6 Car Features You Never See Anymore
Get in a car from the 1960s or ’70s and it feels like a different species of vehicle. No LCD screens, no GPS, and certainly no smartphone mirroring. Instead, you’ll see a number of features that have quietly disappeared over the decades, killed off by safety regulations or simply made redundant by newer technology. Together, they serve as a reminder that the ordinary, everyday car is constantly being redesigned. Here are six auto features that were once completely ordinary but are now barely seen at all.
Pop-Up Headlights
Pop-up headlights reached their peak in the 1980s along with shoulder pads and the Sony Walkman, but they’ve actually been around since the 1930s. Once a hallmark of sleek sports cars, including the Ferrari Testarossa and Lamborghini Countach, pop-up lights let designers create a smooth, unbroken front end of the car when the lights weren’t in use.
Their downfall came from a mix of factors. Stricter pedestrian safety regulations introduced in Europe in the early 1990s specifically targeted hard, protruding surfaces such as raised headlight housings and hood ornaments (another feature rarely seen today). Aerodynamics and wind-tunnel testing were also becoming much more important, and designers weren’t keen on the drag that pop-up lights created. By the mid-’90s, there was little reason to keep them around, and the feature became obsolete.
Manual Crank Windows
This might come as a shock to anyone under 20, but back in the day, winding down a car window required actual physical effort. Once found in nearly every car regardless of price point, manual windows required drivers and passengers to turn a small handle to raise or lower each window. Power windows had been around since the 1940s but were reserved for luxury vehicles until they became cheaper to manufacture and install. By the late 1980s, power windows were installed in many midrange cars, and by the 2000s, hand cranks had disappeared almost completely.
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Built-In Ashtrays and Cigarette Lighters
From the 1950s onward, ashtrays and a spring-loaded cigarette lighter were considered standard features in nearly every car. But as smoking rates declined and cultural attitudes shifted, automakers began dropping ashtrays from their standard equipment lists, most notably in 1995, when Chrysler announced that its new Chrysler Cirrus and Dodge Stratus would not be fitted with ashtrays. Both ashtrays and spring-loaded lighters were largely gone by the mid-2000s, although the once-ubiquitous lighter socket survived in a new form, repurposed as a simple power outlet for charging phones and other electronics.
Vent Windows
Before air conditioning became standard, many cars featured small triangular windows — known as vent windows, quarter windows, or wing windows — mounted at the front edge of the door. They provided a slow breeze when opened slightly or a stronger stream of fresh air when opened fully, avoiding the need for winding down the main glass and letting in the full rush of highway wind. As air conditioning became widely available and affordable through the 1970s, these little windows became redundant, and by the 1990s automakers had phased them out in favor of AC and simpler, cheaper-to-manufacture door designs.
Tail Fins
Inspired partly by jet aircraft design and the glamour of the Space Age, dramatic tail fins rose to prominence on American cars throughout the 1940s, reaching their most extreme form in the late 1950s on cars such as the Cadillac Eldorado, Chevrolet Impala, and Plymouth Fury. But the look faded almost as quickly as it arrived. Safety concerns were once again an issue due to the protruding nature of the fins — in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader likened fins to the spikes on a stegosaurus tail. Automotive design also shifted toward cleaner, more restrained lines, and by the 1970s fins had pretty much disappeared from showroom floors.
Three-on-the-Tree Shifters
Before floor-mounted gear shifters became the norm, many manual transmission cars used a column-mounted shifter nicknamed “three-on-the-tree.” Rather than reaching down to the floor or the console between the front seats, drivers shifted gears with a lever attached to the steering column. It was a logical system, as it freed up space on the front bench seat for a third passenger. The three-on-the-tree was introduced in the 1930s and remained a standard feature on many American cars through the 1970s. But as bucket seats and center consoles became more common — and bench seats fell out of fashion — the column shifter gradually gave way to the floor-mounted shifters found in most manual cars today.
