What would cars look like if Ralph Nader had never been born? I know that David Letterman once pondered that question and figured the answer would be things like the fasten seatbelts chime being replaced by a synthesized voice telling you to “Punch it! Punch it!”. I tend to agree.
There’s no better example of that than the American cars of the fifties. Forget about the lack of seat belts and airbags; that doesn’t begin to describe the madness. We’re talking about cars where performance and glitz were the goals with zero regard to the consequences of even making contact with the interior or exterior surfaces.
Let’s look at a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado. It’s not enough that you can run over a pedestrian because the V8 makes it far faster than the drum brakes and squishy suspension can handle. No, this thing will flat-out gorge anything you drive into forwards or backwards with sharp, pointed edges.
The inside is just as bad; you can see emergency rooms filled with people needing care for puncture wounds in the shape of some gilded radio knobs and such shit. Ah, but this Caddy was even worse. It’s long been known that drinking and driving is a bad combination. You don’t want an open container of alcohol in a car; you might as well have a bar built into the dashboard, right?
That’s right. Open the glove box of the Eldorado and, in addition to a make-up mirror, there’s a bunch of little silver coasters and a suggestion for carrying a small bottle of your favorite libation. Were they serious? How did that work? Magnets, baby! Located on the bottom of each tumbler, magnets kept your drinks from sliding onto the cut pile carpeting. Oh wait, you were concerned about the actual alcohol being served in the front seat of the car? I have no idea what they were thinking. Maybe they figured that you couldn’t get enough alcohol in the glove box to get totally plastered in those Mad Men days? I’m digging that illegible rotating drum clock, too.
At least the magnetic tumbler idea made sense from a physics standpoint; a lot more sense than the infamous Glove Box Circles that were popular on most cars from the fifties up through the early eighties. To the younger generations, you might have never seen these; once you do these things will seem as odd as crop circles in farmland. Here are a few examples from Japan (Toyota Land Cruiser), Europe (2 series Volvo), and America (68-72 Chevy/GMC pickup). Most cars had them:
Naturally, it’s obvious in today’s world of adjustable foot-deep cupholders to hold Big Gulps, this is a bit absurd. According to Patrick Smith’s “The Secret History of the Glovebox Door,” there was in fact real thought behind them:
The drive-in diner and movie theatres took hold in a big way during (the fifties) and the rise of fast food with car hops and kitchen to car delivery gave the glove box door a new function, When opened, indents on the inside lid allowed you to rest your cardboard cup of soda or malt shake without fear of it slipping away. To be sure those indents weren’t deep enough to prevent a slide in a moving car but it was good enough for stand still convenience… The glove box started losing indents for paper cups in the late 1970s as drive in movies and restaurants faded from the scene.
Look, I get it. This is way that manufacturers sort of said “put your drink here” to the passengers, but it also says “if you do and the car moves even a fraction of an inch when a door is slammed your beverage will end up in your lap.” Today someone would put a hot cup of coffee there, burn themselves and sue the manufacturer even if they added a sticker that said DO NOT PLACE HOT OR COLD BEVERAGES HERE (which goes against the message the funky circles are telling you anyway).
Regardless, car companies for the most part back then were smart enough to not put a mini bar inches away from the driver. Besides, they could fill that space with two giant ashtrays and cigarette lighters instead! Much safer.
If you want an example from the other end of the price range, the Citroen AX has a door pocket apparently designed for a bottle of wine…
I have personal experience that a rocks glass will sit securely on a Cadillac dashboard at 20 on the freeway. (Not from inside. I was the tenth car to get by.)
When I was in elementary school I asked my mom why she couldn’t have her wine while my dad drove on road trips. She asked where the hell that question came from and I answered that a Rolls-Royce could be ordered with a champagne cooler and crystal flutes. “Nathaniel, your father drives a Honda Odyssey” was her response.
re: Tail fin gore, this Mad Magazine image has lived rent-free in my head since I was a kid.
LOL! I remember these – mine was the “slant-fender slash”!
Oh, God. Nightmare fuel to a little kid!
I’ve never read an article about a car that could possibly miss the point so utterly and completely, disregarding the era in which they were built and for those they were built for. Awful.
This is just silly fluff – who green-lighted this article? PS I just skimmed it and it was still trash.
As if I didn’t already love you, Bishop, citing a Letterman Top 10 list from ~30 years ago… beautiful.
Off the top of my head, one of the other items was piano wire seatbelts.
Top 10 Ways American Cars Would be Different if Ralph Nader Had Never Been Born
10. Dashboard hibachis
9. Seat belts made of piano wire
8. Windshield replaced with ant farm for kids
7. Strobe headlights make oncoming traffic look like old time movie
6. 50-foot antennas allow you to broadcast while driving
5. Optional front-seat hammocks
4. Wiper fluid reservoir routinely filled with thousand island dressing
3. New York City taxis would be exactly the same
2. The paper Buick
1. Speedometer replaced with electronic voice chanting “Punch it! Punch it!”
“The inside is just as bad; you can see emergency rooms filled with people needing care for puncture wounds in the shape of some gilded radio knobs”
Many years ago, in college, I took a class, Forensic Anthropology 101, from Dr William Bass, a pioneer in the field of forensics (this was right around the time he set up his first body farm, a good couple decades before the CSI television shows came out.) He would talk about what he saw at the beginning of his career, in the early 1960s, where he would be called out by the police to examine car crashes; he said there was usually a good way to identify who had been driving (either the unbelted occupants of the car had been tossed every which way or the survivors didn’t want to divulge who had been driving) by checking to see who had freshly skinned shins. He said that a surprising (ha, perhaps not so surprising) percentage of American cars back then had a parking brake with a L-shaped handle underneath the dash positioned just right to skin a driver’s shin in any head-on collision. He joked that he often wondered if such a placement was intentional because it was so precise for the action of shin-skinning. Yeah, Dr Bass had rather the sense of humor, apparently a common coping mechanism when faced with death on a daily basis, probably the only thing these CSI shows got right (for the record, the show Bones, with Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz, is widely considered among the most accurate of all the fictional forensics procedural shows and most of its characters certainly had a sense of humor.)
Even if Bones is the most accurate, my wife who’s got a PhD in Physical Anthropology is forbidden from watching that show because too many heavy objects get thrown at the TV as she yells about what they get wrong. And I can’t keep replacing broken TVs!
Ha, yeah, that says a lot about the, ahem, accuracy of the CSI shows, that’s for sure! I refuse to watch any of the CSI shows and just engage in a healthy suspension of disbelief when watching Bones 🙂
I found the episode of Bones where our heroes walked out of a small room without a scratch after being fired upon at point blank range by two automated GE m134 mini guns particularly accurate. I don’t recall blanks being mentioned.
And then there was the time a super villain blew up their computers with a tiny binary barcode marked on a fragment of some piece of evidence such that the picture taken was enough to reset the CPU temperature in the BIOS firmware of the computer to “melt”. Very realistic.
/s
The only thing an remember about that show was how eye rolling it was. IIRC the only accuracy I found in that show were the characters were reasonably good physical representations of humans but overly attractive for their roles. That about it. The rest was pure primetime TV fantasy. As are all CSI type shows.
Yeah, that’s Hollywood for you, all right. If you think Bones is bad, then you don’t want to watch any of the CSI franchise shows. Bones does indeed require some hearty suspension of disbelief even when taking into account the premise of the characters being the absolute top of their fields working at the top institute in the country (John Rogers, a writer for the show Leverage, coined the term “competence porn” for such a premise.) One thing that’s actually good about Bones is how well they do in passing the Bechdel Test (preponderance of David Boreanaz’s hyper-macho FBI agent character notwithstanding.) The CSI shows are relentlessly patriarchial in the hierarchies of the characters’ workforces whereas Bones is relatively egalitarian which helps make it more palatable than any of the CSI shows.
I tried watching CSI once but had to shut it off when they used a laserpointer (its beam brightly visible on a sunny day) to retrace a bullet’s path ricocheting off multiple nonreflective surfaces and that was before I started working in DNA forensics. It was all downhill from there.
The folks I worked with had come from real, big city crime labs. I heard stories of actual prosecutors, including A/DAs who really should have known better demanding something laughingly unrealistic and when told they were SOL retorted “but CSI”. The consulting FBI agent had some good stories too.
But the CSI effect wasn’t limited to CSI. I kinda liked Law and Order but CSI contaminated that show too. I was particularly bugged when a lab tech would put a sample into a machine and after a minute of buzzing and whirring a printout would be spit out, the tech would hand it to the hero who would gleefully exclaim ” ITS A MATCH!”.
Ultimately that company failed and a couple of the folks who I thought were the most competent literally went on to greener pastures. Last I heard they found marijuana dispensary work more stable and lucrative than working in biotech; ironic considering how much of their crime lab career had been spent prosecuting drug offenders.
Accurate? Uh – where do I get the virtual reconstruction hologram machine?
I just love the interiors of this era of Cadillacs! All the switches and most of the touchpoints are metal, everything is surprisingly well finished and decoration and interesting patterns and colours were plenty. My friend has a ’61 Caddy and the difference compared to my ’72 Fleetwood were remarkable.
I can’t get past the photobomb name drop of my little PA town in the upper left of that pic. Indescribable how proud I am to have the borough immortalized in juxtaposition with something like this. Admittedly, the name was associated with the coachworks in town which was purchased and lifted from here to Detroit where it became something different, but it’s there, by God.
Own your Schlegelschteddel heritage!
you know it.
Well, that’s something I didn’t expect this morning. I grew up outside of Blandon, FHS alum, and my parents still live there in my childhood home even though I moved to California many years ago.
Boyers, Smith Field, Ray Buss, Breakfast Brothers, Fiores, I could go on….Go Tigers.
My E36 also had the glovebox door drink tray, which brings a good question. What was the last car to have them?
I had a Peugeot 206 from 2001 that had them, and unless they changed the design, they were made up until 2006. They were weirdly deep and narrow though, possibly because the door itself was curved.
There’s a good chance that there’s still cars today that have them.
I wonder how many of those Eldorados ended up teetotaled.
Which car was it that had the hidden coke mirror again?
You’re thinking of the Lamborghini Jalpa
Nah, it was a Lexus. My fellow Canuck wrote about it:
The Lexus NX Had A Removable Flat Mirror That Definitely Wasn’t For Coke, I Don’t Know What You’re Talking About – The Autopian
The tiny bottle was a bespoke perfume that came with the car, not a tipple. I’ve seen this actual example in the sheet metal at the Heritage Center. It’s a beautiful car. Word is when it came out it was more expensive than a Rolls-Royce.
Yeah, but I dont think you’re supposed to drink perfume in the tumblers.
This was back when Cadillac really, really was the “standard of the world” before making the Cimarron only 25 years later.
That’s correct. The Eldorado Brougham was priced at more than $13,000 USD when new in 1957 (>$142,000 now) … deliberately higher than the $10,000 Continental Mark II. Even so, Hemmings reports that GM lost $10,000 on each one.
One of the wonderful little bits of bizarreness in the existential road movie Two Lane Blacktop is that GTO’s (Warren Oates) car seemingly has a full-on wet bar in the trunk.
Any film with a Harry Dean Stanton appearance is worth watching.
Dagmars. They’re just the best.
I’m reminded of this exchange in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World…
Jim Backus: You know what I need? I need a drink. There’s some ice and stuff back there. Why don’t you make us all some old fashionds?Mickey Rooney: “Old Fashions”? Do you think you oughta drink while you’re flying?Jim Backus: Well stop kidding, will ya, and make us some drinks! You just press the button back there marked “booze”. It’s the only way to fly!
Oh – by way – I believe up until the late 80’s in Florida you could have an open container in your car and nurse your beer while driving
Your are correct about Florida. You could drink and drive as long as you weren’t over the limit, which was 0.15% at the time, nearly double what it is today.
I remember plenty of times going through a drive through bar with my dad as pre- and early teen. He’d get whatever he was in the mood for and offer to get me a beer.
A friend moved to Denver from Florida in the 80’s. He pulled up next to a cop at a light and took a pull off his beer. Conversation ensued. He didn’t get a ticket but he did learn about open carry in Colorado.
“What if something happens?”
“What could possibly happen with an Old Fashioned?”
You can have an open container in Germany. The driver can’t be over the limit but the passengers can be getting absolutely pissed.
This is true – and my Mom was PISSED when they made that illegal.
Torch, are you in there? Is this really Torch’s alter ego the whole time?
Yes, suspicious. Reasonably coherent start with car safety and Ralph Nader etc. (and an ”innocent” passing mention of caddy rearlights), but then it escalates into booze, cigarettes and obscure glovebox trivia.
Thank you! Glad I’m not the only one.
I was 100% convinced by the first article that “The Bishop” was merely a nom de plume for Torch. Now I’m certain it isn’t, particularly by The Bishops work during Torch’s first convalesce. They share a similar (in)sensibility however.
Also, previous context clues suggest The Bishop lives in Chicagoland, not the Carolinas. However, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen them in a room together, so … ?
I always thought it was kind of a Tyler Durden situation.
“Gorge”? Seriously?! Don’t you mean “gouge”?
Autocorrect
It’s called 10PM, nobody has done a CS for tomorrow yet, and I have to up for a Real Job at six.
As Jason would say… Oy.
I thought he meant “gore” as in “The Matador was gored by the bull.” Or “The innocent bystander was gored by the dagmars of the fleeing Cadillac.”
Or stabbed by Al Gore.
Al Gore gorily gored Gore Vidal?
I though “gore” as is gored by a bull.
Glad I wasn’t the only one. This little stuff drives me nuts, no pun intended.
Although a car gorging itself on human flesh isn’t the worst imagery.
But I imagine “gore” was the intended word.
I think he meant “gore”, like a bull.
This blurred line between drinking and driving continued into the 21st century – I recall Top Gear doing a piece about a Land Rover with a “self-replenishing drinks cabinet.” It was meant for the fox and hound set but the idea was (for a sizeable fee) you had everything you needed for a properly genteel tailgate party, and when a bottle ran dry Land Rover would get you a new one.
The wonder of the shallow drink-holders! My guess was they were primarily to be used while at the drive-in movie theatre. That’s the only time we ever used them.
That Brougham is amazing. Between the magnetic “juice” tumblers and the air-suspension, someone at GM really, really didn’t want their drink spilled while cruising down the turnpike.
You are 100% correct. Those little circular indentions were great for placing your drinks at the drive in movie. As a kid going to the the drive in movies was a big, big deal. Midland TX still had (has?) a huge and popular drive in theater when I worked out there a few years ago.