Car Talk

 

A bit of retrospection about changes in cars over the years

A writing prompt about car keys jumped out at me this week because the one thing notable about car keys is you don’t have them anymore.   You have this funny little fobby thing that never leaves your pocket but still unlocks the door then starts the engine while you push a button on the dash. You can never lose your keys again, but heaven help you if you lose your fob.

This got me thinking about how many changes in cars we have lived through or at least know about.  The earliest vehicles didn’t have keys either. I wonder if horseless carriage rustling was considered to be a problem back then.  Come to think of it, early autos didn’t have starters either. You had to turn the engine over with a crank. My grandfather also told me that cranks could be so cranky that they could snap back on you and break your arm. Thank God Mr. Ford or Mr. Olds or someone did invent an electric starter that got its turnover power from a battery.

It’s a wonder, given the nasty habits of cranks,  that when some bright engineer decided a bit later that an automobile could use some windows to  keep the  dust and the weather out that a crank was the proper method to open a window.  Cranks hung on a long time after that.  

The first family car I remember was a pre-war sedan my dad bought around 1946.  It had cranks on the windows and a manual transmission with the shift lever located on the steering column.  It also had a clutch on the floor.  Most kids today if asked about a clutch would think you are inquiring about a group of birds.  Happily our old friend the clutch has gone the way of keys and cranks.   Shift levers, of course,  have been around since the beginning. They started on the floor, then migrated to the steering column, and finally, when automatics came in, sort of settled down to the center console along-side the drink cups. Have you ever had the experience of trying to change to reverse only to find your hand in the Pepsi or hot coffee?  Not pleasant.

There is a final change to discuss that may be the most important of all. That first family car of ours did have a radio. It grabbed on to a few local stations and the sound came out of a tiny tinny little speaker in the dashboard. Later cars had radios that added the FM band, but soon there came the addition of an eight-track player. Eight-track lasted about sixty seconds before it was replaced by the cassette—which lasted a bit longer. When the CD player and stereo began to be installed in cars that little dashboard speaker became obsolete. Speakers began to multiply like rabbits. Suddenly there were speakers on both sides of the dash and speakers in each door, and speakers in the back seat, and something called a woofer (not a giant Doberman) pushing out heavy bass from somewhere in the trunk.  Most of us know these musical setups from the vehicle next to us at a stoplight that is emanating sounds so loud that they make our teeth vibrate. I have always wondered what it must be like in the interior of that car.

I have not forgotten that today our flivver has a GPS screen in the front seat that will answer your cell phone, find and direct you to any address in the country, and beam hundreds of channels of entertainment  to additional screens in the rear seats so the kids can watch a movie or play video games.  This has eliminated that age-old child’s whiny question “Are we there yet?”  Now what comes from the back seat is “Can’t Aunt Ida hold dinner until we find out if the SUPERLORDS have saved civilization as we know it once again.”    

I don’t mean to make too much fun of the changes in cars over the years at all. The mechanical improvements and computerization have been a boon.  I know that our old pre-war Ford needed a quart of oil at every fill-up. Dad always carried a case of motor oil in the trunk along with tools and an innertube repair kit since tubeless tires were still in the future. No older vehicle ever had air conditioning other than cranking down the windows. Nor did an older car have a moon roof on it so you could push a button and pretend you had a convertible. And finally, who could have imagined that one day we would have a car that could parallel park for us.   

Jim De Young   11/30/2021