This is one of those weeks where I’ve been finding myself appreciating the warm comfort of old car brochures, and when I get into these moods, I sometimes find that I’m more likely to fixate on some really tiny and insignificant details. Today is definitely one of those days, because there’s a little illustration in this 1977 GMC truck brochure that has really managed to stick in my brain.
The late ’70s was a sort of odd era for American car brochures; I feel like it was a transition period, moving from the illustration-heavy 1950s and 1960s and into the more photography-based 1980s, but there was still definitely illustration present.
The styles of these illustrations had changed, and – in my opinion at least – I think there was a bit of a downturn in quality. Not a huge one, really, and some of it may be related to the more outline-heavy, simpler-colored, and overall looser aesthetic of 1970s illustration, but generally I find these ’70s illustrations to not quite have the refined artistry of the past couple decades.
But there are some gems! Like this cutaway:
I’d be curious to learn more about how techniques had changed in the ’70s; for something like this, I wonder if any early CAD imagery was a factor in how these illustrations were produced?
The illustration that caught my attention, though, is this one:
It got my attention mostly because… what the hell am I looking at, here? Is that water spraying out of the under-windshield vents from that, um, lump of water in the driver’s seat? And that water is, um, kicking it’s rear-facing water-legs through a flap in the door?
It seems this illustration is for the ventilation system, and we’ve certainly seen flow-through ventilation system diagrams before, usually with airflow-indicating arrows, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one quite like this, especially with that strange lump of “air” on the seat? How can that even work? I get the arrows there are showing air exiting through the vents in the door, but the “intake” air sure looks more like a jet of water going outward, I think because of the way it tapers at the point of the vents and then expands past the hood? Like a jet of water would?
It’s so strange. And, even more strange, is I can’t not see this:
It looks like some friendly elephant is in the seat, spraying water from its trunk out of the cowl vents, dangling his crossed legs out the door flap thingy.
I suppose airflow isn’t an easy thing to illustrate, but this is the first time one has reminded me of an elephant.
I’ll note some nice details now, to make up for my pachyderm-based mockery. As a modern designer using modern tools, I have to respect the work that my long-ago colleagues put into things like making that truck break the boundaries of the background. That’s an effect I’ve always loved, and to do it back in 1977 would have required a lot of careful X-acto-knife work.
Also, I love these engine illustrations – V8 atop, straight-six below – especially the way the shiny bits are rendered, with the bands of like three to five shades of blue. I wonder if these were made with that old color-separation gel technique?
Speaking of color, I don’t think we can show any ’70s brochure without noting the glorious array of colors almost every interior was available in. We’ve got a terracotta color, a patterned, ruddy colorway, a golden pattern, and then an icy blue plaid-esque one. I also like how GMC calls this the “comfort control center” and touts the “luxury” which I guess here means, what, the seats have padding? Oh and carpet. So much carpet.
And finally, I’d like to note how weird double-cab pickup trucks used to look before they became the norm, as they are today. This just looks weirdly stretched, and it looks like all of 40 minutes of work went into designing those doors, clearly just based on the front doors. Compared to the single cab trucks, these just looked awkward, but, again, that’s what eventually won, so what the hell do I know?
Add 3 feet of bed and wheelbase to a modern truck and it will look just as ungainly. That thing is loooong.
If only I knew someone really good at Photoshop with a popular website on which to post the results…;-)
If you think a 4-door Sierra looks weird, just wait until you see an 8-door Suburban.
Yes, double cab trucks were rare and unusual until the 90s. 100% commercial usage, and didn’t appear in half-ton models until around 2002. (International-Harvester excepted)
Well into the 1960s, most manufacturers didn’t even build crew cabs themselves, they were subcontracted out. (Again, I-H excepted.) I can’t remember if it was Ford or Dodge, but I remember seeing crew cabs built with 4 *front* doors, and a weird, V-shaped B-pillar to fill the gap.
Fun fact on the Squarebody.
You could get the 3+3/Crew Cab or a Bonus Cab.
The only difference was the Bonus Cab had no back seat, it was all for cargo.
These are such good looking trucks, I love them. Especially in two-tone.
As far as the rear doors, some earlier crew cabs were even weird looking. I’m pretty sure Dodge and International used front doors for rear doors – the pass front door would be turned around to be the driver’s rear door, and vice versa.
One of my HS friends had that same four-door truck. Switch the red for that weird yellow gold color instead. Tan interior. He parents breed race horses on the side, so they had used it to haul both the horse trailer and family (5). Parents had a newer one they didnt allow him to drive. We typically went in his truck to cruise our small town (was still legal in 80s) cuz you could seat at least 6 comfortably & had air conditioning. That, and he had ‘free’ gas from their Co-op fuel tanks, which was good because it had a thirsty 454 w/ tow gear in back. It was pretty fast from 0-40 mph.
He took the truck with him when he went to Vanderbilt University (wealthy private school). Bet it stuck out like a sore thumb in the student parking lot! It was not in pristine condition.
Nah, a truck like that in fancy surroundings pretty much shouted “Horsey Set”. Nobody would have blinked. (Although they may have tried to do the mental math to figure out how the truck owner’s relative assets stacked up to theirs…)
If you want to see trucks, go to a farm and gin show.
Walk around the parking lot and you’ll see where those hopelessly costly trucks market is.
Lately they have custom bumpers that could cut through a car without slowing down.
In Kandahar:
“What happens if they block the road on purpose?”
” You’re gonna feel a bump”
Pretty much nobody had four-door pickups back then. You really only saw them used as city or railroad maintenance crew vehicles.
When I went to college in ’86, one of my dorm-floor mates was an ag major, he drove one of these mid-70s Chevy four-doors he brought from the farm. We made heavy use of his truck for hauling all our gear to the football tailgates. I never had game tickets, but never missed a tailgate!
Also very handy, once you’d had enough beers, the stock height of the wheel openings was handy for relieving yourself without exposing yourself.
I mean the 8′ box and tiny carlike tires on this 4wd don’t help it’s looks. But the same truck in short bed crew cab with modern wheels and BFG knobby tires make it a stunner, not too different than the modern 4 door crew cab pavement princesses.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/13/81/89/138189b9d10e071aef96e6817e3b9775.jpg
I really dig the old 70’s truck brochures and design aesthetic. Just so simple and straightforward. Can the fun truck fonts come back too?
I’m mildly surprised to see how similar the door cards in my dad’s 1990 Suburban were to those shown in that brochure (specifically, the Sierra Classic Trim).
Pasteup is a lost art now.
I bought all the local font sheets left.
“I love these engine illustrations – V8 atop, straight-six below”
Since you brought up elephants now I’m seeing those engines as weird propeller driven elephants, especially the 6 looking over its shoulder at the camera.
It was a different time when they could put a cutaway view or a picture of the engine in a sales brochure and buyers cared.
I think part of the reason that Chevy crew cabs from this era look so ungainly is that there was no extra cab option in those years. It was either standard cab or OMG long cab.
I remember seeing a lot of extended cab ’80s OBS Ford’s in my youth. IIRC they had uncomfortable side mounted jump seats in the back. Don’t think Ford made a factory 4 door at that time.
I believe they did, they were just very uncommon. My work has a 1989?(bricknose) F350 crew cab, back when they were for shuttling an actual crew to a work site. It’s fitted with sumptuous dual bench seats clad in the grayest of vinyl.
Friend had a four door Dodge pickup from the early 60s with navy markings on it.
Right, Ford had extended cab, and Dodge had them for a while, dropped them, and had them again, but Chevy never had an extended cab Square Body.
Both Ford and Dodge also built crew cabs in those years, but only in 3/4+ ton. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that crew cab 1/2 ton trucks became a thing.
There’s a company that did extended cab conversions on the square body era trucks, and they look kind of odd.
I believe you’re correct on crew cab 1/2 tons not being a thing till the 90’s. I remember the last years of the GMT400 offered a crew cab 1500, but I don’t think I’ve seen one in person. Even the GMT800 crew cab 1500s are rare.
I remember it being a big deal in the late 90’s/early ’00s when Ford released the F150 crew cab with the short bed with bed extender, I think they called it the “Supercrew”.
Centurion, the conversion company that built 4 door Broncos back in the 90s, also built crew cab 1/2 ton OBS F-150s and GMT400 1500s since the factory didn’t.
I remember seeing a Centurion crew cab F-150 on a Ford dealer lot in 1996 and tried hard to get my dad to buy it, but alas he bought a used ’88 F-150 instead.
I loved those old Centurion Bronco’s. I wasn’t aware of the pickups but that makes sense.
I was at a campground a few years back and a 6 door F350 pulled in. I asked the guy about it, he said they had it custom made because they needed a vehicle that could haul 7 people and a 5th wheel trailer.
Yeah, the Squarebody extended cab conversions do look weird. There was a derelict one in the parking lot behind my local Mazda dealership for years. I should drive by there sometime to see if it’s still there.
“I’d like to note how weird double-cab pickup trucks used to look before they became the norm, as they are today.”
Yeah, that was one of the reasons it was so notable when some contestants used one in a 1981 film that some people inexplicably love titled The Cannonball Run. A 1980 GMC C-35 Sierra Classic Crew Cab Wideside Dually: https://imcdb.org/i010255.jpg
And I remember even some practical folks, such as contractors, grumbling about the weird looks even as they bought such trucks; such concerns did tend to be overridden by the desire for being able to transport multiple passengers as well as cargo, though. I also remember some people much preferring the looks of VW’s double-cab trucks even if they couldn’t countenance the cursed chicken tax.
Interesting timing. Alfie Wise, the actor who played the driver of the GMC in The Cannonball Run, passed away yesterday.
Mad Dog – you are gonna take the shortcut to the interstate, arent you?
If you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly!
Guessing he wasn’t one of the stunt drivers, though?
That film was rife with negligence and a criminally cavalier attitude about safety, alas, which resulted in at least one stuntperson being injured on the set and paralyzed for life (to add insult to injury her fiance was one of the stuntpersons who actually coordinated that particular stunt and then he left her when she was recovering): https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/heidi-von-beltz-dies-stuntwoman-234050207.html
The more and more one reads about the stunts and what went on behind the scenes during the making of The Cannonball Run the less and less one enjoys watching that film…
I think the thing about double-cab pickups from that era is that they looked just like someone just chopped off the back of a Suburban. Today, though, the design of the GM pickups looks like someone just chopped off the back of a Suburban. Hey, wait…
There’s a much bigger conversation there about how truck-based SUVs probably elevated the status of the trucks themselves, and then vice versa. Well, all except for GM’s weird low-hanging IRS that still bothers me after several years. It’s too reminiscent of all the old, exposed solid rear beams from cars like the Aztec or early Sienna. For a while, I think the Impala and/or Malibu had an exposed IRS with speed holes. It was such a distraction.
Drives me nuts every time I’m behind one. WHY IS IT SO LOW
Same! I hate that so much. And they have the nerve to offer the Z71 “offroad” package with this.
And oddly enough, because it’s supped to be an off roader, the Land Rover Defender suffers from this too, though not as bad.
That cutaway might very well have a basis in CAD drawings — The squarebody trucks were notably one of GM’s first designs to use CAD from the ground up. They seem primitive now, but there was a lot of progress that went on behind them.
My memory is hazy, but growing up riding in those trucks, I know some of them had pressure vents in the bottom of the doors that vented into the interior of the doors where the window track and latch mechanisms were. I think in later years, and certainly in the GMT400 and onward, the vents were moved to the back of the cab, but the older ones had it in the doors.
And from the vents in the interior side of the doors, the air went out through vents on the back edge of the door and out the panel gap between the door and the bodywork.
This was long before minimizing panel gaps was a thing…
Ah, that’s right! I forgot about the vents on the back of the door. My dad used to rage about them being the reason the doors rusted from the inside out.
I used to think the vents were to ventilate the body to keep it from rusting from the inside out, not to keep the cabin fresh.
I had a 73, it had vents in the doors. It also had them in the kick panels; you’d operate them via a pull knob to let air in at your feet. That was actually a nice feature, I’m surprised it’s not shown on the illustration.
The vents in the kick panels were for passenger comfort; lots of cars used to have them, especially when air conditioning was a high-end luxury feature.
The others were part of a mandated passive fresh-air ventilation system which used negative pressure generated at the rearmost exit vents to pull fresh air through the cabin as the vehicle moved. The object was to prevent carbon monoxide from building up in the moving vehicle. It doesn’t really do anything for interior comfort — it’s just supposed to ensure a minimum amount of outside air gets in. Not enough to even help clear cigarette smoke out of the cabin.
Foreign cars usually had visible small vents behind trim at the B- or C-pillars, or sometimes above or below the backlight glass. Early GM designs often had the exit vent as louvers cut into the trunk lid just behind the backlight. (Noticeable on 1960’s Toronados and Rivieras, mainly. The Vega had them too.)
They switched fairly quickly to putting them in the back edge of the doors (rear doors on 4-door cars. From there, they got more creative as standards demanded more effectiveness to the system. The exit vents started to get hidden behind larger overlaps of the rear doors on some front-drive cars, and in places around the trunk lid or rear hatch, or behind trim on the rear quarter somewhere. Nowadays, the exit is often behind on overlap of the plastic rear bumper cladding. Pickups have them on the back of the cab, down below the rear window and in front of the bed pretty much universally now.
I did not know that! Thanks for the great response and interesting info.
In addition to what UnseenCat said, they also serve the purpose of allowing pressure equalization when the HVAC is set to a high fan speed and creating a light positive interior pressure. Without the vents the air will try to push out via the seals and you can end up with whistling, additional wind noise, and potentially an ingress path for combustion gasses.
If Google Streetview had existed in the mid-70s, GM might have gotten the design for their double-cab pickup trucks entirely for free 🙂
One of my friends was delighted when that crew cab config went into production. His family took a three week vacation out west every summer and he used a big slide in camper. Prior to the crew, his three kids had to ride in the slide in.
Are you sure that double cab isn’t the result of some proto-Google street view shenanigans? I also love how it looks like there’s a tiny crane sitting in that long bed. How great would that be?
They make tiny cranes for pickups.
PICKUPS
Pickup….Trucks?
Nope. Pickups and I’ll die on that hill.
Back in the 70s my dad was returning with his best friend to Pennsylvania from a hunting trip to Wyoming. He was in a half-ton pickup that was most assuredly overweight due to meat from two mule deer, two antelope, and possibly even an elk or two plus other gear. He was driving through Nebraska or Iowa on I-80 and blithely rolling by weigh stations in an era where in that state they expected pickups to pull in and get weighed as well, since at that time Pennsylvania along with other states required pickups to carry “Commercial” tags. He got pulled over and that’s when the hilarity ensued. Apparently the conversation went something like this:
Officer: I pulled you over because you failed to stop at the weigh station
Dad (feigning ignorance): I was supposed to pull in there?
Officer (rolling eyes): Yes, didn’t you see the sign?
Dad: Yes I did, officer. It said all trucks pull in for weighing.
Officer: Right, so why didn’t you pull in?
Dad: It said all trucks.
Officer: And you’re in…
Dad: A pickup.
Officer: It’s a truck.
Dad: It’s a pickup.
Officer: It’s a pickup – what?
Dad: It’s a pickup.
My father politely but steadfastly refused to agree he was in a truck. At some point the officer got quite exasperated and told him he’d better pull into the next weigh station and he’d be radioing my dad’s vehicle description and license plate ahead. My dad respectfully told him “yes, sir” and at the next exit pulled off I-80 and took two-lane roads through the rest of the state.
Automakers have been calling them trucks for over 70 years (https://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/chevy/50ct.html) , so I’ll never really understand people getting mad about calling pickups “trucks”. Usually truckers are the one who will argue about it, and aren’t their vehicles technically “tractor-trailers”? It’s all so silly.
I guess with that airflow illustration, they were trying emphasize that yes, it will cool you, the sweaty driver, with the special blend of air and particulates from your ’70s atmosphere.
Double-cab pickups from that era look utilitarian in such a satisfying way, one that’s usually reserved for stuff like cranes and earthmoving equipment.
I agree, there is something homely but appealing about a double cab long bed, and if it has a dually axle…. game over.
This was GM’s first factory crew cab, the back doors were shared with the Suburban, and iirc the two middle trim packages were not offered on them, since if you were buying one personally it’d be a bucks-up toy hauler but most were still going to fleets on low-bid contracts.
I wish my ’79 Pinto’s brochure had a similar illustration…especially if it had accurately depicted the snow and leaves which would be forced into the car from outside. Which typically meant they’d be directed straight into your face.