Artkansas 

kmv2

lol is this the video that GM showed when it was begging Obama for money.

Mobile 155

It is also interesting to see what ads are posted on the side and bottom of this page talking about cars. We see a plug for GM and I get to see an Ad for Lexus just above the reply to thread button and a VW ad next to the Video we were looking at.

Ekdog

Weren't there any black folk in America back then?

Roody

Growing up in Detroit, we would be shown "educational" movies like this from time to time. Often they were produced by Jam Handy.

Actually, there probably isn't much in the movie that's inaccurate. Car manufacturing was a huge sector of the economy in the 20th century. The industry usually led the nation both into recessions and out of them. Of course, cars are still a big part of the economy, if a little less pervasive than they used to be.

Roody

Nope. And no Hispanics, working women, or gays either. All of them started arriving here in about 1965.


but did you notice how many people still rode buses and streetcars, even in a GM commercial? Also the throngs of pedestrians on the downtown streets?

Artkansas 

They didn't realize that all that construction in the suburbs would gut downtown.

I was amused that their demonstration of 1 of 7 workers was people riding on a bus. And men in coat and ties were riding the bus. It was more acceptable. Even Yogi Berra rode to Yankees games on public transit.

Dahon.Steve

That was a good video!!

It's amazing the millions of people who are employed because of motorized transport in this country. I started a thread on the importance of the railroad and believe we would have been better off in the long run if we used that model instead.

However, that is not the case and the video stated we need to protect the motorcar but it's become too costly. The wars we fought to keep the free flow of oil left the nation with trillions in debt. The cost of driving skyrocketed over the past 50 years since the movie was made and many of those manufacturing jobs have been sent overseas. Add in runaway inflation of the 70's and taxation depleted the average worker's salary. Those beautiful roads and bridges that were built are in disrepair costing hundreds of billions to maintain each year. The motorcar is the second biggest cost in the American family adding financial hardship to millions.

kmv2

Before they were integrated, they were segregated.

Artkansas 

What I appreciate the most is the naivete of the film. The facts about how integral the car is to life are probably accurate, though they take credit for everyone who so much as touches a car. But just the fact that they see things as an ever-widening horizon says a lot. No peak oil. No downtown parking craters, No Silent Spring, No Exxon Valdez.

Ekdog

And they were kept socially invisible, as we can see in this film and read about in Ralph Ellison's great novel.

no1mad 

More like a swap with a good bit of automation thrown in. While the domestic brands (GM, Ford, and Chrysler w/their overlord du jour) may have shifted production outside CONUS, the Asians have been setting up shop. Honda, Kia/Hyundai, Toyota, and Nissan all have production facilities in the States.

no1mad 

Gotta love Google Analytics

$20 will ensure you don't see them again for 2 years

Mobile 155

Yes, until I looked at the video I was getting ads for Panama hats, something I was looking at for the last few days. Once I viewed the GM piece presented I got car ads in every forum in BF.net.

wahoonc

Depending on your browser... Adblocker is your friend

Aaron

gerv 

Another option is to send $25 a year to BF and support the cause. For me, it's cheaper than cable television and much more entertaining!!

wahoonc

I am one of the oldsters and got grandfathered in with the red star brigade

Aaron

Dahon.Steve

I was watching the end of the video moments ago and they made the point that we are all responsible for "safe guarding the benefits it has brought us" over the years. How am I going to do this? Form a block association to protect random parked cars? LOL!

What worries me is the statement made that "if we plan for the future" the motor car will be the key to our freedom of movement. However, we can't protect things we have no control over and that's the price of fuel and the skyrocketing cost of motoring. It sad to think about the future but if we don't discover an inexpensive alternative to petrol, millions will lose their freedom of travel. All those millions of jobs and when you think about it, our whole economy dependant on the motorcar continuing forever.

Roody

This ad, IMO, doesn't sell a particular make of car, it sells the whole lifestyle of cars. I wonder how much of this is a deliberate attempt to sway people into the new (at the time) car culture, and how much it was just an expression of exuberance by car guys for a product they really loved. From growing up in Detroit, I do know that people who built cars absolutely loved them, from the guys who swept up the shop floor to the chief executives. They were happy to be making tons of money, but without question they also believed that their cars were making the world a better place.

On the other hand, the people never voted democratically for universal dependence on cars. There was never a free and open national debate on deleting public transit or opening up the countryside to urban sprawl and white flight. The car companies (and their buddies, the oil companies) certainly had the money to steer public opinion, if that's what they were trying to do.

i really don't know how cynical to ,feel about this GM movie.

Artkansas 

Well, car culture was at least 40 years old at that time. It was at its zenith. The message I got from the movie was the old saw, "What's good for GM is good for America". Certainly the most obvious message was that the car industry was too big to fail. Given that this was made for the dealers, I'm guessing it was to get loans from local banks to build dealerships and buy inventory.



My grandfather was an oil geologist and executive with Gulf Oil at that time and belief in the goodness of the car was a given. However, I did find one article, in his papers, that he submitted to the Gulf in-house magazine warning that when the total amount of oil was unknown, it was stupid to waste it. I don't believe it got accepted for publication.

kmv2

And this is car culture now,

https://www.roadandtrack.com/features...ll-ellis-drive

gerv 

Communist!

DX-MAN

Sorry, I didn't get very far into the video; the whole propaganda push of the "goodness" of car ownership leaves me nauseous. But what I did notice was the LACK of street stripes on the urban streets -- basically, bare asphalt! Nobody cutting off the electric bus, steady flow...for the car advocate, utopia. Mom, Dad, Junior, all sharing the front seat, while dad drives sedately...ah, the 50's. <sarcasm>

Artkansas 

Road striping was new. The first one was hand-painted on the road by Dr.June McCarroll, close to where The Coachella Festival is held today. By 1925 she had persuaded the state of California that it was a good idea. And the idea slowly grew from there.

Artkansas 

They had room to breathe then. The film states that there are 50,000,000 motor vehicles in the U.S.. By 2008, there were 255, 918,000 cars in the U.S, and over a billion worldwide in 2010