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?
Legally, how does this work? Ford takes them to court for copyright infringement and JCW says it’s totally a coincidence their FOBD-brand hubcaps use the same font and the judge believes this?
“I mean, that’s the dream, right?”
Maybe yours.
My dream is much like the one DT is living, to build any number of desirable exact replicars entirely out of parts from the JC Whitney catalog AND have JC Whitney pay for those parts.
My dream garage (all generously donated by the catalog):
1968 Por$che 9!! R$
1962 Furrari California Spider
1955 Murcedes 300 SL
1972 Lamborghino Murcia
1963 Jaguar € Type
1967 Toyoka 2000Gπ
To name a few.
Further proof that JC Whitney had fucking EVERYTHING. Man, I miss that catalog.
But do you see the Fnords?
The Mustang trim emblem looks like the horse is trying to run backwards.
The horse emblems on the sides of the Mustang always face forward,.
See option G in the first catalog scan image? That’s JCW’s take on the Ford truck wheel covers of the 70s, which to this day, in my not so humble opinion, is still absolutely the very ugliest wheel or wheel cover design in American motoring history. If I had owned a Ford truck that had lost these wheel covers, I would consider it a blessing. I thought they looked dumb when I was a kid, and they have not looked any better to me as the years have gone by.
“Food” would have been a major upgrade. Have you driven a Food lately?
The ‘Food’ wheel cover appeals to me.
Did they branch out into Cannon Cameras and Soony Tv sets ?
In Italy or in places like NYC or New Jersey, I could see Cannone Cameras and Sonny TV sets…
And Panasaonic. Only an illiterate fool would buy one of those.
“Only an illiterate fool would buy one of those.”
So… they sold a lot of them, eh?
LOL
Love the Fool one
Food Tempo is something I need to work on slowing down so I will realize I’m full before I’ve eaten way too much.
My mother’s ’58 Plymouth arrived mislabeled, with an H on the trunk where the L was supposed to be. My father’s Dodge came with a DeSoto steering wheel.
When I was a kid, my folks bought a 1971 or so Econoline. 302, 3 on the tree (kinda wish I had it now). The person they bought it from had switched the F & D on the front so it read D O R F.
A friend had a PONATIC.
I saw a Yukon recently that someone had arranged the letters to spell DENIAL.
You could get a lot of mileage writing about the old JC Whitney catalogs. I remember ordering the catalog in the 80s. My gearhead neighbor and I would circle hit that we’d plan to order for car, which usually ended up being the engine chrome kits (valve covers, wire looms, etc.).
I’ll offer up a short story for you if you’re interested.
Back in 1984, my parents bought a brand new Ramcharger. It was literally the coolest vehicle my parents ever purchased. Seriously. They were usually pretty practical when it came to car buying, but this was cool enough for 12-year old me to be excited when we picked it up from the dealer. It was rear wheel drive, essentially a giant coupe, and it had a (slow) V8, and giant sofa for the back seat, but the that wasn’t the coolest part of it all. For me, it was looking out across that bigass hood to see a bigass ram head at the end of it.
We were lucky enough to go a couple of years before there was a run on certain hood ornaments that teenagers liked to wear attached to the the end of a big and likely fake gold necklace. Thanks to the social media of the day, MTV media stars made this popular with hood ornaments from Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, and others. Unfortunately for my parents, the Dodge ram head ornament was also on that list and living in a large metro area like Detroit made our wonderful two-tone blue Ramcharger, with the Royal SE Prospector package and aluminum turbine wheels, a common target.
I can’t remember where the first one was stolen, but I was the one to notice it. Out shopping with Mom, I asked “what happened to our ram head?” Mom was pissed. Dad was pissed, but went ahead and ordered another from the dealer. As you’ve already guessed, it didn’t last long. Less than a year later, it was also stolen.
A good family friend who also worked for Chrysler at the time offered to get one for my parents that happened to “fall off of a truck during shipping”, but Dad was and still is a pretty honest guy to a fault. Instead, looking through one of my JC Whitney catalogs, he saw a ram head ornament that was far cheaper than a new one from the dealer (again). So he ordered it.
It’s hard for some to comprehend, but to understand the quality of items offered by JC Whitney, you would have to compare it to ordering from TEMU today. You would make your order based on some crude drawing and description and hope for the best. Sometimes you would get lucky and end up with something not so bad. Other times… well… you get the idea. Our new ram head came in the mail and I opened it with the excitement of finding a stack of vintage Playboy magazines in my back yard (true story) when I came home from school. And, like realizing that all the photos were torn out of said magazines, I was disappointed with the ram head. First of all, it was cast steel and chrome. Not the frosted aluminum of the original. Additionally, it was cast together with the base and the base had a notch in it that kept it from laying flat on the hood. But that’s not the worst of it. The casting was a split cast that had a rough casting line right down the center of it that was unblushingly chromed over. In short, it was fugly. I hated it.
Dad being my dad, he went to work mounting it to the hood. Dad is a pretty smart guy, but he’s never been known for building things with finesse and he’s never been smart enough to outsmart criminals. Not only did he hard bolt the ornament to the hood, but he also used some sort of sticky tar/glue to sandwich in between the hood and the ornament. I hated looking at it every time I was in the truck. It just wasn’t the same and just seemed too half-assed for me. Our cool truck had lost its cool.
Mom was out Christmas shopping at the mall one day. She came home, pulled the truck into the garage, and when I came out to help her with some things, I noticed it. A huge gaping hole in our hood where the half-assed JC Whitney ram head once stood. A good portions of the metal from the hood that once held the ram head in place was gone. The metal left around the hole was bent all to hell. Some kids, likely thinking they were just going to grab another ram head ornament, had their work cut out for them this time. It was evident that that they tenaciously pulled the ram head from side-to-side, once I’m sure they realized there was no simple cable to cut, until they literally ripped it off of the car with bolts, tar/glue, and bits of hood along with it.
Needless to say, Dad was pretty pissed and, well… he was done. The following weekend, he went to the local junk yard and purchased a simple pentastar and base like that found on the Dodge and Plymouth K-cars. He hammered the hood around a bit with his claw hammer and pliers, mounted the new/used base, and mounted the ugly-ass pentastar on the hood where it sat at a backward angle like the wind was pushing it back. That pentastar was never stolen. It stayed bolted to that hood until purchased the truck from them in the mid 90s and ran into a parked car one night and had to eventually replace the hood all together. I still never added a ram head or any hood ornament for that matter until I eventually sent the truck away to the junk yard in 2002.
Friends ordered from JC before I was old enough to drive and found out fast about TEMU level quality.
Grew up all the car mags and mail order mags stacked in the bathroom in the mid 1960s. Even to a 7 year old the JCW catalogues looked like crap vs glossy paper magazine ads.
They also sold some really weird stuff. Like spark plug extenders if your car-truck burned so much oil that a plug would oil foul.
A friend in school bought some and used them in a Ford V8 Mustang for about 10 minutes.
The car ran like a diesel at idle because of insufficient spark to the combustion chamber.
Really sketchy stuff for sure.
Tremendous. These are even better than those “Raptor-style” grilles which were popular for a spell – ones in which some owners didn’t know or were too cheap to swap out the OOOO letters in favour of FORD (sold separately, of course).
You see, this is completely intentional! Onlookers will say “Oooo, that’s one nice grille!”
Since we do apparently think alike on this score, are you also not sure which is worse: the OOOO grill or adding unnecessary amber marker lights to give you the big truck five?
Eggs Benedict is beest served on a gleaming, silvery plated hub cap.
There’s not plate like chrome for the hollandaise.
*Insert Cary Grant “GET OUT” GIF here*
*insert Ron Swanson “I regret nothing” GIF here*