V4003 Review for The Wonderful Wacky World of Marketingmobiles: Promotional Vehicles of the World by David Finlay for CarKeys.co.uk (Web) February 2006 UK This book is something of a departure for author James Hale, described as "the world's leading authority on dune buggies". Anyone who can make that claim must surely have an eye for unusual and imaginative cars, and here Hale turns to his other passion - inspired by a childhood visit to the National Motoring Museum at Beaulieu - to marketingmobiles. Although there are some exceptions, marketingmobiles are very often based on standard road vehicles, but they rarely look like it. The best examples are designed to look like the products they were created to advertise, and in these pages you'll see motorised versions of teapots, hot dogs, sweets, Cadbury's Creme Eggs, lobsters, chickens, cigarette lighters, toothpaste tubes, houses, beer bottles, oil cans, drainage pipe and (in the case of a 1000cc three-wheeler used in Manila) a giant pink high-heeled shoe. The shoe was built in 2004, but the history of marketingmobiles goes a long way further back than that. The earliest example in Hale's book was built in 1910 by the American Thermos Bottle Company and looked like a vastly expanded version of its Model 24 thermos flask. Complete with a mahogany interior, of all things, it toured the country for some time, and lasted long enough to make an appearance (for no reason I can begin to imagine) at the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York. Most of the cars in the book were new to me, but I was pleased to see that Hale has devoted quite a lot of space to my own favourite marketingmobiles. These were the Mini-based Outspan orange cars, created in 1972 in an attempt to claw back some of the public sympathy lost because of the fact that Outspan's products came from apartheid-ridden South Africa. With their dimpled fibreglass bodywork and almost completely spherical shape, the Outspan cars looked remarkably like real oranges. They also shared with real oranges the tendency to start rolling in any direction with the slightest encouragement, and Hale reveals that 200lb of ballast was installed underneath the rear floor to prevent the cars somersaulting forwards under heavy braking. Marketingmobiles don't always advertise anything so sordid as a commercial product. Between 1972 and 1984, the Baptist gathering in Brannockstown, Co. Kildare held sermons in a Leyland bus which had been converted into a 35-seater church complete with portable pulpit and electric organ. And even this wasn't the first time God had got in on the act; from 1921, the Reverend Branford Clarke of New York preached along Broadway from his "perambulatory pulpit", based on a Model T Ford and fitted with the finest optional extra in the history of the motor industry - a collapsible steeple. Perhaps the fastest promotional vehicle ever has been the 1967 Voxmobile, shaped like two Vox guitars and crammed full of other Vox products (such as an organ and various amplifiers) with a total power output of 1000 Watts. The engine was pretty muscular, too - a 4.7-litre Ford V8, as used in the early AC Cobra and capable of pushing the Voxmobile to a claimed top speed of 175mph, though I'm not sure if anyone was brave enough to find out if this was true. Hale's text, mostly in the form of captions accompanying archive photographs, has a few more puns than I was prepared for, but it's very informative, and the pictures themselves are fascinating. Although marketingmobiles undoubtedly represent a distinctly off-centre part of motoring life, the most dedicated of petrolheads should really know about them, and this book is an ideal introduction to the subject. The Wonderful Wacky World of Marketingmobiles: Promotional Vehicles of the World, by James Hale, is published by Veloce at £12.99. ISBN 1-84584-003-8. More details at www.veloce.co.uk