Even as a kid looking at car advertisements in the seventies and eighties, I was always sort of bothered by a number of the things that I saw, particularly the often-repeated staging motifs that seemed painfully detached from reality.
Cars parked in front of buildings made sense, but the car in question was frequently depicted parked on the sidewalk instead of the street. Who does that? Posing the latest model on a sandy beach always made for a nice photo, but the object of desire was usually a 2WD street machine that was absolutely, positively not going to get off that dune without a tow. These are just two tropes of heavily-staged images that, even as a ten-year-old, I could discern as the fantasies of ad agencies and not any sort of reality.
Jason has already pointed out how malaise-era ads made it look like every person either had a private plane or was a hang-gliding enthusiast:
At the very least, they owned a hot air balloon which they could stuff in the back of their Cruising Wagon:
However, one of my greatest pet peeves has to be the “wheel turn on the road” picture. Look, I get it- cars look better and more “dynamic” when the front wheels are turned so that the viewer can get a good shot of your whitewalls or dope aluminum wheels. Still, during the dark ages many of the shots of these “driver’s cars” on the “open road” showed the wheels uncomfortably turned in weird angles. The advertisement below features this bothersome trait on an infamous Chevy Citation, albeit the sporty X-11 version, a car that was theoretically a good match for a Saab 900 Turbo as long as you didn’t mind poor quality, intense torque steer, and what one magazine described as “a transaxle that feels like a gear bag and not a gear box.”
Look at the front wheels: where the hell is the driver going? Why is he turning that sharply? It’s not enough to do a U-turn and way too extreme for the corner. Attempts at “action” shots like this have the reverse effect of making the cars look quite static – which it is, of course, no matter how much the sunglassed driver (who isn’t driving) leans into the imaginary maneuver.
Here’s an Oldsmobile Delta 88 Holiday coupe, a “downsized” full-sized American coupe and likely one the most durable and reliable GM cars ever made. (Exception: the diesel version where The General’s choice to not add a water separator and acceptable head bolts doomed the American public’s taste for oil burning cars.) One must show off the color-coded wheel covers from the “Holiday” package, right? Sure, but again, this dude is headed for the weeds.
This next one is really disconcerting. My guess is that they’re trying to show that the little Renault 5 “Le Car” has just used its mighty sixty horsepower to pass a semi, but in reality the angle of the car and wheels make it look like the driver popped onto the two-lane road without looking and we’re about to see a clip from Faces of Death.
You can’t unsee this stuff, and it’s always bugged me. Of course, it also bothered me that the number of Piper Cubs and hot-air balloons in my entire neighborhood, let alone my Dad’s garage, was zero. Based on all the car ads I saw, I thought they were pretty common
Citation driver: “I can’t stand this car anymore, I’m going to steer into oncoming traffic and end it all”
Crash in the headline with the Citation image triggered me. I was a back seat passenger in a Citation that crashed. The front seat passenger had already exited. The crash sent me to the front seat. I was even wearing my seatbelt, but the anchor broke lose. The car was such a POS.
I like when marketing folk spend that extra fiddly bit of time and attention to detail to ensure that the wheels are both rotated to match the same orientation (as per the Pinto). Obviously much easier to do with hubcaps (or bicycles, motorcycles, or other lighter vehicles).
You know how with weights you can do reps til exhaustion? Presumably the Chevy driver has simply fought the torque steer for as long as humanly possible, their arms are now like wet noodles, and the car is about to park itself in a tree
And, not just the front wheel angle — the angle of the whole vehicle. In the top shot, the rear wheel is pretty close to the paint stripe at the edge of the road, and the front is several inches further away. So it has already started its vector sideways, and the wheels are *still* turned with respect to that angled car. Disaster or fun awaits.
Fuck, look at that Pinto Sport Wagon!! A two-door wagon!!
I assume these wouldn’t sell today?
Just last night, I had to open my hatch’s window to haul home a 10-foot outdoor shade. the exhaust somehow knows to go into the open window. Even with the vent fan on full, I’m still recovering from the fumes.
The ad for the X-11 is clearly working because now I want one and I’m actively searching for a manual gearbox version.
The X-11 was the best looking X Car. Is that damning with faint praise?
I’d say the four-door Pontiac Phoenix was the best looking, but the X-11s were close behind. I would have gotten the hatch, but as I’ve aged I’ve come to appreciate the two-door coupe/sedan. There’s something about the beltline and curves that give it a taut, sinewy stance.
The traditional styling of the Buick and Olds iterations doesn’t work as well, which makes them the quintessential X cars, because the primary characteristic of an X car is that it doesn’t work well at all.
The early 80s X – 11 was a good looking car with those little five wheels in the car rated high output 2.8 was fun. Maybe the guy ripped the brakes so he’s doing a skid!
I remember Le Cars racing in showroom stock, watching them lift a rear wheel going into the turns. Sometimes, the rear wheel would lift too far, and the car would roll over turtle style, becoming a Le Wreck.
If you were lucky they took you to Le Hôpital and not Le Morgue.
The ads were accurately depicting the steering angle necessary to navigate the corner… the cars just suffered from horrible, horrible understeer
I always love when this is mentioned because my dad got a 1980 Delta 88 Diesel and it promptly shit itself. It was then out of service for something like a year while he swapped a gasoline engine in. It astonished me even then as a lad that he would go to this trouble rather than just junk the car and get a different one, but then, mindsets were different, I guess.
In those days, replacing those diesels was a cottage industry, and surely much cheaper than starting over.
What GM’s telling you is that they’re really good at making great performance cars on paper, just like the best way around a corner *on paper* is hitting the apex (double-yellow be damned), like that X-11 driver seems to be aiming for.
What does “slow from F to E” mean???
From Full to Empty, implying it’s good on gas.
AH! I get it now. Right over my head. Thanks.
That’s rather interpretive,but kind of you to say.
This is a big nothingburger IMHO. They’re just marketing photos of actual cars.
Giant unrealistic wheels and everything slammed to the ground on every damn concept car drawing is much worse IMO. They don’t look good, I don’t care what the designers say. They’re wrong.
What does look good is a realistically proportioned wheels, tires, and stance for a real road car. Give me those 50 profile tires with meaty sidewalls!
What automobile manufacturer, in their right mind, advertises a car’s 0-50 time and NOT it’s 0-60 (or 0-100 km/h which equates to 0-62mph, because metric)?
Growing up as a kid in the 80s, the “Le Car” was always the butt of jokes as they were somehow worse than the American malaise-era crap at the time. At least they neighbor next door who spent peanuts on his Yugo GVX could wear his cheapness as a badge of honor, whereas the Le Car neighbor ended up with a wheezebox that rusts heavily by even thinking of rain or road salt.
They all advertised 0-50 back when the national speed limit was 55. Can’t be condoning speeding, now, can we?
This site is funny; show an American market Le Car and the comments will mock it for its peak malaise craptasticness. Show a European market Renault 5 and the same comment section will drool over its gallic charm.
The truth is that they were a) both the same car, and b) both dreadful. I just find it funny how selective the application of rose-colored glasses can be.
Also who advertises their acceleration time when the car is a tortoise?
The Citation actually is doing a U-turn. The guy just drove by a herd of sheep and wants to find out who they are following. Certainly not his Citation…
Oh, and that LeCar is going to beat the claimed 0-60 time once the semi hits it in le derrière.
The Citation was one of the more craptastic GM products of the era, but I was always mesmerized by its oddball dash layout – everything was podded together in a tight cluster in front of the driver, including IIRC the radio being turned 90 degrees so it would fit.
The AM radio was indeed turned 90 degrees, which made replacement a pain. Not that it mattered much, since the speakers (two in the dash) couldn’t really handle anything else.
When I added a CD player to mine, none of the car audio places near me would do the install (while still charging the same price they charged with install included, of course), since it was an under dash mount for a CD and cutting holes and running wires for speakers. Luckily, my dad and I were able to do a pretty darn good job (mostly him; I was a dumb teen who didn’t know what I was doing).
I had to trim the trim a fair amount, but a single DIN stereo fit in there just fine. I wasn’t rich enough to afford one of them fancy wancy C D players. The Roadmaster stereo kit from Wal-Mart worked, sorta, most of the time. It worked more than the car did most of the time. Later I upgraded to a good used Pioneer system. That probably doubled the value of the car when I sold it.
I don’t recall the speakers being too difficult to run. I think the originals were in the dash, but I ran wires to the doors and hatch cover. The 8-track sized primo Pyramid 500W amp fit good enough in the dash somewhere.
Yeah, if you could replace vertical with vertical, the swap would not have been too annoying. This was around 1999 or so, so a CD player was the standard. It would have cost just as much to get a cassette player and made it harder to find music. Didn’t get an amp, just relied on the stereo. The amp was what I felt too poor to get.
The doors and hatch cover were exactly where I ran mine, too. We ran the wire under the plastic trim around the doors. The car audio places were the real annoyance, since they included installation in the price and wouldn’t even do the install for extra. I ended up getting most (maybe all) of it at like Fred Meyer or something, since I didn’t want to pay for an install I didn’t get.
The radio was moved to a horizontal location for the last ones just before GM killed it. They’ve never done 11th hour fixes like that before (cough…Corvair…cough…Fiero…cough….Allante)
And while I guess they attributed the decision to rotate it to space constraints, the radios on the Pontiac, Olds and Buick versions were horizontal, so that wasn’t really the case.
It’s too bad they didn’t work out. If they’d been as good as the first magazine reviews claimed they were, not only would they have captured downsizers with a fairly sophisticated design for its price position, but it wouldn’t have inspired the white-hot hatred that parked those same downsizers behind the wheels of Accords, Camrys and other Japanese cars when it came time to trade in.
Best comment! So true Bishop
We had two Citations with the radio vertical. I always thought it was stylistic decision to evoke the grandeur of the mid-60s Corvettes with vertical radios while applying it to a steaming pile of X-body garbage (and yes, both of ours were garbage even from new).
Oooh, that Renault will soon be Le Carnage.
Please bring back fake trunk straps with buckles
And golf shirts with epaulets, while you’re at it.
Yes! Judge Smails would drive this car.
You didn’t see that episode of Barry when he’s in that Olds? He’s about to pop that trunk and pull out the potato steel on the guy following him. The 88 is his shield.
Damnit
(Off to search for a Pinto Rallye wagon)
Maybe Citation Man is having a medical emergency. One fine day a guy – I think it was a guy it all happened fast – made a left turn into the median barrier on I-80 just far enough ahead of me that I was able to avoid certain death myself.
[ Citation not needed ]
Renault claimed the LeCar had a blistering 0-50 time of 10.4 seconds.
I suspect getting from 50-60 took another 10.4 seconds. (These were not great voiture.)
The owners of the glass-assed Pinto have apparently sobered up enough to realize the seriousness of their mistake and are considering jumping off that cliff sans glider.
He is driving a Chevy Citation. He probably wants to crash.
the bad front/rear brake proportioning valve (one of many recalls) probably stuck and now the rears are locked up
That is how my Dad totaled out his piece of shit Citation.
Lesson learned once again about GM, back to imports for him.
You had brakes in yours?!? Mine had a pedal that would slow the car sometimes. ‘Braking’ was a little too generous a term to describe it.
GM still used nearly the same brakes in the A-body cars. 2 of the 3 A-body cars that my family had ended up wrecked due to poor brakes.