-back.
Ugh, I would have to dispose that plastic bag unopened. That banana stinks up the nice and tasty orange. I can’t stand banana smell. Same with pineapple. I can not comprehend how people would order pineapple on their pizza (Pizza Hawaii). And don’t get me started on multivitamin juice! What a torture that was as a kid.
Now what was the topic here?
I love that old style cutaway artwork. I remember an article years ago in Car and Driver about an artist who specialized in it. David Kimble, IIRC. Really interesting.
I love it too. I have a huge book of cutaways of WWII aircraft and I can lose an entire afternoon just flipping through it.
I always made a beeline to those cutaway books when I was a kid in the library. I have a distinct memory of one with a Panzer tank. The horizontal cutline bisected one of the crewmemebers, so the artist chose to cut the poor tanker in half and show a cutaway of his intestine.
The Devil is in the details…
Now that’s commitment to your job.
Haynes Publishing, before they were bought out by an investment management firm in 2020 and subsequently severely attenuated, used to publish a lovely book of cover artwork by Terry Davey who drew so many of these iconic old Haynes manual cutaway pictures (fun fact: they had to disconnect the smoke alarm above his drawing desk at the Haynes offices due to his heavy pipe-smoking.) Haynes also would sell posters, t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets, etc, with his artwork. Alas, no longer, thanks to the aforementioned investment management firm. Bah humbug.
That explains the amount of Haynes branded tat available these days.
I have a coloring book of his cutaways, from back when I was trying to turn my kid into a car guy. I’m hoping he’s a late bloomer…
I’d love to see an Autopian article on that.