Cars made many decades ago had some of the weirdest features in or on them. Read on to learn about seven of them! Enjoy!
1) Horse Head
Cars battled with horses as a popular means of transportation in the early days of cars, and there were some problems. Horses were frightened when a car approached because they didn’t know what cars were. In the late 1890s, Uriah Smith developed a perfect solution – a fake horse head. The idea was that cars would absolutely have to have his “Horsey Horseless” fake horse head attached to the front of the vehicle and that would calm skittish horses. Unfortunately, this never actually happened.
2) Illuminated Tires
Goodyear introduced illuminated tires–made of a special translucent rubber and had electric lightbulbs mounted inside the rim–in 1961. They were slick looking and actually illuminated the road at night. Goodyear chose not to produce these tires so they never made it into production automobiles.
3) Mini-Bar in the glovebox
In Cadillac’s Brougham in 1957, which was a very innovative car for its time, came with a genuine mini-bar in its glovebox. Doesn’t sound possible, does it? You have to remember that this was over sixty years ago and in many States there weren’t any DWI laws.
4) Labeling bad drivers
During the 1930s, Memphis briefly had a policy to place special skull and crossbones license plates on vehicles to signify who was a good driver and who was a driver to avoid. This law met with opposition from a variety of fronts so it wasn’t around for a long time. Today, this seems like a crazy idea but, at the time, it was supposed to make driving safer for Memphis’ citizens.
5) Wrist-Twist Steering System
In 1965, Ford attempted to make the driving experience safer and better by introducing the “Wrist-Twist” steering system. Featuring a couple of small rotating wheels fastened to a steering stalk, the driver would get a better view of the gauges and road. Due to poor feedback, this design never made it into production and only existed on select experimental models of the Park Lane.
6) Automatic Seatbelts
Toyota was the first manufacturer to make seatbelts “automatic” in the early 1980’s. They were first installed on the 1981 Toyota Cressida. The seat belts were physically attached to the door, which meant that you needed to slide underneath the belt when entering the car and lock them in place when the door was completely shut. That seemed like a good idea at the time but customer feedback wasn’t strong. Although this was a way to insure automotive safety, owners did not like being “restrained” by the belts and many removed them.
7) Rim Blow Steering Wheel
In the early 1970s, Ford and a few other vehicle makers thought that it would be a neat idea to replace the horn-button in steering wheel’s center with a squeezable rim that would trigger the horn. Although this sounded like a good idea, it did have one major problem: as the rim shrank over time, the horn would go off at times when it was not needed. Customer feedback was poor after a few years and this feature was discontinued.
Article Courtesy of: Sudbay Chrysler Dodge
