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Today’s most advanced cars offer the kind of luxury and safety equipment our ancestors couldn’t even dream of. Or do they?
While it’s true that motorists from even 30 years ago couldn’t imagine actually buying a car, they could get out of their garage with a pocket computer, drive for hours without touching the steering wheel, or one that uses augmented reality navigation— instructions projected onto the windshield, many of the gadgets we consider new and innovative had been tried years ago.
Often those trials failed because the technology wasn’t advanced enough to make them work properly or reliably. But with modern computing power behind them, those ideas were given a second chance. Here are 10 car features that came back from the dead.
1. Turbocharged
There is now hardly a combustion car for sale that does not use the power of exhaust gases to squeeze more air into the engine. But when GM abandoned its short-lived early 1960s experiment to give the Oldmsobile F-85 Jetfire and Chevy Corvair Monza the performance of cars with much larger engines, it was years before another major OEM tried the same trick.
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When turbo technology returned, it was picked up first by performance cars like the 1974 BMW 2002 Turbo and the 1975 Porsche 911 Turbo, then by diesels, including the 1978 Mercedes-Benz 300SD. Forced induction on regular gas-powered cars wasn’t quite normalized. around the world until the VW Group launched its 1.8-litre engine in the mid-1990s and put it in just about everything, but by the 2010s, cars without turbochargers started to become the anomalies.
2. Automatic headlights
Before the dawn of the new millennium, driving a car down a twisty country road meant having your fingers ready to jump off the steering wheel and either push the turn signal lever away or snap it toward you to dim your light completely. to avoid dazzling other drivers .
Today, most cars do the work for you (though not perfectly), but Cadillac launched an early version of the technology called Autronic Eye way back in 1952. early 80s as Guide-Matic.
Most contemporary cars also have headlamps that come on when it gets dark and stay on to show us the way to our front doors, two features promised by GM’s Twilight Sentinel system in the 1960s, while modern swivel headlamps certainly take their inspiration from cars such as the Citroën DS and SM and Tucker 48, and aftermarket cornering headlight systems available in the 1920s.
3. Cylinder-on-demand / variable displacement
Cars only need a fraction of their maximum optimum power when cruising, so it seems like a great idea to turn off half of an engine when it’s not needed to save fuel. And if you’ve driven a modern little Audi, a current Ford Fiesta ST, or a 5.7 Hemi-engined Dodge or Jeep, you know it’s surprisingly smooth.
What more can be said of the 1981 Cadillac V8-6-4, whose clever ideas for beating the second gas crisis were not matched by the cleverness (or reliability) of the electronics needed to keep the system running properly. It was quickly dropped, but two decades later the technology was back and finally delivered on its promise.
4. Flush-fit, color-coded bumpers
Unless they’re trying to look like tough off-road warriors, modern cars always have smooth, color-coded bumpers that don’t interfere with the lines of the body’s sheet metal. It’s a style trend that the industry took to wholesale in the mid-1990s, making anything built before look instantly dated.
But Porsche’s 928 had been flaunting the same trick since 1978, the Corvette since ’73, and the Pontiac GTO’s Endura bumper had already appeared in the fall of 1967.
5. Rear axle steering
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Four-wheel steering was popular in the 1980s with technology-obsessed Japanese automakers, who used it on cars like the Honda Prelude and Mazda 626. The Nissan Skyline GT-R also took over rear-axle steering for its comeback in 1989 and championed it over the years. Ninety. even as the technology began to fall out of favor with other automakers.
But ironically, Nissan dropped the GT-R’s function with the death of the R34 Skyline. When the R35 GT-R appeared in 2007, it only steered on the front wheels, just as other automakers were beginning to rediscover its advantages.
6. Electric Powertrains
As we approach the 2030s, combustion engines are being pushed aside in favor of cleaner, quieter electric alternatives. But in the late 1890s and early 1900s, a very similar war was waged, and then it was the electric current that was forced into submission. Early gas cars were loud, smelly, dangerous, more complicated to start and drive, and needed regular attention. But they were also lighter, cheaper, and the batteries (lead-acid at the time) in EV alternatives couldn’t store much energy relative to the weight they added. Sounds familiar?
The introduction of an electric starter was a big boost for combustion cars, but Edwin Black writes in his book Internal combustion that petroleum interests have derailed the electric car movement. But in 2022, with improved battery technology and climate issues driving governments to turn against combustion energy, the takeover of electric vehicles is back on track, just 100 years ahead of schedule.
7. Digital Dashboards
Large digital infotainment displays have changed the look of our car’s center consoles and central dashboard areas over the past 20 years. And now almost every new car that comes out also has a secondary digital display instead of a traditional analog instrument panel. Some, like the Mercedes EQS, cover their entire dashboard with digital displays.
Digital dashboards first emerged in the 1980s, but were largely abandoned (by European automakers) by the end of that decade. However, thanks to truly actionable advantages over analog clocks, including the ability to display navigation maps, digital gauge clusters are back in fashion. And there’s no turning back to analog this time around, especially now that Apple’s CarPlay will soon be integrated with the cluster, and not just your car’s central touchscreen.
8. Talking Cars
This is closely related to the previous entry on digital dashboards, as both became topics of discussion in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, the real talking cars of the early 1980s weren’t nearly as smart as TV’s most famous talking car, Knight Rider’s KITT, and the technology was exposed as a gimmick.
It’s much better these days, especially with the arrival of the built-in Google Assistant, because your car not only talks to you, but also listens. However, it almost never understands what I have to say…
9. Frunks
The EV has revolutionized how and where we ‘fuel’ our cars, as well as how we load them with groceries. Instead of opening a trunk or hatch, we might as well pop up the hood and drop our bags in, because dumping the combustion engine usually frees up useful cargo space, as seen here on the new Ford F-150 Lightning.
If you’ve ever owned certain mid-engined sports cars, such as an early Toyota MR2 or a rear-engined Porsche 911, none of this would seem strange, but neither would it be to millions of European car drivers 50 years ago when many BMWs , Fiat, Renault, Skoda and Volkswagen models had their engines mounted in the rear. Fortunately, the terrifying swing-axle suspension and wet-weather handling of Russian roulette, which were also often part of the vintage rear engine, didn’t co-operate with frunks in making a comeback of the 2020s.
10. Rotary Motors
From Citroën to Mercedes, most manufacturers in the late 1960s and early 1970s were enthusiastic about Felix Wankel’s super-smooth rotary engine. Though Benz never put one into production, NSU did, as did Citroën, though it soon wished it hadn’t: The French company tried to buy back and destroy every GS Birotor it had sold.
Only Mazda held out, but when the RX-8 died (and many did) in 2010 due to its inability to meet Euro 5 emissions standards, it looked like the rotor had worn out its last rotor tip and a comeback seemed unlikely. However, around the same time that the RX-8 was dying, Audi showed an A1 concept with a rotary knob as a range extender, and Mazda decided to do the same to improve the small range of the electric MX-30.
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