The Best 1980's car adverts

The 80's were a time of astonishing excess. Subtetly, suggestion and understatement went out of the window, and advertising was an industry far from the slick machine it's become these days.

These two facts combined to produce some of the most visually exciting, baffling and downright boring adverts in televisual history, and since the car industry tends to flash more cash when it comes to commercials, this phenomenon is seen most clearly in TV car advert of the '80's.

Cast you nostalgic mind back to the Castrol GTX ads of the time; boggle at the baffling wonderment of Grace Jones advertising the Citroen CX; shake your head at the pride-before-a-fall braggadocio of the Rover 800 ad; shake your fist at Noel Edmonds; and doze off to Ford's neverending snoozefests.

What follows are commentaries on the most famous car adverts of the 80's and links to videos of the adverts themselves. We think we've got the best of the bunch - the top 20 80's car ads - but if we've missed out your favourite let us know and we'll do our best to track it down.

Land Rover Dambusters advert

All Land Rover ads seem to portray their owners as inveterate show-offs. If they're not charging to the top of a mountain in their Rangeys - what do they do when they get there? - they're scaling dams for the sheer hell of it.

Still, this one's a good effort and features a bit of slightly dubious music to boot. Nowadays Land Rover has gone the whole hog and admitted their adverts are aimed at snobs.

• Watch the Land Rover Dambusters advert

Jetta advert - More Volkswagen than you think

Painfully British, painfully 80's, but a neat and simple idea well-executed. This ad shows a parade of German and British luxury cars being gently dissed.

You see the new Jetta is wider, has more legroom and a bigger boot than, er, one of those.

The bearded chap in the ad does miss out when not pointing out that, er, any of those have about ten thousand times more character.

• Watch the Jetta - More Volkswagen than you think advert

Saab 900 advert

Saab still relies on this trick of pushing its aerospace heritage, as if the idea that aeroplane manufacturers should automatically be good at building cars is unquestionable. Still, the 900 does look great blasting up a quarry at night.

Understandably the company is less keen on extolling its range of devastating weaponry, though an advert showing a crazed exec in his 9-5 blowing the living daylights out of his office block with a Saab-built anti-tank gun would be amusing.

• Watch the Saab 900 advert

Audi versus the Germans

It's a sign of how slowly reputations usually change in the automotive industry when Audi is essentially still playing the same game of catch-up with BMW and Mercedes as it was when this ad was made in 1987.

The VW-owned manufacturer has come on leaps and bounds since then, but it's still perceived to be a half step behind its rivals.

The message here seems to be that if you're ready to drive like a madman it's time to buy an Audi.

Appealing directly to crazed lunatics may not be de rigeur these days, but this is the 80's after all.

• Watch the Audi versus the Germans advert

Ford Orion - Performance Incognito

Utterly lacking in humour and self-awareness, Ford's adverts in the 80's really were the nadir.

Despite showing anyone driving a Ford to be living in some sort of Thatcherite nouveau riche fantasy world complete with misty country estates and assorted Victoriana, the subtext for this Orion advert - the Escort with a boot - seems to be 'it's not as a bad as you think it is'.

Which it almost certainly was.

• Watch the Ford Orion - Performance Incognito advert

Dunlop - Tested For The Unexpected

Explosions, grand pianos, painted fat eunuchs, gimp suits, big marbles, feral children, the Velvet Underground. Anyone who knows anything about cars understands that these are common hazards on the road.

Thanks God, then, for Dunlop, whose tyres are engineered to cope with all of these nasties.

Music video director Tony Kaye took the helm for this quite incredible advert, which may actually hail from the 90's.

Basically the best advert for anything, ever, and would you really have guessed it was for tyres?

• Watch the Dunlop Tested For The Unexpected advert

Honda and Madness In the City

As Bird's Eye will attest to in 2008, stick Suggs in your ad and people will buy your product.

This trend was started by Honda in the early 80's with this advert featuring Madness flogging the City, er, city car.

Nutty walk=increasing sales of Japanese small cars. HONDA! HONDA! HONDA! Advertising is easy.

• Watch the Honda and Madness In the City advert

Grace Jones, La Beaute Sauvage - Citroen CX

Truly the most bonkers advert ever produced, including the Dunlop ad further up this list.

We have no idea why a Citroen CX is coming out of a giant Grace Jones head, and why anyone thought that would make people buy it.

'La Beauté Sauvage,' says Grace at the end, although at first we heard 'A Bout de Fromage', which means 'A cheesy end' rather than 'Savage Beauty'.

• Watch the Grace Jones Citroen CX advert

Renault 5 advert

According to this advert you'll feel much more alive, if only you buy a Renault Five.

We can only assume that the makers of Ford's adverts would all have immediately suffered heart attacks if they'd seen this early-80's effort advertising the Renault Five.

It's an advert so garish, childish and ingenuous it rather defies critical description. All we know is they don't make them like this anymore, probably good news for epileptics.

• Watch the Renault 5 advert

Rover 800 Fastback car advert

An advert of such bafflingly undeserved hubris, it's impossible to believe it ever got off the drawing board.

This advert for the Rover 800 Fastback tilts the executive saloon of the likes of BMW and Mercedes by having Germans in awe of its capabilities. Rather oddly, Citroen has recently tried to do the same thing for the new C5, probably with more success.

The omens are not good for Citroen though. Six years after this advert was made Rover was sold to BMW, who struggled to make anything of the marque before offloading it to the Phoenix Consortium in 2000.

MG Rover collapsed in 2005.

• Watch the Rover 800 Fastback advert

Austin Rover and Noel Edmonds - Driving at its best

Noel Edmonds. The new Austin Maestro. Surely a marriage made in heaven.

24 years is a long time, but still not long enough to believe adverts like this, including a stultifyingly dull tour around some new Austin models with Edmonds doing his best to appear as earnest as possible, ever passed muster.

According to Edmonds, who also talks about 'the Magic of Metro', the new MG Maestro 'looks really terrific on the road', while the bearded wonder thinks the Montego is 'the most stylish estate car ever devised'. As if he gives two hoots.

Just before he delivers the coup de grace - 'I've enjoyed finding all about the new cars' - Edmonds packs his small children into a rear-facing shelf in the Montego's boot, presumably to guarantee their instant deaths in the event of a rear-end shunt.

Really, all you need to know about the end of the British car industry in the 80's is in this advert.

• Watch the Austin and Noel Edmonds advert

Peugeot 309 advert

A man dreams of exciting escapades in his Peugeot 309 - perhaps the least-exciting car ever made, and actually a Talbot reject from the mid-80s.

The 309 was a hodge-podge of Peugeot and Talbot bits'n'pieces and was designed in-house and built at the now-defunct Ryton plant. As such it didn't get the Pininfarina styling that the rest of the Peugeot range did, and looked a bit crap.

There's nothing too exciting about this ad, barring the fact that our hero is clearly shown to be bored of spending time relaxing with family, dreaming instead of spy adventures, and furtive sex with dangerous Russians.

Interesting pitch from Peugeot, that.

• Watch the Peugeot 309 advert

Austin Metro: A British car to beat the world

No-one does jingoism like the English, with this advert for the Metro urging you to send the invading visitors back where they came from, showing a bunch of Fiats, Nissans, Volkswagens and Renaults taking the ferry back to Johnny Foreignerland.

Accompanied by The British Grenadiers and Rule Britannia, the ad goes to great lengths to extol the Metro's British roots and white-heat technology - split-folding rear seats, nearly 60mpg on the motorway and a 12-month service interval.

The Metro actually lasted longer than most Austin Rover models from the 80's, but the lingering suspicion that the humble supermini was a little off the pace put paid to it by the time BMW came along.

• Watch the Austin Metro: A British car to beat the world advert

Vauxhall Cavalier - Car of the future

The car of the future: four-wheel drive, an onboard computer, ABS. The stuff of a madman's dreams in the mid-80's, according to this Vauxhall advert anyway.

Can you see where this is going? Yep, it's the Vauxhall Cavalier, which has all of the above and more.

The car of the future indeed, if by that the advert meant car most likely to be used by taxi drivers in the future.

If that kid in front of the telly had time travelled to the mid-80's and found that the Cavalier was the height of mankind's endeavours he'd have committed suicide. Good concept, crap car.

• Watch the Vauxhall Cavalier Car of the future advert

Peugeot 405 - Take my breath away

Explosions, a soundtrack by Berlin, crashing waves, swirling vortices of downed leafs. If all of these make you think of the Peugeot 405, a French car manufacturer would like to talk to you.

Ignoring the sheer excess of this advert, it's unclear why anyone thought of hawking a fairly boring mid-size saloon aimed at families using huge explosions and the biggest rock ballad ever made.

It's all testament, surely, to the amount of cocaine being taken in the advertising industry in the 80's.

We're sure that no-one in advertising takes cocaine these days though. No, not us.

• Watch the Peugeot 405 Take my breath away advert

Ford Sierra advert

Another incredibly conservative ad from Ford, but this one's shilling the Sierra, a car that stirs up a surprising amount of nostalgia.

"It's a hatchback, a saloon, an estate," says the voice, belonging to the head of a local masonic lodge, over a Bontempi backing track.

Compare this effort with more recent Ford adverts for the Mondeo and you can see just how far cars - and car adverts - have come in 20 years.

But there's always the nagging doubt that the cars, and the adverts, of the past had more character than the new models ever will.

• Watch the Ford Sierra advert

Esso service stations

Your kids need the toilet, you're running low on petrol and you're being stalked by a tiger. Time to stop at an Esso service station!

But hang on, the lavs aren't slippy with unidentified liquids, the wares are surprisingly wallet-friendly and the cashier isn't dead-eyed and sullen. It can only be an advert.

People stop at petrol stations because they absolutely have to, not because they're warm, friendly oases of peace and welcoming smiles - so why advertise them at all? You're not going to drive another 50 miles because the next circle of fuel-sale Hell has an Esso logo on it.

The idea that service stations are anything other than places of depressed and possibly dangerous loners, bafflingly expensive pasties and furtive purchases of pornography seems an especially strange one.

• Watch the Esso service stations advert

Austin Metro Clubman

Oh dear, the curse of Austin strikes again. In this one Michael Barrymore takes us through the options in the new Metro range, and to be fair it's pretty funny.

"Aw white, aw red and aw Bwitish racing gween'...". Apparently the Metro Clubman also featured a digital clock, though it seems unlikely that this was ever a deal-breaker.

What's also striking about this one is the bafflingly expensive Metro Clubman - nearly six grand for a base model at 1989 prices and around the price of a brand new Ford Ka in 2008.

Barrymore outlasted the Metro, but both came to sticky ends in the 90's. A bad time for British cars, and British entertainers.

• Watch the Austin Metro Clubman advert

Castrol GTX - Liquid engineering

One of the best ads from the 80's, Castrol's adverts were always something to look forward to. What obstacles would the oil have to traverse this time? And why the sinister music?

The original Castrol ad featured a drop of Castrol GTX oil moving steadily from an oilcan into a spanner, set to Mahler's Seventh Symphony.

Castrol has rather updated its adverts these days, the frightening music consigned to the empty oil can of history, but they still feature the classic motifs of the 80's.

• Watch the Castrol GTX Liquid engineering advert

BP - On the move advert

An advert so ridiculously overblown it could only hail from the 80's.

This effort from BP could have been summed up with two words: 'buy petrol', but instead takes us on a whistle-stop tour of BP's operations around the world that unsurprisingly stops short of taking in BP's documented oil spills and government-sponsored persecution of farmers in pipeline regions.

As has been pointed out, the advert's last scene features a pizza delivery boy being deliberately exposed to the chill vacuum of space, inevitably resulting in a violent and rather messy death. Cheers, BP.

• Watch the BP On the move advert

View dozens of car advert videos

All the latest car videos and adverts that will keep you entertained, from car manufacturer ads to movie car chases

Badverts - the worst car adverts

You´ve had the top ten best car adverts. Now try the most annoying, the most embarrassing and, frankly, the worst car advertisements on television.

Top ten TV car adverts

Ever the staple of the pub chinwag, TV ads are more and more part of our sphere of consciousness – often irritatingly so. Think Honda, Volkswagen and Citroen.

Top ten TV car adverts

Ever the staple of the pub chinwag, TV ads are more and more part of our sphere of consciousness – often irritatingly so. Think Smash, Guinness and Levis. Then think Honda, Volkswagen and Citroen.

Bugatti Veyron: Buying the best car in the world

We have all seen the Bugatti Veyron by now. Do you want one? Then you have to sign a contract with the company which - quite frankly - is rather absurd.

Name

Comments

Validation	Please enter the text to the left (case sensitive)
Reload