QOTD: What Car Features Do You Want, Miss, or Neither?

It’s been unusually cold here in Vancouver, where the averages for December and January are low 3 and high 7 °C (37/45 °F). Lately we’ve been getting as low as -14 °C (7 °F) and occasionally all the way “up” to -3 °C (27 °F). We also got 19 cm (7½”) of snow, which is quite a lot more than we usually don’t get. Don we now our heavy jackets, and utter “F”-words that aren’t fa-la-la-la-la! This necessitates shovelling, sweeping, and brushing snow; chipping ice; spreading sand; sitting in a cold car waiting for the inside frost to dissipate from the windows, and driving on roads unplowed by trucks Vancouver hasn’t got.

Years ago, Popular Science magazine had an “I’d like to see them make…” column. Readers sent in their product ideas, and PS paid $5 for each they used.

Why, I’d gladly pay a penny to be gassed with insecticide in a small, enclosed space!


 
Some of the car-related ideas show the kind of thrifty ingenuity that makes you go “Gee!” in grandpa’s garage…

…some of them demonstrate that the past is a foreign country…

…some of them were more or less prescient…

…some were mooted by technology evolving elsewise…

…some were clever, but never gained traction…

…some were less than completely thoughtful…

…and some of them were nutty:

With this cold weather lately, I could wish fast idle were still a thing. Carbureted engines have a fast-idle cam that props the throttle partway open while the choke is closed, creating enough flow through the intake tract that even though a lot of gasoline condenses on the cold manifold walls, a burnable amount still reaches the engine.

There are sturdy reasons why it’s a good job we don’t have them any more: starting a cold engine and immediately revving it caused tremendous wear, especially since most motor oils in the carburetor era had very poor cold-flow characteristics and it took awhile for them to reach all the friction points while the engine was revved up and grating itself. And it was none too friendly to automatic transmissions, universal joints, engine mounts, or final-drive gears to take the slam hit from engaging a gear with the engine running fast.

My 2007 Honda Accord, which I have extensively kvetched about, is like other fuel-injected cars in that it doesn’t need much of an elevated idle speed to cope with even the coldest of starts. There’s no fuel flowing through the manifold; it’s injected right behind the inlet valve, so there’s no condensation to speak of. But there are also sturdy reasons why I want a manual fast-idle control. The engine, coolant, and heater-defogger just don’t warm up very fast with the engine calmly ticking over at a 750 rpm curb idle, and I feel like an ape—a very cold ape—sitting there with my foot on the accelerator. Oil flow is no issue with synthetic 0W20; besides, I start the engine and give it a few moments at its low idle before raising the speed. I’d just really rather have a switch or knob or something to un-footcuff myself from the accelerator. That way I could warm the engine (etc) and clear the windows, lights, roof, hood, and decklid in parallel rather than serially.

Some of the school buses I rode had a throttle control on the dashboard: pull the knob to raise the engine speed, then it either stayed there by friction or you rotated the knob to lock it in place, like the one on this ’91-’97 FJ80 Toyota Land Cruiser:

I don’t need that level of adjustability; just a switch to raise the idle to 1,800 RPM or so. Ideally pressing the switch again would cancel it, as would touching the accelerator or brake or shifting out of Park or Neutral. It’d be useful in summer, too, for speeding up the A/C compressor enough to move significant heat while stuck in one place.

That said, this unpleasant weather has also added something to my very short list of things I like about this car:   2︎⃣   means second gear and none other, right from the start until something else is manually selected. Not first and then second as with all the Torqueflites, Turbo Hydramatics, and assorted other automatics I’ve driven over the years. This is terrific for reducing torque to the drive wheels for slip-free departures from stops and snowed-in roadside parking spaces. Yes, the car has traction control, and that’s a help, but it’s a frenetic, instant-by-instant reaction to wheel spin. By reducing the engine’s mechanical advantage over the wheels, skipping first gear helps stave off the wheelspin in the first place. This last week or ten days, I’ve made whole trips in   2︎⃣  for the traction assist when starting forward, and the engine speed boost while cruising along at 30 – 50 km/h (20 – 30 mph) on a short trip.

If we zoom out for a wider view, I could draw up a good list of features I miss from older cars: wing windows, pull/pull rather than push/pull stalk operation for high-low beam selection, and ignition keys inserted straight forward into dashboard-mounted locks like it says in Scripture, for starters. I could put together a pretty hefty list of stuff I’m happily rid of from the older models, too—wind leaks from those wing windows, for example, and carburetors entire. And as I’m peering overtop my glasses to see stuff at close range and elsewise galloping along towards membership in the get-the-hell-offa-my-lawn-goddamn-kids-today-got-no-respect brigade, the list of features I don’t want might be biggest of them all. I’d be tickled to never again hear of “infotainment”. I don’t want touchscreens or any other kind of permanently-illuminated dashboard, or pushbutton start/stop. I don’t want my car (…refrigerator, toothbrush, fly swatter…) on the internet to any degree, and I don’t want my car rifling through my phone to find music or anything else. I’ve lost all of those fights before they’ve even begun; sooner or later I will have to buy a car with some or all of these. The Accord already has a perma-lit dashboard, which I intensely dislike.

Okeh, now you: what do you miss or wish gone on your present car? What would you like to see them make for your next one? What do you wish they wouldn’t?