As you’re likely aware, this site has been the nation’s premiere organization for the dissemination and preservation of sidelight knowledge and culture, and I’m happy to keep that tradition going. Sidelights are, generally, some of the most under-appreciated lights in the vast automotive lighting constellation, which is why I was so excited to see this illustration in a 1959 Ford Prefect brochure. I’ve never seen sidelights shown with so much drama!
The image is up top there, and what I like about it especially is that it’s showing sidelights being used in their original, true context: in a well-lit city center at night, where the purpose of the lights is more to insure you’re being seen as opposed to casting light to see by.
I think what really sells the painting is the moody atmosphere set aglow by the strangely-bright lone Philips 44963XTXD bulb. Maybe an 1156, I can’t really tell, but you get the idea. I mean, look at this:
That’s easily the most moody portrayal of a parking/sidelight in all of Western letters, right? I love it.
This whole brochure is full of good illustrations and captions and combinations thereof, and portrays the Prefect as a very charming and useful little car. It has a very expressive face with a sort of constantly pensive expression that’s oddly endearing.
That dude looks sort of strangely small in there, doesn’t he? Also something about the tricky angles here make him look precisely in the middle and the driveshaft offset, which I know isn’t the case. Fantastic Kermit-the-Frog-green suit, though.
These Prefects had a 997cc inline four making about 39 horsepower, so while you weren’t going to haul all that much ass, whatever ass you were hauling was probably fairly content with the ass-hauling rate, given the time and place.
Sometimes the time and place looked to be in the middle of a storybook forest, at least according to this lovely illustration. Look at the impressionistic flora in the back there, it’s just stunning. And holy crap, that kid in back is positively beaming.
I also appreciate these wordy descriptions of the lighting setup, including a note about the chrome surround of those same sidelamps and the little rundown of everything in the taillights.
This description of the carburetor I find funny because, well, that’s what all carburetors do, or at least should do. It’s written here like it’s something special and unique to the Prefect, this incredibly ability to measure fuel out to the cylinders, but that’s like talking about how amazing someone is because of the way they masticate and swallow food, then process it into energy and wastes.
Oh! One thing about Ford Prefects that may be familiar to our geekier American readers: when I was a kid, first reading the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books, there was a character in there named Ford Prefect. I knew it had to be a joke of some kind, but we had no Ford Prefects here in America, so I had no idea what the joke was.
This was pre-internet, of course, so I couldn’t just google the name and find out that Ford Prefect was a common car in the UK at the time. It’d be the equivalent of a character naming themselves, something like Ford Fairlane here in America, which I suppose actually did happen a bit later, though most of us have likely blocked this from our memories:
Anyway, now I know it’s referencing the car and the joke is that Ford Prefect, an alien stranded on Earth, mistakenly thought it’d be an inconspicuous name. In fact, in the 2001 movie version of Hitchiker’s Guide, there was a nice actual Ford Prefect cameo:
It seems so obvious now! What dark ages we lived in.
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