MAD Magazine could always be counted on for a sarcastic take on the issues of the day. This two-page joke highlights the Zeitgeist on build quality, circa 1966.
It’s still a pretty accurate take on the life-cycle of cars as appliances, but I sure wish they’d leave more wrecks lying around in junkyards like they used to.
I remember as kids we once heated up and squished a model or 2 and made them look like they crashed into a wall. One was a 1st gen Mustang.
Never realized around the same time Mad Mag did the same.
The wheelchair down the stairs corner cartoon would probably not be done today.
Hee,Hee…”blowing up” models with firecrackers was a hoot too. ??
MAD’s model kit #2 is not a domestic car, FYI, 😉 Looks British.
Funny also is the VW Bus in the model junk yard.
I’m thinking Opel Rekord.
Aston DB6.
Domestics certainly weren’t the only new cars to suffer initial quality issues in the 60s and 70s.
I remember in 1970 or 71 my mom bought me a SSP smash-up derby set. When I opened the box she was upset that the cars looked wrecked already!!
We had those, too!
The Chev Nomad and ’57 Ford Fairlane seemed to be the default models in most sets. While the commercial appeared to run for at least a decade or more.
Yup I had that set too. I loved those things, and wore them out. They could really go fast, and eventually got broken much more than they were supposed to be. I’m sure my mother appreciated all the little divots they left on every piece of furniture in the house.
Wow, I remember that ad from my youth. The models depicted in the kit and in the advertisement were only 10-15 years old at the time but considered wrecks. These days I consider a 10 year old car as pretty fresh.
Great commercial – it sold my 8 year old self!
There was another SSP smash derby car called “Bug-em”.
Can guess what kind fairly easy, 😉
Bugatti Veyrons? 😉
I had this as a kid. Got bored with it soon!. See any on Ebay?.
I had had a set too!!! BEST TOY EVER! ??? My mother was mainly upset when she would step on a stray part. ?
I found the Achilles heel for these sets, besides lost parts, was the teeth on the pull cord would wear out rather quickly. Kenner probably designed it as such, as I recall owning at least 2-3 sets in the early 70s. 🙂 I would have liked to have found the set with the VW Bug and the pickup, while the ’57 Fairlane and ’57 Nomad set was everywhere.
House pets had a very natural strong distaste for this toy.
Still have my set, my ramps were black and yellow, and the cars mostly those colors too. I think I still have all the parts. I didn’t use the pull cord much, though, just pushed the cars into each other, or into other things. Dinged up a number of chair and couch legs in the process!
Yes, those cords stripped out quickly. Even at that age I loved destroying the 57 Chevy. 🙂
My cousin had an AFX set, and we used to make bodies for the cars out of kitchen foil. When your car came off the track you got real crash damage.
We were doing that in college. Lol
As a kid born in the 50s, I think adults buying cars before the existence of consumer rights groups probably just accepted it when a “new” car had a few small assembly glitches. If something was serious, or made the car undriveable, then you raised hell with the dealership. Or if a car was OBVIOUSLY not well assembled compared to similar cars….then the dealership got a visit.
My father, during the 50s, bought a new car every 2 or 3 years. He was a traveling salesman and really needed a dependable car. In the early 50s he had a Dodge, he traded that for a Ford, which was traded for a Chevy. I asked him a few years ago why he drove all those different cars and his answer was that he just wanted to try them all and didn’t really feel any allegiance to any brand. That stopped with the Chevy. My mother LOATHED that 58 Brookwood and my father was NEVER allowed to buy another new Chevy.
Problems with that Chevy? Marginal brakes that got hugely worse when wet, and a defogger for the windshield that was also marginal.
We would own several 50s Plymouths in the 60s, and all were as well built as any other car out there.
These were generally how my model cars turned out anyway, anything above level 1 snap togethers I pretty much melted mutilated and disfigured them due to my heavy handedness or impatience with paint, decal application and glue. Thank god for diecast cars!
Plenty of Popular Mechanics magazines back in the 60’s and 70’s had owner surveys of newer cars, This was a rare pre consumer- movement opportunity for buyers to get honest feedback on the flaws of new cars.
As I recall, poor workmanship and niggling design problems were constant complaints of domestic auto makers. Even though most cars were built poorly, many consumers still thought this state of affairs to be unacceptable and demanded better.
PM also wrote the occasional article, harshly critical of poor design, planned obsolescence and misleading advertising typical of Detroit. This is a surprising attitude for a conservative publication somewhat dependent on that same Detroit advertising.
My dad complained about his GM and AMC cars’ poor quality and defects. He HATED Fords and would not consider one, thinking they were terrible rust buckets (which they were).
Since then, I’ve owned and driven many Fords of that era and found them to be better quality and better assembled than GM and AMC, and would have made my dad happier. Chances are my dad would have liked an oil -soaked Galaxie.
Remember the ‘Crashmobiles”? They were spring powered with a sort of mousetrap setup inside. You wound up the rear wheel, set `em on the floor,and when they hit a wall, the hood, trunk, top, and sides would fly off! They were great, but they got pulled off the market because driving instructors and schools thought they encouraged reckless driving. Even then, nobody had a sense of humor! Rare and valuable today-if you can find them.
There’s a guy who builds model cars and then distresses them to make them look like they’ve been sitting in a junkyard. He sells them on Esty (https://www.etsy.com/shop/classicwrecks). I don’t want to put an advertisement for him here, but I bought one for myself and a custom one for my Dad, and he did a great job on both. Photo below is of the Opel GT he made for my father (painted Sunburst Yellow just like the one Dad drove).
I have half a mind to ask him to make a post-crusher one like that last MAD magazine picture. With some carefully applied heat (from a hair dryer?), that might be possible.
This was a bit before my time, but it seems to be a pretty comment sentiment of the era.
Jerry Reed and some Hee Haw Honeys! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
I never had one, but I remember commercials in my childhood for a figure-8 race car set. The cars would self destruct when they crashed at the intersection.
These came a little late for me. They came out after I started doing this to real cars on the real road or in other words reality driving.
Awesome. To be read while listening to contemporary MAD music…
People always complain when anything costs them anything.
While everyone in the 50s and 60s sniveled about shoddy assembly, oil leaks and bodies that rusted through in 5-6 years, I doubt anyone expected anything to ever improve. Consumer Reports used to post a count of the assembly errors they found on every car they tested, which usually numbered 20-30 issues per car. I could walk through a relatively new Ford dealership showroom in the early 70s and see oil stains on the carpet.
Cars were so maintenance intensive then anyway: bias ply tires that wore out in 10-20,000 miles. Replacing plugs points and condenser every, what, 12,000 miles.. Chassis lubes. Ring jobs. Valve jobs. Repacking wheel bearings. Radiator hoses that would rot and burst in 5 years. Mild steel exhaust systems that rot out in a couple years (I kept my 85 Mazda for 12 years, and forgot how many free mufflers I got from Midas). Cars were appalling money pits.
Plus suspect rust resistance, with body rot starting in as little as 2-3 years, in some climates.
Clearly, manufacturers were downloading many costs to the buyer. And it almost appeared normal at the time.
Clearly, manufacturers were downloading many costs to the buyer.
A lot of it was a function of the state of the technology of the time. A couple companies tried EFI in the last 50s, but it wasn’t reliable. Transistorized ignitions were a new thing in the early 70s. Synthetic lubricants did not exist.
The propensity to rust was only an issue for people living in the northern half of the country. Talking about “typical Studebaker rust” (the streak that always formed on the trailing edge of the front fenders) one person recalled a talk he had heard by Brooks Stevens, where Stevens said the way Studebaker made the front fenders was the cheapest way, and, management figured the original owner would trade the car in 4 or 5 years anyway, so the propensity for rust didn’t matter as the body would look OK long enough to satisfy the original owner.
Steve – I’ve been spending some time lately listening to old radio shows from the late 30’s to mid 1950’s on the Internet. Lots of these shows contain old commercials. I am, of course, most fascinated by the ones for cars and car maintenance. Apparently as late as the mid 1950’s cars needed to be greased every two thousand miles, and one battery company very proudly says you may only need to add water “as little as three times a year”. Then there’s Autolite advertising new resistor spark plugs and special plugs for the “new high compression engines” (the ad specifically states you couldn’t use them in your ‘old’ engine). Then there’s carbon build up in your heads which could reduce power up to 20%!
Remember all these things were touted as major improvements. Even as late as the 1960’s I seem to recall that points and plugs were an annual thing, and oil changes every 3,000 were a serious thing – required, not recommended. Pistons rings had to be replaced every (?) 30,000 miles?
Cars really were maintenance-intensive and so, I suspect, people were used to the idea that ‘Smokey Joe’ at the corner garage was always going to be working on your car anyhow, and if your car held together five years, it was doing great.
Finally, in the 1950’s America had -at least- a decade of pent up demand for cars. People preferred a car now over waiting for a perfect one.
So, people’s expectations were lower in those days.
Having said that
Apparently as late as the mid 1950’s cars needed to be greased every two thousand miles,
The chassis lube interval got longer as lubricants improved, but my 78 POS Merc Zephyr still required greasing occasionally. While Ford required the suspension be greased, grease fittings were not installed at the factory, just plugs, so the first time the POS Zephyr went in for a suspension lube I was billed extra for installation of Zerk fittings. The grease interval must have been on the order of 10-12k miles as I got rid of that thing by the time it hit 13K
Another improvement of the 50s was self adjusting drum brakes. Prior to that you had to have the brakes adjusted by hand every few thousand miles. True to form, Ford had omitted the self adjusters on the POS Zephyr, so I had to pay to have the rear drums adjusted every 5 or 6K miles.
Ford also had “innovated” a new design window regulator, which required I pay the shop to open up the door and lube the regulator track so the thing wouldn’t jam maybe once a year.
Carbon build up: prior to the development of detergent oils and the provision of oil filters,you had to periodically have your engine torn down and “decoaked”, have all the sludge from the oil cleaned out.
Fuel quality became particularly bad in the late 70s/early 80s. My POS Zephyr soon was carboned up to the point where punching the gas would result in a huge cloud of carbon being blown out the tailpipe, and uncontrollable pinging. A coworker had a new 79 Mustang with a 302, which, within months of purchase, ran exactly like my Zephyr’s 302. Someone wrote a letter into R&T’s “technical correspondence” column complaining that the BMW dealer was telling him he needed to have the heads pulled and sandblasted (with ground up walnut shells) to clean out the carbon to restore proper performance. The editor of the column, Dennis Simanaitis, replied he was seeing torrents of complaints about carboned up engines recently, from a variety of makes and models, and surmised there was something severely wrong with the fuels we were being sold as this had not been a problem a few years previously.
I remember a guy in the 70s (who knew his cars) bemoaning the fact that there had once been a time when a guy could buy a new car and confidently take it on a cross country trip. But by then, he said, you had to drive it for a month and get a bunch of stuff fixed before you could safely do that.
IIRC the factory warranty in my 1959 Plymouth had been 3 months or 4,000 miles according to the booklets in the glovebox. I read somewhere that the first 12 month/12K mile warranty came from Ford in 1960 and Chrysler followed with its 5/50 in 1963. I took a stats class in college and learned that statistically, most manufacturing defects will show up quickly, so that a car warranty could usually be extended at a relatively low average cost per car. Unless it was a 1970s Chrysler, of course. 🙂
I remember a guy in the 70s (who knew his cars) bemoaning the fact that there had once been a time when a guy could buy a new car and confidently take it on a cross country trip. But by then, he said, you had to drive it for a month and get a bunch of stuff fixed before you could safely do that.
He must have been looking through his 60s hippie rose colored glasses.
My dad’s 51 Champion started honking it’s horn every time he turned a corner. The shop found the steering column full of metal shavings that had chewed through the insulation on the wires for the horn.
I talked years ago with an old guy who had taken his brand new 65 Mustang on a trip. In the middle of nowhere the engine died and refused to start. Trying the engine again some time later, it fired right up. Ran fine for a few minutes, then died and refused to start, again. He pulled a plug wire and had his wife crank the engine. Good strong spark. He disconnected the fuel line from the carb and had his wife crank. Gas came out in a stream powerful enough to shoot over the fender. He was stumped. It had fire and gas, it had to run. He poked into the fuel passage in the carb where the fuel line connected and pulled out some plastic packing material. The plastic had been partly blocking the fuel passage so the engine would starve, but sitting for a while enough gas would push past the blockage and refill the bowl so it would run again, for a bit.
Another guy bought a new 65 Stang, and immediately wheeled it into the shop for, among other things, a wheel bearing repack. Sure enough, one of the wheel bearings had only a smear of grease on it.
My grandfather’s 66 Plymouth lost a U-joint when it was only a few months old. Fortunately, he was a mechanic and always listened to what his cars were telling him, so he had the U-joint replaced before the car left him by the side of the road. He had some other issues with that 66 that I have forgotten about. I remember him saying that he was wondering if he had a lemon, but he got the car straightened out eventually.
My dad’s 69 Plymouth failed a couple days after purchase, some combination of carb and ignition as the engine kept losing power. It would be cruising along fine, then start stumbling.
My father in-law had a early 80s bronco that had a squeak in the rear differential. After 2 trips to the dealer with no fix he pulled the plug on the diff himself when he got it home and found it was dry, had never been filled with lube at all.
Steve, don’t forget the fiendish, temperamental device that was the carburetor. I was born in 76 so I remember all the occasions on which it was wet or cold, or the car was in a mood and it just would not start or run right. Carbs needed constant tuning and by an expert. The imprecise fuel metering with a lot of fuel going into the cylinders unburned really led to the lower life expectancy of engines then as compared with now. I had one experience recently with an edelbrock on an olds 403 and no. That car is getting ls ed.
Steve, don’t forget the fiendish, temperamental device that was the carburetor. I was born in 76
Carbs weren’t that bad in the 60s, as long as they were kept clean, unless it was cold. In the winter, in Michigan, between the poor atomization and mixture control of the carb and the weak spark from the points and condenser ignition, getting a car started when the temp was below 10F was an art form.
Due to US emissions controls, Volvo and air cooled VWs started using EFI in the very early 70s. In 76, VW went to EFI for all it’s front drive models, because carbed engine drivability was so bad. The big three clung to their mantra of “make it cheaper, make it cheaper, make it cheaper” and persisted in using carbs no matter how miserably they performed. Cold stalling and stumbling was routine, as well as the engine continuing to run after the ignition was turned off…known as “dieseling”
The two best running carbed cars I had were an 80 Renault R5 with a manual choke Weber and an 85 Mazda GLC with an electronic feedback Hitachi. Seems everyone hated the feedback carbs, but the one in the Mazda worked wonderfully, as long as it was kept immaculately clean and fed the best quality gas.
I had only two daily drivers with a carb, a 1982 R5 and a 1987 Ford Escort. Both had a manual choke. After a while you knew exactly how far you had to pull the choke’s knob out, it all depended on the weather (temperature), combined with how long the car hadn’t run. Once you knew that, it always worked, 100% hassle free.
I vividly remember the “screamers”. Folks who didn’t -gradually- push the knob back while the engine was already warming up. Best effect in the morning; at traffic lights, intersections and such.
After a while you knew exactly how far you had to pull the choke’s knob out, it all depended on the weather (temperature), combined with how long the car hadn’t run.
On my R5, cold starts always wanted the choke all the way out. I have forgotten exactly at what temp I would add a squirt from the accelerator pump. When it was even colder, I would give it one squirt before cranking and a second squirt during cranking after the engine had rotated a couple times. Fired without fail.
Carb + manual choke = best car anti-theft device ever.
Carb + manual choke = best car anti-theft device ever.
And in the US these days, manual transmission
After 100 or so carb type cars the main thing to ensure easy starting was the ignition system, carbs themselves give almost no trouble but ignition system faults are blamed on the carburetor every time.
The top picture of the Mustang looks JUST like the yellow plastic one I had as a kid. It had an electric motor and a remote control (with a wire, if I remember correctly).
I think it was powered by either C or D batteries.