10 Things That Used To Be Common - But Which You Won't Find Today
Here's a fun way to test your age - or at least, your automotive IQ. If you can remember even half of the following features that cars used to have, you're either over 40 - or know your four-wheeled history!* Floor-mounted dimmer switch - With modern cars, you pull back on a steering wheel-mounted stalk to activate (or switch off) the high beams. In the olden days - prior to about 1981 - you'd use your left foot to tap them on and off. The change was done ostensibly for safety reasons - though a argument can be made that having to take one hand off the wheel to dim the high beams is not necessarily an improvement, safety-wise, over tapping a button with your left foot - and keeping both hands on the wheel.
* Column-shifted manual transmissions - As recently as the late '70s, some passenger cars equipped with manual transmissions still had their shifters on the steering wheel, just like pick-ups used to. It could be a challenge to get the pattern right - and led to lots of grindin' on the way to findin' first, second and third. But the upside was that with mastery came a sense of real accomplishment - especially if you could run through all the gears quickly.
* Carburetors - They've been gone for 20-plus years now. Hard to believe, isn't it? Fuel injection (especially multi-port fuel injection, which has an injector for each of the engine's cylinders) is now standard equipment on all new cars and trucks. It's more expensive and complex - but the gains in drivability, lower emissions and higher gas mileage are hard to argue against.
* Frameless door glass - Ok, some cars (Subarus for one) still have frameless door glass, but it's increasingly uncommon. Reason? It's harder to get a tight seal, especially over time. (Framed doors also add an element of structural integrity to the car, which can make it more crashworthy in side-impact accidents.)
* Steel wheels/plastic wheel covers - Yes, some low-end/base model vehicles still come through with one or both. But alloy rims - formerly found for the most part on high-end and high-performance cars only - are now dominant. This is ironic, because steelies are sturdier - and it's much cheaper to replace damaged plastic trim covers than bent aluminum wheels. But aluminum wheels do look nice - and they're lighter, too.
* Gas heaters - Cars with iffy/marginal heaters sometimes offered supplemental gas-fueled heaters that made them bearable in winter. It also made them dangerous firetraps - or mobile gas chambers that had the potential to asphyxiate their owners with carbon monoxide. Which is why you don't see them much anymore.
* Air-cooled engines - Ever-tighter emissions control requirements did them in. Porsche was the last to offer an air-cooled passenger car vehicle - but in the past, there were several makes on the road, including VWs and (in Europe) Tatras - some of which had air-cooled V-8 engines.
* Wing vents - Before air conditioning became a near-given that most cars either came with as standard equipment (or at least, offered as optionally available equipment) cars came with window wing vents that could be adjusted to direct airflow into the car, which kept the interior reasonably cool. But the effectiveness of this system depended on the car moving at a decent clip - and as traffic worsened, that got harder and harder. Air conditioning - and rolled-up windows - quickly became a "must-have."
* Hoods that opened from the outside - Either we were more trusting or thievery was less an issue "back in the day," when you could open just about any car's hood from the outside, just by pulling a lever or catch. No locks, no problemo. Today, you need to pull a lever from the inside to get the hood to pop open - which makes it harder for no-good-niks to access your engine compartment.
* Factory CB radios - Hey, good buddy! For a few years during the mid-late '70s, Citizen Band radios were quite the rage. Some automakers even began to offer CB radios as factory-installed equipment. But the craze died down as quickly as it appeared - and today, CBs are as rare as other icons from the past like 8-track tape players and non-digital tuners.
