Old Car Advertisements

[Matt Herring]

Hey Everybody!

Being an avid Sports Illustrated reader (I've read every word cover to cover every week for the past 20 years...call it OCD if you like) I came across a handy little website that allows you to manually click through and read every page of several dozen old Sports Illustrated issues every week.

Aside from being able to read all the old, cool sports articles you can also browse ads that were in the magazines. There are some interesting (and sometimes funny) car ads in the magazines and it really gets you thinking just how far (or maybe not) we have come in the car industry since Sports Illustrated started back in the 50's.

Below is the link for the site if you want to click through some issues and see the car ads (might bring back some memories for some of you). When you go to the site there is a little link under some of the SI covers that says "View this issue." Click that and you can flip through the SI magazine from that week (issues go all the way back to the 50's).

Sports Illustrated Covers - 2,800 covers of the magazine - SI Vault - SI.com

My favorite car ads:
* 2/8/1965 issue with Jerry West on the cover (VW Bug ad: Claims the car uses less "parts" than normal cars so you don't have to haul the extra weight of the parts resulting in gas savings and 32mpg...VW was one of the first ecomodding trailblazers reducing weight to save gas!)

* 10/10/1983 issue with Redskins on the cover (Chrysler Laser XE ad: Claims the car leaves Camaro Z28 in it's dust with multi-point injection system that "spritzes" fuel at 4 points. Also mentions that the 0-50 speed of 5.8 secs leaves the Trans Am, Supra and RX-7 in your remote-controlled side-view mirrors...love it!)

Feel free to post your favorite car ads from old SI issues!

[wagonman76]

One of my favorite cars from the 80s. An older gal in high school had one identical to this.