JC Whitney Used To Sell Knockoff Hubcaps With Weird Bootleg Brand Names On Them Like ‘Food’

One of the most common “tells” of images created with artificial intelligence (AI) is that things like logos or written text are often strange, corrupted messes, resembling their intended representation, but not quite hitting the mark. They’re off, often in comically obvious ways. Images that are blighted with such distortions are usually a good way to tell if they’re from the past couple of years, but I’ve recently happened to see some examples of real-world artifacts, some dating from as far back as the 1950s or even earlier, that are strangely similar to weird AI text glitches. These artifacts are hubcaps.

Specifically, they’re hubcaps from mail-order catalogs like JC Whitney, and while they’re made for common, popular cars, they don’t quite look like the original equipment. This is because most cars’ hubcaps have the carmaker’s logo on them, and JC Whitney was far, far too cheap to pay good money to license any logos or branding from major automakers. Uncle JC isn’t made of money!

Look, you want cheap hubcaps, something has to give. And, remember, from the, say, 1940s to the 1990s, hubcaps were far more common and were always getting lost, stolen, damaged, or just flung off comically in corners, where they would roll, loudly, before clattering to a halt like a dreidel that was definitely not comin’ up gimmels.

That’s why, if you looked really carefully at ads like this, you might notice something:

Okay, take a close look at hubcap C, for example. It’s for a Chevrolet. Look carefully at the center, where the Chevy bowtie usually resides. What do you see?

Not the Chevy bowtie. A hyphen. A truncated bowtie! That’s because JC Whitney was not about to cut a check to GM to use their bowtie, and they didn’t want lawsuit trouble. So they just made something that looked close enough, at least from a distance. They did this a lot. Look:

I love these! Some are subtle, like substituting the Cadillac shield’s birds (they’re actually not ducks, they’re merlettes) with stars or little hashmarks, or having a Ford hubcab read FOBD, or Chrysler becoming some very AI-looking unpronounceable minestrone of letters, and then, yes, the Chevy hyphen.

JC Whitney seemed to have the most fun with Ford’s script logo, which they sometimes rendered as Fool or Bool – the first letter could be either a B or F:

My favorite Ford one are these Model A hubcaps that read “Food”:

That’s so good! I would love to drive a Food!

Dodge was another fun one, coming out as something that could be Doood or maybe just Doooo or even Dodoo or Doodd or some combination of those:

From a distance, these probably worked just fine! And, when driving, they’re spinning anyway, so how accurate do you really need to be?

JC Whitney was also very big in the aftermarket accessory business for air-cooled Volkswagens, so they had a number of bootleg VW hubcaps. I remember these very well from when I was a kid with a ’73 Beetle and pouring through these catalogs:

These were the fancy ones. They classed up your humble Beetle or Squareback or Bus and looked like this:

That’s sort of like two overlaid VW logos, so it has to be twice as good, right? Also, these were full-wheel-sized and slotted, to give those brakes some cooling air. But they also had ones that tried to mimic the originals more closely. This variant is extremely close:

Those are really, really close. Just a pair of breaks where the V-shapes intersect, giving a dimensional illusion. I wonder if these were too close, forcing JC Whitney to switch to ones like these:

They also had ones that had a sort of twin lightning bolt look to them, but those felt a bit like the SS logo, a visual association that I suspect most Volkswagen owners weren’t eager to make so obvious.

What kind of baffles me about these is that while most of the hubcaps had knockoff logos and badging, JC Whitney would happily sell you other products that absolutely replicated carmaker’s logos and badges:

Why were these okay, and the full hubcaps not? Because one was an actual car part, and the other more clearly an accessory? Also, weird VW badge there, and the less said about the Confederate flag, maybe the better.

Look, they even sold Ford-specific ones, with the actual names. You could even get these for your Tempo or Topaz! Imagine combining these with some Food hubcaps so you could rock a Food Tempo!

I mean, that’s the dream, right?