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I have fond memories of washing my parents' cars in the 1970s and 80s. I'm not sure, but I think that the white walled tires phased out in the early 80s. What happened?
They scream Detroit tackiness at its finest! You also need large gaudy chrome bumpers and a vinyl roof for white wall tires. It was just a stupid way that the tire makers and the Detroit three could distinguish their more upscale models inititially.......more tacked on doo-dads and gaudy trim/chrome. Started in the thirties but didn't really take off like wildfire until about 1952 when excess chrome and overdoing it meant you had a more upscale flashy ride even though it was essentially the same piece of trash as the economy version of the same model....you just paid 20% more for the extra tackiness to show you were at least equal to the Joneses.
Tire makers loved them because for decades, the fifties through the seventies, people paid a lot more for the same model tire in a whitewall versus the blackwall version. A huge profit center for the tire makers. By the eighties, European cars and Japanese cars had become the style leaders as well as the superior auto producers instead of the motor city. No seventies or eighties Mercedes, BMW or Audi was ever seen with whitewalls except when someone decided they simply wanted to. By the end of the seventies, there was no price premium on whitewall tires since they had become "land yacht" tires because Radial tires had taken over all vehicles by then. Michelin had pioneered leadership in the most advance design of tire technology by the end of the sixties and foreign cars were fitted with radials by then and Detroit would follow a few years later, just as they had done with disc brakes. By the seventies, no sporty car was fitted with whitewalls except Detroit garbage like the Corvette, and Camaro and the bloated Mustang and even the later small MustangII. Around the start of the seventies, because whitewalls had become a land yacht staple along with vinyl roofs, the tire makers and Detroit decided to go to a more awful, low class redneck look, that they deemed to be "Sporty" and that was the Ultimate in Tacky, the raised white letter sidewall tire that would go on to sporty cars instead of the old fart's whitewall tire. The raised white letter sidewall came about because of the INDY 500 influence where the competing tire manufacturers, Firestone & Goodyear had placed their giant logos and white lettering on the sidewall of the racecar tires, so spectators and newspaper photos and tv coverage would show the the white letter name Firestone or Goodyear if the car was stopped in the pits or or a parked publicity photo, etc...
The Indy 500 really became space age modern in the mid sixties when the British came with slim cigar shaped rear engined cars powered by lightweight small FORD V-8 engines. Within two years or so, all of the front engine cars were a thing of the past as they could not compete with the speed of the rear engined cars. The front engined cars won the first competition against the rear engined cars only because the front engined car survived the entire 500 mile race. The rear engined cars had something like a 7 or 8 lap lead on the traditional front engined cars but they suffered mechanical failures late in the race. That was enough to send nearly all race teams to go rear engine cigar shape for the next year, though some low budget teams did enter using old outdated front engine cars, hoping that again they would be the only ones to finish. Speed jumped exponentially and the new style race cars were the rage. I guess someone in Detroit or Akron (the rubber capital then) said hey lets make tires look like the Indy Car's with GOODYEAR Polyglas and Firestone 500 and Atlas and BF Goodrich and every other name in big bold WHITE RAISED LETTERS.
The buying public thought it was cool. In an instant it replaced the red-line (red wall tires) that GM had tire makers make specifically for their Pontiac sporty models beginning in about '62, and the Corvette also had red wall tires in the sixties. You guessed it other mfr'rs tried gold wall and blue wall tires to copy GM but only the red-line tire was seen as cool until the giant bold white raised letter tires became the rage from the end of the sixties until the late seventies.
Excess in bad taste like vinyl roofs and chickens on hoods of Firebirds and ugly loud stripes and decals on most every sporty Detroit piece of garbage during this time.
Some things like, Bee-Hive hairdos and the big hair shellac helmut hair that went out about 1967 and nehru jackets for men and combovers, chopper sideburns, hippy hair, leisure suits, polyester disco suits, Elvis' jumpsuits, and later day mullets that men once thought looked cool and we must have thought so too. Every picture tells a story don't it...yeah it does you know and the bad choices in looks that would not survive the test of time....
Whitewall tires and Raised White Letter Tires really fit in there with vinyl roofs, platform shoes, giant bellbottoms, orange and green and brown shag carpeting, 8 track tapes, CB radios, chain-smoking five packs of cigarettes per day...
What in the world were we thinking back then?
Those of you who are young deserve to laugh at all of us over 56 , in the 57 to 67 yr old age group....as we were definitely far off in retrospect. Whitewalls and raised white letter tires are like shag carpet and mullets and everything else that should never again return...... History shows that bad taste always survives and every generation leaves their mark, though at the time they don't realize how bad their particular choice is.....
...................picture the loser played by actor David Spade, the character of Joe Dirt......yeah he'd have a polyester open shirt, gold chains, a frosted mullet, and a piece of trash Chevy Monte Carlo with whitewalls, or it could be a Camaro, or a Nova with rust and New Jersey, the Garden State license plate.
That is the look that comes to mind when one mentions whitewall tires.......that or 97 year old Mr & Mrs Magoo in their 1979 Cadillac Sedan Deville or their 1987 Lincoln Town Car with vinyl roof and Florida license plate, driving 28 mph in a 55mph zone.
I disagree that they were tacky. I liked them. Now the three inch wide ones were tacky but the everyday ones were nice IMO. More than anything I think tastes changed and we move away from them. That plus 40/50 series tires make it kind of difficult to fit it on there
They scream Detroit tackiness at its finest! You also need large gaudy chrome bumpers and a vinyl roof for white wall tires. It was just a stupid way that the tire makers and the Detroit three could distinguish their more upscale models inititially.......more tacked on doo-dads and gaudy trim/chrome. Started in the thirties but didn't really take off like wildfire until about 1952 when excess chrome and overdoing it meant you had a more upscale flashy ride even though it was essentially the same piece of trash as the economy version of the same model....you just paid 20% more for the extra tackiness to show you were at least equal to the Joneses.
Tire makers loved them because for decades, the fifties through the seventies, people paid a lot more for the same model tire in a whitewall versus the blackwall version. A huge profit center for the tire makers. By the eighties, European cars and Japanese cars had become the style leaders as well as the superior auto producers instead of the motor city. No seventies or eighties Mercedes, BMW or Audi was ever seen with whitewalls except when someone decided they simply wanted to. By the end of the seventies, there was no price premium on whitewall tires since they had become "land yacht" tires because Radial tires had taken over all vehicles by then. Michelin had pioneered leadership in the most advance design of tire technology by the end of the sixties and foreign cars were fitted with radials by then and Detroit would follow a few years later, just as they had done with disc brakes. By the seventies, no sporty car was fitted with whitewalls except Detroit garbage like the Corvette, and Camaro and the bloated Mustang and even the later small MustangII. Around the start of the seventies, because whitewalls had become a land yacht staple along with vinyl roofs, the tire makers and Detroit decided to go to a more awful, low class redneck look, that they deemed to be "Sporty" and that was the Ultimate in Tacky, the raised white letter sidewall tire that would go on to sporty cars instead of the old fart's whitewall tire. The raised white letter sidewall came about because of the INDY 500 influence where the competing tire manufacturers, Firestone & Goodyear had placed their giant logos and white lettering on the sidewall of the racecar tires, so spectators and newspaper photos and tv coverage would show the the white letter name Firestone or Goodyear if the car was stopped in the pits or or a parked publicity photo, etc...
The Indy 500 really became space age modern in the mid sixties when the British came with slim cigar shaped rear engined cars powered by lightweight small FORD V-8 engines. Within two years or so, all of the front engine cars were a thing of the past as they could not compete with the speed of the rear engined cars. The front engined cars won the first competition against the rear engined cars only because the front engined car survived the entire 500 mile race. The rear engined cars had something like a 7 or 8 lap lead on the traditional front engined cars but they suffered mechanical failures late in the race. That was enough to send nearly all race teams to go rear engine cigar shape for the next year, though some low budget teams did enter using old outdated front engine cars, hoping that again they would be the only ones to finish. Speed jumped exponentially and the new style race cars were the rage. I guess someone in Detroit or Akron (the rubber capital then) said hey lets make tires look like the Indy Car's with GOODYEAR Polyglas and Firestone 500 and Atlas and BF Goodrich and every other name in big bold WHITE RAISED LETTERS.
The buying public thought it was cool. In an instant it replaced the red-line (red wall tires) that GM had tire makers make specifically for their Pontiac sporty models beginning in about '62, and the Corvette also had red wall tires in the sixties. You guessed it other mfr'rs tried gold wall and blue wall tires to copy GM but only the red-line tire was seen as cool until the giant bold white raised letter tires became the rage from the end of the sixties until the late seventies.
Excess in bad taste like vinyl roofs and chickens on hoods of Firebirds and ugly loud stripes and decals on most every sporty Detroit piece of garbage during this time.
Some things like, Bee-Hive hairdos and the big hair shellac helmut hair that went out about 1967 and nehru jackets for men and combovers, chopper sideburns, hippy hair, leisure suits, polyester disco suits, Elvis' jumpsuits, and later day mullets that men once thought looked cool and we must have thought so too. Every picture tells a story don't it...yeah it does you know and the bad choices in looks that would not survive the test of time....
Whitewall tires and Raised White Letter Tires really fit in there with vinyl roofs, platform shoes, giant bellbottoms, orange and green and brown shag carpeting, 8 track tapes, CB radios, chain-smoking five packs of cigarettes per day...
What in the world were we thinking back then?
Those of you who are young deserve to laugh at all of us over 56 , in the 57 to 67 yr old age group....as we were definitely far off in retrospect. Whitewalls and raised white letter tires are like shag carpet and mullets and everything else that should never again return...... History shows that bad taste always survives and every generation leaves their mark, though at the time they don't realize how bad their particular choice is.....
...................picture the loser played by actor David Spade, the character of Joe Dirt......yeah he'd have a polyester open shirt, gold chains, a frosted mullet, and a piece of trash Chevy Monte Carlo with whitewalls, or it could be a Camaro, or a Nova with rust and New Jersey, the Garden State license plate.
That is the look that comes to mind when one mentions whitewall tires.......that or 97 year old Mr & Mrs Magoo in their 1979 Cadillac Sedan Deville or their 1987 Lincoln Town Car with vinyl roof and Florida license plate, driving 28 mph in a 55mph zone.
Much too long. I stopped reading after your first paragraph , so I have no idea what you said.
I think whitewalls have their place. A neighbor has a 95 Roadmaster and they look PERFECT on that car. They also are a good look on a lot of older cars. Like any fashion trend, it can be overdone. If i had a truck with BF Goodrich's on it, I would want them white-letter facing out. Two things happened to the whitewall IMO. 1) we went for the more aggressive bigger wheel/less rubber look as upgrades. 2) It went out of style. Will it be like skinny ties or leggings and be cool again? Or will it be like bowties and suspenders and be relegated to a yesteryear status? I kind of hope for a recurrence. Also, as the Boomers Age, we may see more cars with higher sidewalls/more rubber as they no longer care for a "sporty" ride.
I think laziness played a big part of it too. Not too many people wash their cars on a regular basis anymore, and if you have whitewalls, all that brake dust and road grime would stick out much worse than on regular tires.
However, if you still want whitewall tires, they can still be found, just not nearly as common anymore. I know Coker and Firestone still make some models like that.
Diamond in the back.
Sunroof top.
Diggin' the scene with a ganster lean. Gangsta white walls.
TV antennas in the back.
You may not have a car at at all.
But remember, brothers and sisters.
You can still stand tall.
Just be thankful...for what you've got.
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