Our car guy looks at automotive fads of the past we’ll see coming back
Even if you have no opinion of or interest in old cars, you’ve probably had some pop culture exposure (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang/Grease/Jay Leno/Fast and the Furious/Patrick Dempsey/Wiz Khalifa), depending on your tastes and/or generation. If nothing else, you probably have an American Graffiti-style image of a Fifties car with whitewall tires floating around in your head somewhere.
As we’ve talked about before, the last 130 years of car development has mostly been a story of inventing stuff, then finding out that the technology to make it work doesn’t exist yet--things like hybrids, turbos, disc brakes, fuel injection and automatic transmissions are all well over a century old. All your various accessories and convenience features go equally far back.
Before there was bluetooth integration, there was your driver, who you commanded to do things. You could get a little scrolling map that navigated your trip, automatic lights, record players, in-car coffee makers, wheel-mounted ice-cream churn, vacuum cleaners, charcoal heaters and phones, not to mention the dozens of varieties of cigarette lighters. Not all of them were practical, or survivable, but there are a few whose time has come around again.
Curb feelers
You may have seen these little wire whiskers sticking off the underside of a car, especially if you were alive in the Fifties. They actually go back at least to the early Thirties, when they were invented by the grandfather of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor (this is actually true).
Merely steel rods that scrape the curb when you get too close, they went out of fashion in the “cars shouldn’t have whiskers” era. Current safety standards have raised doorlines and thickened support pillars hugely since then, which ruined visibility. Insurance companies will surely soon require a porcupine-like muzzle of bristles around your car.
Highwheelers
Back when roads weren’t paved and suspensions were primitive, there was a class of wagon-wheeled cars called highwheelers. There was no specific criteria, but you generally had wheels of at least 26 inches in diameter, or more. It did make handling a little quirky, especially as your tires were no more than four inches wide, but they did keep you out of the mud.
Now, low, wide tires give you a much greater “contact patch,” the part of the tire that actually touches the road and lets you corner and stop and stuff. But they’re not very fuel efficient, since there’s a lot of friction there.
Cars like a Toyota Prius are already using skinny, hard tires, so anyone running dubs and above has the right idea, as we’ll all be on nice 30s (“trips”) or 40s (“quads” or “double deuces”) with molded-on rubber again.
Convertibles
For decades, convertibles outsold hard tops by vast margins, to the extent that many models didn’t come with a roof at all. By World War II the balance had shifted, and continued to shift until by the Nineties less than five percent of all cars sold were convertibles.
In an age of climate change, they make perfect sense again—you can’t expect your poor HVAC systems to go from hot to cold every day over and over again without breaking in expensive ways. It’s far simpler just to put on a sweater and leave the roof down.
Beaver-fur Driving Coats
Sweaters might be nice for cool spring mornings, but the miserable drizzles of December will require more rigorous weather protection. Doing double duty as a stadium coat (think Bane in The Dark Knight Rises), a good fur will shrug off any downpour and last for generations.
There are also any number of post-apocalyptic situations in which a fur will be invaluable, like hiding from sentient raccoons or cushioning your fall from an abandoned Ferris wheel.
Plus, you’re not going to roll on those trips without looking machofabulous, are you?
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who recently quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.