1960s Chevrolet Commercial Shows us Their Torture Testing for Reliability

If we take a look back at advertisements of old, it’s pretty wild to see just how much commercials and other ads have evolved over the years. Sometimes, it’s for the better but other times, we find that car commercials, in particular, have a way of being a little bit boring these days.

I guess it could be attributed to different things like executives sucking the soul out of a brand or focus groups determining what boring elevator music people react best to. However, no matter the reason, at the risk of sounding like my father, they definitely don’t make them like they used to.

This time, though, through the power of YouTube, we take a trip back through time to the year 1961. Needless to say, things were a little bit different in this era, including the way that Chevrolet wanted to advertise some of its vehicles at the time.

Apparently, the folks behind one campaign decided that the best way to demonstrate how effective their cars are would be to show people how exactly they are torture-tested. In the commercial, Chevrolet shows us all sorts of different tests that they’d do, practicing things like opening and closing doors 50,000 times, taking an Impala off a ramp, or even running an engine at a high speed for over a week.

Down in the video below, we tune in with all the bumps, shakes, and vibrations that these Chevrolets would go through before they made their way to the consumer. Apparently, not only has the way that we advertise changed but the way that we torture test our vehicles has also gone through a lot of evolution over the years as well. Some of it is for the better, other is for the worse but all of it is pretty interesting to look at!