The January 1950 edition of The Road Ahead featured a story on the state of Japan’s automobile industry and its recovery from the impacts of World War 2.
“Information about motoring in Japan is usually slight and ill-informed, but the picture is now clearer than it has been for some time,” the story began.
At the time, the fledging GM-backed Holden was the only car maker building a truly Australian car, with Ford producing the partly imported Zephyr at its plant in Geelong and the Falcon still a decade away. Several other companies including Chrysler and the Nuffield Group, which manufactured the British marques M.G., Morris, Riley and Wolseley, were also preparing to establish factories here.
Motels, positioned on or near major highways, have been common around Australia for decades, offering a convenient short-term stay for travellers.
However, in the 1950s motels were only just starting to pop up in the United States and yet to make an appearance here.
The January 1950 edition of The Road Ahead featured a story on this emerging accommodation option with the heading, “The Motel – America’s answer to the tourist accommodation problem”.
The story explained that motels, short for ‘motor hotels’, were becoming big business in the US.
The same edition of The Road Ahead revealed that a motel was being established on the outskirts of Sydney and accurately predicted this would be the first of a “chain of these tourist hotels which will ultimately stretch from Sydney to Cairns”.