What’s your choice? Car or Girl?

Pairing a striking car with an equally striking model is a marketing trick that predates muscle cars entirely, but the 1960s turned it into a full-blown genre of its own. From cheeky ad copy like Pontiac’s ‘What’s new pussycats?’ to glamour shots that are still a staple at vintage car shows, the formula never really went away. Here’s where it came from — and why it still works.

Long before automakers had focus groups or social media metrics, they had a formula that worked anyway: park a beautiful car next to an even more striking model, take the photo, and let buyers argue about which one they actually wanted. It’s a marketing trick with roots that stretch back further than most people assume — advertisements pairing women with vehicles show up as far back as the late 1800s, long before muscle cars existed to sell in the first place. By the 1960s, the formula had become a full-blown genre of its own, showing up everywhere from magazine spreads to showroom posters. The strange part is how effectively it still works today, decades after the cars in those original photos stopped being new. Why does an image built purely to provoke a reaction still get people talking this long after the fact?

Why Automakers Paired Horsepower With Glamour

The pairing wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be — automakers and parts companies alike leaned on glamour photography because it grabbed attention in a crowded marketplace, using not-so-subtle visual cues alongside the models to reinforce a car’s performance credentials. Muscle car marketing in particular embraced boldness across the board, from aggressive model names to bright paint colors to advertising copy written directly at a younger generation looking to define its own identity. A 1966 Pontiac GTO ad famously ran the line ‘What’s new pussycats?’ — a tagline that captured exactly how unapologetically the era’s marketing leaned into personality over pure spec sheets.

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A Marketing Trick That Outlived the Cars It Sold

That formula never really disappeared. Pin-up photography and car culture stayed intertwined long after the original muscle car era ended, and today it’s practically expected at vintage car shows, where models in period-appropriate styling pose alongside restored classics for the same reason automakers used the trick in the first place — it draws a crowd. The images themselves have become collectible in their own right, treated less as advertising and more as artifacts of exactly how brash and unfiltered muscle car marketing used to be.

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