The eye of the tiger

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Many moons before Esso came up with its famous slogan to "put a tiger in your tank" to boost petrol sales, Malayan Breweries Limited used another marketing strategy to sell its Tiger Beer. They drove around in this cool marketing mobile. Or perhaps there was more than one of them, since we found another picture of what looks to be a similar car but with a different layout.

Tiger Beer

They weren’t on their own. Worthington Brewery of Burton-on-Trent in the UK had a number of Daimler-based ‘bottle trucks’ in the early 1920s, while the Billings Brewing Company of Billings, Montana in the US did something quite similar as early as 1910. But it has to be said that the Tiger Beer effort was particularly good, with some first class coachbuilding having gone into the car(s) shown here.

Tiger Beer made it to the market in 1932 and is said to be Singapore’s first locally made brew. It’s still going strong. Our guess is that these pictures aren’t much older than the year the Malayan lager debuted. What car is it? Suggestions are, of course, more than welcome.

Words Jeroen Booij. Pictures Pinterest.

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