Old Volkswagon Ad With Hudson In It

[Deleted User]

I Hope this is new to someone.  

railknight

I recall seeing this print ad back around the early 1970's. Thanks for posting it!  By the way, you can view the old VW television commercial spot on YouTube that follows the same theme seen here (search using Volkswagen commercial 1949)  there's a young McLean Stevenson (from M*A*S*H) promoting Packards. Dan

Jon B

I well remember the TV commercial at the time.  And I thought, "they're flogging a dead horse!  Everyone was selling bigger, wider, heavier cars at the time, not simply Packard and Hudson and Studebaker.  But these makes eventually were bypassed by better-selling makes like Cadillac, Olds, Mercury, Dodge, etc., who did a much better job of selling wretched excess (two-ton cars, 500 HP engines, enormous tailfins)  than the Independents.  The independents withered and died but the others went on to spectacular success, to become everything that VW stood against.  But you don't see THEM mentioned in the ad!

(Actually, I seem to recall that one of the symbols of 1949 excess was Buick portholes.  They were listed in the early versions of the TV ad, but were quietly withdrawn later.  That's because the whole theme of the ad was "these ridiculously overblown cars all went down to defeat, but VW didn't".  Buick was a shining example of a 1949 behemoth that succeeded wildly!)

RonS

" The 49 Hudson is the car for you". To make matters worse, Volkswagen is now the worlds largest in sales, by surpassing Toyota. It was fun while it lasted. Cars needed to be large enough for a family of 5-6. We had little public transportation in most places, unlike Europe and Japan. Where we invested in roads, they invested in mass transit, and with that smaller, fuel efficient cars for specialty/occasional use. At the period equivalent of todays $8 per gallon the Euro/Japanese drivers could not bear a '49 Yank Tank that got 12 mpg, and needed a boat slip to park.