Ideal prospect

I’ve been consuming these old dealer training filmstrips (audio only) in my bedtime playlist lately.

This was aimed at Rambler dealers in 1959. As it happens, I can check the realism of the advice. My parents bought a new Rambler in 1960. The car had an unsolvable intermittent ignition problem. Some days it wouldn’t start, for no obvious reason. The dealer did try to serve, giving us a loaner each time they took the Rambler in for service. I remember the loaners more than the Rambler because they were more interesting. One was a stepdown Hudson, another was a ’54 Studie.

Unfortunately the dealer’s mechanics never fixed the problem despite repeated loaners. Finally my parents got tired of an unreliable car and bought a ’63 Olds, which was even worse.

My parents were NOT suitable Rambler customers. Dad was what the dealer films call a “conservative prospect”, who “valued economy and simplicity”. By himself he was the ideal Rambler prospect. But my mother was a status climber who constantly pressed for fancier and bigger things.

Happy wife, happy life. The Olds was bigger and fancier, so it didn’t matter if it was less reliable.