Advertising that mentions potential problems draws customers’ attention to them. Mazda’s advert from 1973 does just this. And it uses weasel wording too.
As I said in the introduction, advertising addresses people’s worries. Just as Rover handled the problem that their 1993 620 saloon was a Honda Accord in tweed (“Above all, it´s a Rover”), this ad from 1978 attacks the common prejudice that Japanese cars were vulnerable to rust. I tried to find one of these cars for sale and found only the precursor to the Mazda 626, the 616 LN. It’s from 1975 and probably the only one left.
If you notice the wording in the 1978 ad, it reads “quoted in Car magazine”. It’s ambiguous. A careless reading of the phrase “quoted in Car magazine” is that Car’s own writers thought it was tough enough to work in a salt mine. However, it is open to the interpretation that it was a person from Mazda who said “you could use a Mazda as a taxi in a salt mine and it would not rot away” which is not the view of Car but a view Car was reporting. If someone has a copy of the original article, please send us a scan and we can resolve this controversy once and for all.
Driven To Write 