Are you from Germany? Are you looking for a new car? Is it 1959? If so, then I have some important news for you: I have some issues with this Ford Taunus brochure. Now, none of these are a big deal, really, but I do think that as a potential car buyer from 67 years ago, you really should be made aware of what I, an as-yet-unborn weirdo from across the ocean, have feelings about. So let’s get into it.
First, I don’t have any real problems with the Taunus, though to be fair, this generation of Taunus (known as the Streifentaunus (1959–1962), which means “side-stripe Taunus) was pretty obviously and embarrassingly out of date, mechanically at least, by 1959. The 12M (1200cc) version was still using an inline-four engine with side valves, which were pretty outdated even back then.
The body design was a fairly up-to-date pontoon-fender sort of design, so unless people made you stop and open your hood, you could save yourself some embarrassment. I mean, you still only had around 35 horsepower or so, but that wasn’t that low, back in the day. Anyway, let’s get into some important issues in this brochure, the most important of which has to do with the interior room and seating.
The brochure devotes a lot of time to noting the interior room and that the seats can slide forward and back, which is, of course, great but hardly revolutionary. They really want you to understand this, so you get that striking-looking double exposure of the woman in multiple positions. Well, two, which is the absolute minimum one needs to qualify for “multiple,” but it makes it. And below the double-lady, I just wanted to show that diagram because I really like how those schematic square-jawed men have hats on. Honestly, that head shape is wonderfully minimal and evocative, and were I making an Indiana Jones video game for a system that used vector graphics like a Vectrex, I’d totally steal that.
But my real issue is with this image:
Okay, a cutaway of a car interior is pretty common in these brochures, and I get they want to show how much room is in back, but look how far forward the driver’s seat is! Now, I’m short and tend to push the seat pretty far forward, but this feels like a lot even for me. The steering wheel bottom is about over the halfway point of the seat bottom cushion. Only my 4’9″ mom who drives a Fiat 500 and sits on an extra seat cushion would pull the seat that close. This feels a little deceptive.
Plus, this cutaway – which was physically done to an actual car and isn’t some photographic or illustrative trick – just makes me realize that perhaps the Taunus should have been a four-door. For whatever reason, Germany in this era seemed to prefer two-door cars – Volkswagen, for example, didn’t have a mass-market four door passenger car (not counting the Type 2 bus or wartime Kübelwagen) until the Type 4 in 1968 – but with the Taunus being marketed as a family car, once you get a taste of what direct access to the rear seat could be like as in that cutaway, you’d think it’d be hard to go back to two-door reality.
I’m just including this picture because I like it. That’s a lovely, steep hill there! Go little Taunus! You can do it!
Oh, and this picture I’m including because of how much it looks like Los Angeles, even though I think all these pictures were shot in Germany. Taunuses of this era came to the US in low numbers, but were never really popular. This image, though, really does feel like what a Taunus would be like existing in late-50s Santa Monica or something. The house is even that adobe-style!
It’s also worth showing this illustration that shows just how many colors these cars were available in, which is impressive, and also what I think is a warning illustration about the danger of your car getting re-painted by farbzwerg, or “color gnomes,” a severe problem postwar Germany was dealing with, where large populations of tiny gnome-like creatures who manufactured their own crude paints would come out at night and sloppily repaint cars, building, streets – anything not covered by a tarp or sprinkled with paprika, which kept them away.
By 1964, a German task force was able to lure most of the color gnome population onto a ship, where they were secretly taken to Antarctica and released. They appear to have integrated themselves and interbred with the local penguin population, which is why so many penguins, when given access to paint, will create large-scale Jackson Pollack-like works.
Finally, we have one of my favorite sorts of improbable-parking car brochure scenes. What’s happening here? It kind of looks like they’re on the campus of a university, and just drove onto the quad or a quad and parked wherever. But that umbrella and table suggest a café? But what’s going on with that kid and that dog? The copy says the men are just drinking beer and talking about cars, and the dude in the sunglasses owns the Taunus behind him. Which is fine, but there’s still so much left unexplained.
Anyway, once again: German car buyers of 1959, please consider these issues carefully before you decide to buy a new Taunus 12M!
All images: Taunus
It’s a Ford: It’s supposed to be shitty. Old engine, few doors, exaggerated features.
This is nothing but child abuse. In the first photo a kid is being spanked by a Taunus. In the last photo a boy is forced to wear women’s slippers while his drunken father mocks him. I’m calling the authorities.
One of my uncles had a 17M. By some unfortunate series of events back in the old country, eons ago.
Some guy from his city managed to jump the Iron Curtain without getting shot, and went on to greener West German pastures. Turned out – homesickness hit him harder than it did others, and he decided to return no matter what. Little detail though – jail time awaited him back home, because – traitor to the shiny Communist motherland, having jumped the curtain and whatnot.
My uncle was the chief surgeon in his regional hospital and pulled some strings – possibly from apparatchicks he had reassembled back together on his operation table.
Long story short – the guy was allowed to come back to the country without fears of prosecution, which was really not trivial.
My uncle ended up with the guy’s eternal gratitude, a Philips all-in-one turntable+Cassette+Radio (we used to call them combines for some reason), all the jeans he could wear and a brand new Taunus 17m. I strongly suspect it was a P7a.
Not sure if it was fate, bad luck, how my uncle drove it or just how these were, but this car turned out to be the absolutely abyssaly worst POS the car universe has ever seen. It was going through an engine rebuild about every 40000km, I still remember little me wasting a day during a short and impossible to organize trip to the forbidden land (Munich) in the 80s, explaining to a puzzled German parts manager that yes, we DO need the “dritte Aufbohrung” piston set. Or “third overbore”, or whatever would mean “We’re looking for pistons three sizes over because it’s the third rebuild“, and then confirming that yes, the car has 120000km at this point, not 1200000.
And those were the major things that kid me remembers. There was always something, and this thing passed most of its life perched on four logs.
Top Shot
Grimacing Face emoji
That 50s German art style that looks like early to mid 2000s CG always freaks me out. The lady in the seat is truly terrifying.
Ford’s British arm would happily sell you a 4 door version of their similar offering, the Prefect. Bring a towel.
I think we’re overlooking that the Taunus in the last picture has been clearly been put in time-out, and is at least a little ashamed of what it did. We’re not mad, little Taunus, just disappointed.
Mein Gott!! I want that many color choices for cars, SUVs, Crossovers, and trucks made today.
They were tired of the feldgrau.
Families used to prefer two doors because in the days before child-safety locks, no back doors meant that the kids couldn’t open the door and fall out. Not like people were wrestling kids into ginormous kid capsules in those days.
Oh, yeah, that’s a great picture of that Taunus ascending the steep hill.
Geez, the number of people in the comments making clever cracks about the Taunus being incapable of climbing such a hill certainly says something about people not being able to wrap their heads around the fact that you can indeed do *plenty* with just low double-digit horsepower. That Taunus was indeed most eminently capable of summiting that hill; to be sure it’d have been pretty slow but, hey, you’re going uphill, what’s the big hurry??
Depending on the choice of engine that Taunus would’ve had either something like 34-38 hp or 54 hp. A 1959 VW Beetle would’ve had 36 hp, a 1959 Citroën 2CV would’ve had 18 hp, and a 1959 Fiat Nuova 500 would’ve had all of 13 hp. All of those were indeed perfectly capable of handling the hill in question, albeit just sloooowly, especially in the last two.
Yeah, don’t worry about needing triple-digit horsepower, just row down through the gears and enjoy the scenery…
Frankly, I’m more worried about it trying to get back down.
Oh, yeah, that’s always a concern no matter what horsepower a car has, especially if it has drum brakes all around.
At least with smaller and lighter cars engine braking can be surprisingly effective if one knows what they’re doing…
Downshift to go up… downshift to go down 😛
Yeah, you’d be surprised (maybe not) at how many people just don’t know what they’re doing, lol
People can’t wrap their heads that this car weighted what, 800kg? Nowadays the mobile buildings that took the place of our cars weight that just in accessories that are locked behind a subscription, so yes, 36hp will be enough to move the rear window wiper and that’s it.
Notably, it isn’t shown having reached the top of the very steep hill. I wonder why?
Also, it’s just funny in that in the pic with the golden retriever, you can tell exactly where the trainer is standing, just out of frame, telling the dog to hold the “sit-stay.”
Cover shot: Bending over in front of Americans was basically what the Germans did between 1945 and 1949.
Interior shot. Every car ad I’ve seen locally does the same thing. Shove the driver and passager seat into the dash and then show how much room is in the back. It’s like “WOW, this Corolla has more room in the back than Rolls!”
Are we ignoring the lead photo in this?
You know where little boy is bent over the front bumper?
“Predicting the future, where you can not see a child in bright red overalls in front of your Ford!”
“Nein Hans, das is kein Direktturboinjektion! You have to be 10cm taller and a little to the right to line up with the intake”
“Ford, we don’t need Opel or VW to crap on our cars, we can do it ourselves!”
And I haven’t even started with the most German of training for this little dude. Socks and Sandals. He’s being raised right there.
The top image reminds me of the annoying crying kid dolls at car shows.
In the first shot, is that a naughty Deutschboomerjunge on the front bumper?
https://images-stag.jazelc.com/uploads/theautopian-m2en/cs_taunus_seats_1.jpg
I’m assuming those numbers are millimeters?
Makes me wonder why decimeters isn’t really used when people are using metric measurements. It’s usually millimeter, centimeters and then jumps over decimeters right to meters.
Millimetres works for most situations – until you start taking distances over 10metres.
After many years in manufacturing: centimetres and decimetres mess with my perception of length.
Arguably, you could claim: “Inches, Feet, Yards, Miles? Why do they just skip over barleycorn, palms, hands, cables, rods, and chains?”
I’m not looking for an argument, thank you.
Long Live Base 10 Units Systems!
Keep strengthening that petition for MN to join Canada.
I am trying!
It’s more: why do we use centimetres, when the rest of the SI system sticks to powers of a thousand? (eg kilo- mega- giga- peta- milli- micro- nano- etc.).
And the answer is; humans often need to measure things which are around the same size as us and our appendages. My fingers are about 1 cm diameter, from the end of my thumb to the first knuckle is an inch, from my outstretched arm to my face is about a metre or a yard etc.
I feel like that poor car struggling up that hill would have been painful with only 54hp on tap. However, coming back down with non-power, 4 wheel drum brakes must have been downright terrifying.
Let alone when the weather turns.
I’m pretty sure the Taurus is rolling backwards.
Cars of that era had first gears suited to climbing trees for a reason.
My Peugeot 504D was similarly powered. It was fine even in 21st century America. You put your foot down, and it goes.
Drum brakes on lightweight cars work just fine too. Even in mountains.
People are so incredibly spoiled when it comes to cars today.
You can learn a lot about time management driving a three-on-a-tree while changing radio stations and lighting a cigarette.
I’m guessing that your Peugeot wasn’t a wagon with auto trans and a/c.
One of them was. Still perfectly fine. Put your foot in it and keep it there. The main difference is that the extra gear in the 4spd mostly meant it would cruise at 75 rather than 70. A/C on or off made very little difference in those cars, given they had decent amounts of torque.
Mercedes diesels were the same, very little performance difference between the autos and the sticks, though they had the advantage of having four gears in the autos as well.
Not my experience as a line tech at dealers of both.
Well, I owned both for a decade+ each. <shrug> I found performance to be entirely adequate.
small manual cars barely need brakes, just downshift.
My favorite Taunus trivia bit is that the next gen would offer a V4 engine that would also be featured in the first Mustang concept here.
And would be installed in many Saabs while they transitioned from 2-stroke to 4-stroke engines.
They WERE Saabs transition to 4-strokes, and were used in the 96 right up to the end of production of that model in 1980. Quite a run – 1960-1980. though really 1979, the last 96 was built in the first week of January 1980 – I am sure they did that on purpose. 🙂
The wacky thing is Ford built *two* different V4s. This German one and a similar but not the same one in England – the “Essex” V4. Ford UK and Ford Germany were essentially separate companies in those days.
That’s actually incredible, I had no idea they kept it going that long, nor that they made two distinct V4’s. I lust after a 2-stroke Sonett or 96, but the Essex-powered cars are still really cool. In my mind it’s “while they transitioned” because the 2-stroke triple was a Saab-made engine and I thought the 99 was also powered by a Saab mill, but as I just researched and discovered, they didn’t make any meaningful changes to its Triumph engine until 1972, at which point it finally became the Saab B engine and started to be manufactured by Scania.
Yeah, there was a bit of an issue when the cylinder head studs seized in the head casting, meaning the head would not come off and the commonly failed gasket could not be replaced.
One would think that a later Saab engine would be a great upgrade for the Triumph TR7.
I can see that, especially the DOHC H engine, which seems to be a good bit more powerful.
*takes notes*
*fumbling with jars of spices*
“sweet paprika. smoked paprika. hot paprika. which do I need?!?!?! DAMN YOU TORCH! WHICH IS IT?!?!?!”
“WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF THYME!!”
Perhaps a sage reader can pepper us with their knowledge.
Depends what kind of farbzwerg infestation you’re dealing with.
I usually just use cayenne and some red pepper flakes.
“I just wanted to show that diagram because I really like how those schematic square-jawed men have hats on.”
Apropos of which, there’s an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about how a struggling BMW hoped to get some sales from government officials for their then-new 505 sedan but was greatly embarrassed when the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, knocked his hat off on the roof at the C-pillar when either getting into or getting out of the back seat whereupon government officials simply continued using Mercedeses. So BMW kept struggling until they came out with the 1600/2002 models a few years later.
Was there a slightly up-market version of the Mercury Sanle as well? What would a full front light bar look like in 1959?!
Will there be a Taunus SHO, maybe with a motor from Japan?
I want a Taunus MT-5…
Having had the “pleasure” – no, you really don’t.
How bad could it be?
A bit like driving a slow coffee grinder. The performance was adequate, but the commotion from under the hood was annoying. If you want to row your own, get an SHO, or just get one with the far more pleasant V6.
Of course, at this point, when was the last time you saw ANY ’80s Taurus on the road? All but extinct, even here in God’s Waiting Room.
I think that little Taunus has already done all it can with that hill.
Also, I think the color gnome digression shows us exactly when the good stuff you were ingesting kicked in.
What makes JT special is that he can write that stone cold sober.
A pair of Lincoln MK V sized doors would likely solve the rear seat access issues.