By Petrolicious Productions / 08 May 2013
6 Comments

The sixties was a special time for Ford, with many of their most-iconic and best-remembered designs stemming from this forward-thinking time in their corporate history. Nearly across the entire blue oval range, styling was distinct and successful, with not only the Mustang and Thunderbird looking crisp and modern, but with worthy efforts in the forms of more utility-biased machines—all of which are illustrated here on a period salesman’s guide to facts and figures for the 1965 range.

By Petrolicious Productions / 07 May 2013
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VW’s known for some spectacular vintage advertising, ads which were instrumental in their success as a viable large-car alternative in America. During this time, the Type 2 was merely an inexpensive workhorse (as illustrated by these print ads and brochure images), designed and developed long before its days as a counter-culture icon, a time when the idea of a 21-window bus fetching nearly six figures was simply inconceivable.

By Petrolicious Productions / 25 April 2013
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Well-known today as a friendly, easy-going guy, early versions were beyond creepy, with the Michelin Man looking like a bloated zombie mummy coming apart at the seams—his appetite for broken glass and fat stoagies only reinforcing the scary imagery. We can easily imagine kids of the day growing unhealthy and irrational fears of anything on tires, where today they sell stuffed, plush versions for them to cuddle—quite a transformation in only 12 decades!

By Petrolicious Productions / 25 April 2013
2 Comments

This week we present for your viewing pleasure vintage poster designs, advertisements, and photographs from one of the icons of this rose-tinted past, Esso. Derived from the phonetics of Standard Oil’s initials, this once-prevalent brand is largely defunct today, disappearing from most branded stations and products in 1972—perhaps that’s why it’s so deeply associated with a more golden age of motorsport and of the car in general.

By Petrolicious Productions / 10 April 2013
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Designed to fit into the luggage compartment of the Honda City and Honda Today, the former’s trunk space actually being designed around its dimensions, the Motocompo was a little folding scooter sold from 1981–1983. Mechanically it wasn’t much to get excited about, with a 49cc two-stroke and centrifugal clutch, single-speed transmission, but its plastic body and retracting parts were undeniably cool—just like the Transformers, it was more than meets the eye.

By Petrolicious Productions / 10 April 2013
6 Comments

You already know we love vintage brochures for the way they help illuminate a car in a period-correct shade of light, but it still takes a special car and a good design layout to make promo material stand out. The Toyota 2000GT is easily special enough to fill one of those shoes, while the unknown graphic designer and photographers of this great period brochure take credit for the rest. This car was considered by many to be the most beautiful Japanese car ever built.

By Petrolicious Productions / 03 April 2013
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Period photos, graphic design, and visual data charts from vintage car brochures help capture a special, older car’s zeitgeist—its “timeghost”—endowing us with an even deeper appreciation beyond purely rose-tinted sentiment. Cars like the 911 carry such weight that it is difficult to separate machine from myth, metal from memory. We recently stumbled upon a collection of beautiful old 911 brochures from the early '70s—we hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

By Petrolicious Productions / 27 March 2013
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Dr. Felix Wankel’s rotary engine was supposed to revolutionize the automobile. Pundits, insiders, and engineers of the ’60s and ’70s praised its simplicity of design and construction, its compact and powerful nature, and its vibrationless running. They promised it would soon be made reliable and fuel efficient relative to more conventional internal-combustion engines, at which point they speculated it would come to dominate the market.

By Petrolicious Productions / 21 March 2013
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This 1911 Triumph 3 1/2 HP is truly a veteran machine, still in running, original condition after more than a hundred years—perhaps the only left of its kind.

Here we share several images and graphics taken from select 1911 Triumph owner's booklets, repairs and sundries catalogs, as well as interesting paperwork and postcards.

By Petrolicious Productions / 14 March 2013
6 Comments

Cars and music are a great combination. Today, living as we do in a futuristic world of convenience, it's easy to bring along thousands of songs of one's choice on a device the size of a small stack of credit cards, allowing total control of your driving soundtrack. Back in the days of carburetors, distributors, and leaded gas, though, things were a bit more complicated, or more accurately, a lot more simple.

By Petrolicious Productions / 05 March 2013
2 Comments

Before online video tutorials and an abundance of automotive paint shops, people relied on brochures such as this one from 1922, created by the company Kyanize, which was a trademark of the Boston Varnish Company. We love the typography, lettering, and illustrations used throughout the 16-page brochure, the color scheme, the text call-outs ("Yes! I did it myself!"), and the actual paint chips on page 13. Click through to view.

By Adam Kaslikowski / 19 February 2013
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I get why the Vespa never caught on in 1960s America. Our landscape is too expansive, not enough of us were living in crowded cities, and a booming economy meant we could afford big motorcycles rather than little scooters. Unfortunately, when we made that choice, we chose to miss out on one very important fact: A woman and a Vespa together are one of the greatest combinations ever. Take a gander at these calendar images if you don’t believe me.

By Adam Kaslikowski / 30 December 2012

BMW’s have always been about sharp lines and elegant style, and their advertisements are no different. Each of these BMW advertisements subtly speak to the brand’s virtues by way of less-is-more. From the Art Nouveau roadster hurtling up a mountain pass to the Bauhaus bold lines and organic curves of a BMW motorcycle speeding past, these advertisements speak to their decade of invention and to BMW’s style through the ages.

By Afshin Behnia / 13 February 2013
5 Comments

I’m a sucker for vintage automobilia. I love looking for it, perusing swap meets, flea markets, and antique shops for little pieces of automotive history that survived the ages. Not long ago, I stumbled upon quite the find in a used bookshop in Milan.  It’s a 15” X 19” binder with a beautiful enamel Porsche emblem and leather strap forming a clasp. Inside the binder are 18 large-format lithograph color drawings of various automobiles in which Dr. Ferdinand Porsche was involved.

By Petrolicious Productions / 06 February 2013
3 Comments

From the time the Ducati firm offered its very first motorcycle in 1950, a 48 cc bike weighing 98 pounds with a top speed of 40 mph, Ducati is now known for its high-performance motorcycles with their four-stroke L-twin engines.

Do we have any Ducati fans out there?

By Petrolicious Productions / 31 January 2013
1 Comment

Modern historians consider Sputnik's launch in 1957 as the beginning of the Space Age in the United States. In the late-fifties and through much of the sixties, architecture, automobile design, and fashion took on a space age-inspired appearance. The trendiness of the aesthetic both stimulated and exploited Americans' confidence and enthusiasm for the future, culminating into a quick turnover for consumer products and a greater movement toward materialism.

By Petrolicious Productions / 24 January 2013
3 Comments

The Fox was built in-house in Germany and debuted as the Audi 80 in Europe in 1972, where it received critical acclaim. When it came to Australia and the U.S. in 1973, it was marketed as the Audi Fox. The now-rare Audi Fox isn't the most popular of Audi models, but this Audi Fox campaign is a smart and beautifully designed campaign for Audi, which highlights all of the positive aspects of this little car.

By Afshin Behnia / 16 January 2013
2 Comments

One cold January afternoon in the Navigli area of Milan, we came across this well-preserved WWII BMW R75 motorcycle with its original sidecar. We arrived just in time to meet the owner and his wife: a charming couple obsessed with all things from the WWII era.

The brave couple had just ridden the Bimmer from outside Milan in the freezing cold to visit the city for the afternoon.

By Petrolicious Productions / 08 January 2013
4 Comments

Following the Ford Mustang and then the Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac finally entered the pony car market with the Pontiac Firebird, which was built by the Pontiac division of General Motors between 1967 and 2002. Let's take a look at portions of the Pontiac Firebird brochures from some of those years: 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973, and 1979.

Which generation do you like best?

By Petrolicious Productions / 04 January 2013
1 Comment

Today's Vintage Friday post features the French car company Citroën, which has been around for nearly 100 years. Citroën was the first mass-production car company outside the USA, and it earned a reputation for innovation and revolutionary engineering, which is reflected in the company's slogan "Créative Technologie".

Don't you love these creative brochure designs?

By Petrolicious Productions / 18 December 2012

What better way to sell a car than with a gray-bearded old man dressed in red with white fur trim and black boots? Advertising agency creatives have always and will always want to take a stab at using Santa and his sleigh or other holiday vignettes to sell cars, but can we blame them? Whether these ads sell cars or not, these advertisements and the magazines that fill their editorial pages with Christmasy images provide us with a little smile in our day and get us feeling wintry and in the holiday spirit!

By Petrolicious Productions / 13 December 2012
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Nobody knows for certain the country of origin for motor skiing (or skijoring), but it is believed that the first races were held in Scandinavia. Bavaria, Germany, is another place where motor skiing is thought to have originated. Around 1955, a group of crazy Germans decided to hold races in which they towed themselves around at high speeds with Porsches, Volkswagens, and motorbikes. They navigated race courses at speeds up to 100 miles per hour.

By Petrolicious Productions / 05 December 2012

Our site has been up and running for about two and a half months now, and we're so happy about all the support we've gotten so far from all of you. We're down in San Diego today filming a Ferrari Testarossa, and we're looking forward to sharing the finished video soon. For this week's Vintage Friday post, we found images of vintage Ford Mustangs to share...

By Petrolicious Productions / 28 November 2012
2 Comments

Many critics of the Porsche 911 have claimed that the 911 is nothing more than a glorified VW Beetle. Does this 1966 ad for the Beetle once and for all substantiate these critics’ claim? The ad is in Italian, and the translation of the headline is as follows: “Flip it if you want...the Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche: two aspects of the same vision”.

By Petrolicious Productions / 21 November 2012

The first dashboards were wood or leather attached to the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh, to protect the carriage from mud, water, snow, rocks, or anything else that was kicked (or "dashed) up from the horses and the wheels and onto the passengers' legs and bodies. Dashboards have come a long way since those days.

By Petrolicious Productions / 15 November 2012
4 Comments

There's something fun and endearing about photos of famous people and classic cars. Maybe it's because we feel a little bit more like them when we discover that certain celebrities loved that same cars back then that we do now. Click through to see photos of James Dean, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie Chaplin, and many more.

By Petrolicious Productions / 06 November 2012
3 Comments

After hunting for several vintage Porsche posters from the fifties to the eighties, we've narrowed down our findings to our favorites. As the posters progress by year, they also progress by style. The posters from the early and mid-fifties are more detailed and painterly, but in the the late fifties, we see a shift to more stylized designs with modern uses of type, color, and lines.

By Petrolicious Productions / 30 October 2012

These illuminated tires were developed by The Goodyear Tire Company in 1961. The tires were made from a single piece of synthetic rubber and were lit by bulbs, which had been mounted inside the wheel rim. The tires were intended to be produced in a variety of colors. Can you imagine the effects we'd have in time-lapse photography if these were around today?

By Petrolicious Productions / 24 October 2012

Over here at Petrolicious, we're looking forward to this autumn weekend (even if it doesn't feel much like autumn in Los Angeles!).

We came across some cool automotive things around the web this week and wanted to share them with you.