10 weird publicity shots

“Here we go dear, I’ve booked four cars for us – that’s one for each foot”. You can imagine how well this would have gone down with Mrs Newlywed; she’s just looking forward to a life of married bliss when she discovers that her chap has a microcar fetish.

Writing a caption for this one that isn’t obviously pornographic is quite a tall order. Young couple on a beach get frisky with a bunch of inflatable animals. You can fill in the gaps yourself – let your imagination run riot. Not that you have to think too hard…

Not many people know about Citroën’s lightweight DS sports special. Devoid of luxuries such as interior trim, outer panels and all of its mechanicals, the idea was that it would be ultra fast thanks to its light weight. It wasn’t until the first car had been built that Citroën’s engineers found the flaw in the plan…

When Elva launched its revised Courier, it reckoned it was on to a winner with the new dickey seat option. While getting in and out could be awkward, and space was tight once inside, the company was seriously disappointed that nobody ordered this useful optional extra.

When you consider just how brilliant Ford’s S-Max and Galaxy are, it’s hard to believe that the same company’s early attempts at a people carrier were quite so wide of the mark. Still, that’s what half a century of continuous development does for you.

Now there’s a glamorous gig; Miss Polski-Fiat Darts 1978. We bet she’s dined out on this booking ever since this shoot over 40 years ago. Still, the snapper got one thing right; if you want to inject some interest into a deathly dull picture, just introduce a girl with extremely short shorts.

We’re assuming that when this woman decided the object of her affections was a Peugeot 205, she must have been told to put it on plastic and got the wrong end of the stick. What we want to know is whether this is a Tupperware shot with a 205 as a prop or the other way around.

If you want to capture the attention of your audience, just stick an animal in the picture. That’s clearly the advice that Suzuki took when it set up this sheepish shot for its micro-SUV back in 1982. We suspect it was all just a bid to pull the wool over the eyes of new car buyers.

The folks at EuroNCAP would all be having heart attacks if they saw this shot of a bunch of pretty young things having fun as their open-topped VW whizzes along. Rumour has it that this was Volkswagen’s precursor to the CD autochanger, back in the sixties.

Somewhere there’s a 40-something bloke (at least we think it’s a bloke…) hoping that nobody ever connects him with this picture of Volkswagen’s Futura concept car, taken back in 1986. Said kid appears to have fallen down the back of the seat, and taken his very eighties hair cut with him.