(first posted 2/28/2011)
Wow! Leave it to the Australians to outdo anything Madison Avenue ever came up for the Pinto Cruising Wagon. These ads for the Holden Sandman were sent in by reader Davo, and they needed to be…passed around. Truly amazing period pieces. There’s plenty more dazzling goodness, including Ford’s and Chrysler’s answer to the Sandman:
Big Thanks to Davo!
Mad Max’s wife had of those in the first movie.
Came here to say the same, you beat me to it! 🙂
“Here’s your passport to a good time.”
“105 cubic feet of party room up back.”
If you say to girl: “Do you wanna have a good time up in my party room?”, I think she knows what you mean by that… And it’s fantastic copy…
Did I ever tell you my Dad’s nickname in the early 1970s (graduated high school in 1973) was “Moondoggy?” He called my mom “Skinny.” I think if these vehicles had been available in the US I might have been conceived in one.
I failed to mention Chrysler Australia also making a competitor to the Sandman and Sundowner called the Drifter. It apparently used the Chrysler A-body. Photos are at the following links.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiefordadverts/5253492038/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiefordadverts/5253491974/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/2104987782/in/faves-50415738@N04/
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3351/3489317451_a770d77451.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carsaroundadelaide/3489317451/
Thanks; I’ve added one of the Drifter pics. Of course Chrysler couldn’t be left out of the fun.
Oh Yeah Owned several panel vans in OZ used for travelling not the neat paint job versions though. Holden started it with the HQ series {purple} and Ford and Chrysler climbed on board later. Ford also did an Escort and Transit to cover the whole market. Pretty hard to find any now rust and abuse eat the Ford and Valiants and there was a thriving industry removing the roofs from Holden PVs and converting them back to utes or cab chassis 1 tonners. Ford kept building PVs into the 90s but gave up on the sundowner theme.
WE ARE SO CLEVER IN AUSTRALIA
It’s amazing tome what was available in OZ when we in the states were suffering with Ralph Nader and smogged down emissions loaded cars with the 1973-on huge 5 MPH bumpers and down under still had 351-clevelands, Falcon GT’s. (we never had a Falcon GT) utes up thru the 90’s. (our rancheros and el caminos) and nice smooth stylings. With the exception of the steering wheel on the right, they had some sweet cruisers.
I think the difference is the safety and emissions regulations didn’t really start to bite in Australia until the early 80s. Unleaded petrol/gasoline wasn’t required until 1984, versus 1975 in the US.
These were also known as “Shaggin’ Wagons” or “Finger Bowls”.
“Sin Bins” was another nickname as well. These cars also had bumper stickers which read something like “If it’s a rockin, don’t bother knockin” or “Don’t laugh, your daughter’s inside”.
The Pinto Cruising Wagon was cashing in on the conversion van craze, Econolines/ChevyVans/Tradesmen which were basically mobile bedrooms.
Didn’t Coca-Cola in conjunction with Levi’s dress up a Sundowner as the “Denimachine” and give away one or two, like they did with the Econoline vans in US & Canada?
Actually it was Chrysler.
Why isn’t something like this available today?
A van guaranteed to creep out any woman that had even the slightest interest in the owner. Yikes!
Don’t you believe it. A half decent looking bloke with a surfboard and one of these got plenty of action.
I’m afraid that’s true. Life is never fair.
Drifter has very similar paint job to Pinto Cruising Wagon
Very rare in NZ now any Aussie panel van and genuine Sandman vans are worth gold even fakes sell for big money in fact any old Aussie cars command stupid coin but people are prepared to pay so thats how it is
In a classless land, these were not greatly favored by the management class, indeed, they were not really favored by anyone with any class, or anyone whose last class at school went above Year 9. Today, they would find favor the CUB class, a seemingly rather large grouping. (CUB is an acronym, for Cashed-Up Bogan, “bogan” being vaguely like urban working-class redneck, and “cashed-up” meaning they have plenty of folding money that has often not suffered from the depredations of taxation).
In retrospect, I wonder who DID buy these? Like all Oz cars for too long, protection policies meant they were not especially cheap, and being largely V8’s, were even less cheap to run at a time of rocketing petrol prices. (In fact, the first green one here is the ’76 HX, and horribly crude pollution controls meant they they hardly ran at all!) A tradie – tradesman – wouldn’t, because his van was a work machine, and anyway, his wage then didn’t cover such extravagance any more than his credit could (from likewise-protected and snobby banks). A real surfer couldn’t because his wage might often be, er, a government surfing scholarship (ie: social security). It really only leaves a few affluent young blokes who needed to spread the love (and probably their DNA and STD’s), and as noted above, there were indeed an inevitable gaggle of hot chicks who’d start eyelash-flicking and pouting and purring when one of these pulled up beachside. Even a dull-witted nerd like me could see THAT as a kid.
Truth is, they sold very few of these, but spawned twenty thousand imitators when the bog-standard panel vans had done a few hundred thousand k’s service as trade devices and got a repaint and fats all round – mag wheels, that is – and a V8 transplant. The bird-pulling (women-getting) results for new owners were happily much like it had been for the true originals, and it may well account for the current size of the Bogan brigade, who’re surely DNA descendants in some form or other.
Luckily, Straya has classed-up a heap since those dim days. Those descendants, on much better trade wages today, now buy aggro Doomsday-Pack dual-cab utes, with the more successful rising to the ridiculous-for-here US utes at $120K+ a pop, and these are the new pleasure palaces, of sorts. Thankfully, they wear protection these days, although seeing the ever-spreading new suburbs, I’m not quite sure how often.
I don’t really know why I’m stirring the possum like this, especially mentioning DNA. After all, one of my own brothers had a HX van, with V8, and fats, and headers, in an eye-searing red, with the Premier 4-light front, for a good five years in the mid-to-late ’80’s. (And yeah, he never seemed to be going without, the mullet-wearing bastard). Well, five years sort-of. This insurance beacon was stolen at least four times, and on the fifth, was wrapped around a tree – and the wreck STILL sold for more than he’d paid originally, true dinks!
Oh well. An anthropologist might well classify the Sandman and the others as a curious and brief flowering of a cultural phenomenom unique to its time and place, rather than a unique place for de-flowering the briefly curious at any time which is what they really were, which proves that science doesn’t always get it right.
Mate, are you sure that CUB class of yours doesn’t stand for Carlton and United Breweries? 🙂
Good point about who bought them. I had a think about that. Growing up as a teen in a beachside suburb when these were new, I ought to have seen them, but rarely did outside the magazine ads. Guys were much more inclined to buy an older model and spend the extra doing it up to suit them, rather than get saddled with the whole payments-and-depreciation thing that was such a last-generation financial trap. We were like that then.
I reckon it was more of an image-building program than a serious sales thing for Holden. Gone were their days of a fifty-something percent market share. Despite the all-new (to Holden) underpinnings with the HQ, the Grandfather’s axe Falcon was just as good on the road, arguably better handling – at a time when handling (or ‘cornering power’ as we thought of it then) was becoming increasingly important.
Holden’s slice of the cake was being very seriously eaten into by the Falcon especially; as if that wasn’t bad enough the whole big family sedan sector was being munched on by the growing two litre fours. Holden was weak in the two-litre segment. They had to do something to keep the younger buyers interested until they could re-establish their reputation with the better-suspended HZ series and the UC Sunbird/Torana, since their emission controls were abysmal. Graphics were an easy fix.
It could be argued that Ford started this, in slightly tamer form, as the GS pack from the sedans and wagons (fancy wheels, proper suspension, stripes and gauges) was available on the Falcon ute (possibly the van as well, I’m not sure) in your choice of colour since at least the start of the seventies. Okay, this is a model (1/32 diecast), but you could walk into your Aussie Ford dealer and order this XA in ’72. The salesman might look at you a bit funny, but it was in the catalog.
But yes, Holden started the over-the-top graphics thing. AS you can see from the pics, Ford’s Sundowner was tame/lame in comparison (better taste?), and Chrysler’s vans arrived on the market pretty much after the wave had gone.
Question for Australian readers. I worked with some one who was out in Victoria in the 90s. He asked a surfer owner how they could afford to insure one of these V8 babies. The owner said that the gas costs included state third party insurance ,so if you were on the move you were in insured. Is this true?.
Not quite.
To drive any car legally, it must be registered each year, and it’s not cheap (nearly $1000 now), but it includes compulsory, govt-run third-party insurance. That’s insurance for injuring yourself or anyone else. To that extent, if you’re legally on the move (ie: in a registered car), you’re covered for that.
Insurance for PROPERTY damage to others (called third-party property insurance here) is your choice, and pretty cheap usually, and coverage of your own car for damage as well (called comprehensive insurance here) is also your choice and not so cheap. Back in the ’90’s, a V8 panel van would have been the equivalent of at least $1000 today, maybe more, so plenty of the dudes only got third-party and wore the risk: not too silly, as the vans were worth stuff-all then.
Petrol prices are hugely inflated by federal tax: of $5.20 per US gallon at the moment, about $3.50 is tax, none of which is insurance!