Car features are certainly products of their time. Every idea executed on a rolling frame with wheels is meant to suit sometimes very niche problem that someone somewhere thought “this is what people need to fix it!” There was a brief time when Ford thought drivers needed a little more room to exit the vehicle, and so there was Ford’s Swing-Away steering wheel that swung completely to the right (as pictured above). Cadillac in the late ’50s thought you might need to entertain with a drink on your travels, so it put a magnetic minibar in the glovebox of its Eldorado Brougham. It’s for the classy folks.
Ideas that leaned more towards practicality, however, would take hold and remain part of the feature packages we select on new vehicles today. Heated seats, once a luxury item, are typically just a package up from standard now. Manual rear differential locks were mostly replaced with electronic ones. Daytime running lamps and automatic headlights have ensured you never need to manually turn a dial to keep the lights on (that’s what screens are for).
Some of these features over the decades were actually useful. Some were plain entertaining. Many of those features are no more, and had me wondering what long-gone features do you wish automakers still put in their cars today?
Mmmmm… analog
I truly miss old analog instrument clusters. I understand the financial reasons behind automakers shying away from them (if you ever owned an early to mid-2000s Pontiac product, you might truly understand). But to watch a digital needle tap the red line on the fun cars, or watch the odometer number change as it goes up isn’t the same as a real needle moving, or the odometer number literally rolling over. There’s a strange reward in the visceral experience of an input with a more manual outcome. I count myself fortunate that my current daily driver, a 2016 Mercedes-Benz CLS 400, still provides a taste of analog dials, albeit with a hint of digital. Our new truck though, physical gauges be damned — they’ve been relegated to screen.
What other fallen heroes in the name of features would you like to see make a comeback in today’s overtly screen-ladened, digitally-focused cars? Is it something more practical, like buttons and cassette players? Or are you aiming for more wistful like the ’80s digital dashes? I don’t know why all my feature references are from the 1980s, but maybe that was the last time cars had more personality.
Regardless, tell me what features you’d love to see return in the comments below, and expect a compilation of your answers earlier in the week.
