Vintage Advertising: Renault says FWD FTW Edition
This is one of the many 1970s automotive ads you will be seeing in the upcoming time. I’m going to leave them here with no comment of my own, expecting comments from you Hoons. Clicky for bigger picy.
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The Renault I2 – the logical reason so many people are still so suspicious of front wheel drive.
Some Renaults are damn good looking…but not this one.
Good enough for Romania, good enough for me.
<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Dacia_1300.JPG/800px-Dacia_1300.JPG" width=600>
And just the car for any diehard Chicago Bears fan.
/how do i know?
/it's a puzzlah!
Is it me, or is that blue one above leaking oil rom its doors?
You only have to worry about a Renault when it stops dripping oil. That means there's none left.
The wipers are flipped up, so that tells me it was just washed, and maybe driven to where it was being dried off.
DId you give up> The license plate says "HALAS". as in George S.
Not sure if I like the dual headlights here, or the quads in the advert. I think the bumper in the advert is all win, though.
…and it doubles as a birth control device.
Especially if your crush can do more than nearly 93mph.
Just remember that Burt Reynolds couldn't get away from his wife, and he was driving an SM.
Torque Steer can be fun! (I'd know from the front seat of a Pontiac Vibe)
I'm not sure about the 12, but a lot of French car from that era had longitudinal engines with equal length drive shafts and therefore had very little torque steer.
See there you go again, making me smarter…
Also I really know very little about zee Renault.
Three million 'People', or 'French People'?
There's a difference I think.
Jokes aside, an R12 is a good car, particularly in SW form. And the US market models might have been among the best-equipped even including the 1647cc R16 engine. They were one of the first 'world car' models and you still see 20 and even 30 year-old ones rattling around in places as diverse as Argentina and Turkey (where they built them up through the 1990's). Even Dacias seem to last. They aren't much to look at, but I would certainly not turn down the keys to a nice R12 Gordini or Alpine.
Renaults at least in the USA had a terrible reliability history. The company even went so far as to basically apologize for its cars in the ads – of course, the Renault 10 was a dreadful car too. I knew a couple of people who owned 12s in the 1970s and while the cars were pleasant to drive, there were endless problems to the point that the owners ditched them after a couple of years in favor of Datsuns or Toyotas. As for Dacias lasting, remember was Romania was a car-poor nation for a long time and people had no choice but to try to keep their Dacias going – it was that or take the bus.
<img src="http://i42.tinypic.com/2mxx0m.jpg">
Wow, that's a bold ad, hah. Murilee made a post on TTAC asking whether European cars were more reliable at home than they were here, and the answer is basically yes. We're tougher on our cars, and as the ad points out, less likely to fix problems on our own.
My 1st grade teacher in Australia drove a Renault 10. I distinctly remember the sliding front windows.
Now an interesting question would be, are American cars more or less reliable in Europe?
I'm not sure there are enough of them to be statistically significant.
Weird one offs don't count, of course. We'd have to look at models that have had actual dealership representation, so that pretty much means Chrysler and a very few GM models. The problem would be finding similar models, because so many Avengers/300's/Voyagers were sold with diesel mills from various sources. Chrysler Neons sold reasonably well, and they were all gassers. I remember the dustbuster Pontiac TransSport being reasonably popular too.
The difference is that even in the 1960s, cars were so ingrained into the American culture that they were treated as appliances by most people and were expected to be reliable as appliances, too. How many of us expect to do routine mechanical maintenance on our refrigerators and ovens? I don't think Europeans still take cars quite so much for granted.
That's kind of a backhanded apology. They're pretty much saying, "Sorry that we didn't realize how big asshats Americans are, and how incompetent they are with vehicles. Sorry that we built a perfectly good car, and you clowns managed beat on them and abuse them until they broke. We've now made a child proof version, for all you Americans still sucking on your mother's tit."
And there damn well better be a toy with my Happy Meal.
Reading between the lines, that's exactly what they said. It's almost enough to make me want a Renault.
This advert refers, of course, to the experiences unfortunate American buyers had with the Dauphine. There is no gainsaying that particular model's dreadfulness; 30hp, rear engine, swing axles, no rustproofing of any sort. Fortunately, it is not the subject of this conversation. And neither is the 10. A marginally better, but still rear-engined and mediocre car.
While a surprisingly large number of Dacias are on the road, considering their origins, a large number of locally-produced 12s are on the road in places like Turkey and Argentina. It has been some time since I've visited the latter, so it may be different now.
If you have been on the road in either of these places, you will know that cars there are not driven gently. I know from talking to Turkish mechanics that the 12 is respected there as tough (and easy to fix when it does break as it tolerates all sorts of bodges). I would expect that the opinions of these men are drawn from experience with hundreds of examples of the model from the full range of production–not hearsay about one or two from the '70's.
Just because a car manages to insinuate into third-world psyches because of local production and onerous car importation taxes doesn't necessarily make it good. If the Renault 12 was so great, why did US sales fall off a cliff as the 1970s progressed? Renault was a major import player right behind VW in the 1960s, despite the Dauphine, 8, and 10. By 1975, Renault barely existed on US import charts. The only thing that saved the marque in the US was the R5/Le Car and the AMC tie-up, but those ventures eventually ended up as disasters too. Renault shot itself in the foot many times before dying in the US market altogether, and the 12 was just another bullet.