Hey what's the latest that anyone here remembers actually seeing any of these things in the wild? (As in actually being used at a gas station). I actually saw (and used) one as late as the mid '80s.
As a kid I can clearly remember being at the gas station with my Dad driving and seeing them topping off the oil from those bottles. That would have been late '60s or early '70s.
So basically they started to disappear somewhere about the same time that self service gas stations were becoming popular. I'm sure the "self serve" had something to do with it, but also the fact that newer cars would have been using less oil and that oil was more available in convenient to carry plastic bottles must have helped with their demise.
The funny thing was that I'd never bought oil in those bottles when they were around, I always topped off at home from the left overs of the last oil change. But then one day in the late '80s I was traveling and while fueling up noticed the oil was low on the dipstick. I was about to go buy a one liter plastic bottle to top off and then I noticed a crate of those glass bottles full of oil on a rack near the entrance to the workshop. I thought, wow that's retro and grabbed one and dumped her into the crankcase. The funny thing is that this was a self serve station, so I don't know how they really kept track of who'd taken oil or not, it would have been much harder to monitor than the fuel bowsers. I guess it was almost an honor system.
Just wondering if anyone else had encountered a place still using those things well past their time. Maybe traveling in some remote backwater or something?