I’m not going to lie to you: it’s not always easy thinking of what I want to write about. Well, really, I should clarify that: it’s not always easy thinking of what I want to write about in the amount of time I have available before I have to publish it on the site. This is one of those times. Luckily, I have a plan! A plan that uses the troubling magic of hoarding!
Yes, I have way too much automotive crap around, but some of that crap are old car magazines, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can grab one of those those magazines and open it to a random page, and the powerful and elusive gods of Interesting Car Stuff will smile their chrome smiles upon you and reveal something of genuine interest.
That’s how I stumbled upon this ad from a November 1952 issue of Motor Trend:
Hey! I’d love to stop being a “weather-worrier” as the ad suggests, because that sounds freaking miserable. Reading on, you can see what the whole point of this ad for the AUTO-UP is all about: it’s a rain-sensing system that will automatically close the roof of your parked (powered-top only, I presume) convertible if it gets caught in the rain.
What a fantastic idea! I used to have a convertible myself – an ’82 VW Rabbit Convertible – and I almost never put the top up. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and I think it did get caught in the rain a couple times, which was a massive ass-pain, and a system like this would have been incredible. Of course, it was a manual top, so that would have to be addressed too, but still.
This fundamental concept wasn’t unheard of, and I don’t think the makers of AUTO-UP, which could be the R.H. Philbrick mentioned in the ad, came up with the idea. I’ve only found one other reference to R.H. Philbrick that seems plausible (another R.Philbrick was the author of Freak the Mighty, which my son had to read last year in school; I read a lot of it with him. It’s not bad!) is this patent for a Life Preserver Storage Unit and Seat for Motor Boats. I have a feeling that’s the same guy.
I think the best-known application of this idea was on the GM concept car XP-300, known as the LeSabre, which featured
“A rain sensor was connected to the car’s convertible top; when it sensed rain, the top and windows were automatically raised to keep the occupants dry.”
This is just a video of the automatic top raising process of the LeSabre; you can imagine the rain.
The rain-sensing/top-raising system seems to have been an option for Chevrolet Bel Air convertibles from around 1955 to at least 1957 or so; you can see the little gridded rain sensor here on this ’57 Bel Air convertible that was sold through Mecum Auctions:
I’m not exactly sure how that sort of old-school rain sensor works, but if I had to guess, I’d suspect that a conductive droplet of water on that grid would close a circuit, much like how a rubber-dome-type key switch works, where a conductive pad closes contacts on a conductive grid:
Now, I’m not positive that’s how those rain sensors worked, but it’s my theory. Interestingly, modern rain sensors, the kind used for automatic wipers, are actually optical in nature, where they measure the diffraction of infrared light, which will differ when shining through glass than through water. Here, like a gym teacher, I’ll just ask you to watch a video explaining it so I don’t have to:
Pretty cool, right?
These modern rain sensors are quite good, which begs the question: why don’t modern cars offer this feature? By this feature, I mean putting up the top when the car is parked. Plenty of modern convertibles have powered tops, and while I realize that nearly all of them require some sort of physical handle-latching on the inside to fully close, just getting the top 99% closed and all the windows up would be vastly better than the whole car interior getting soaked in a rainstorm.
It seems like it would be so easy to implement, too! Is there some downside I’m not seeing? The car could check for sufficient battery power before doing it, so I don’t think fear of depleting a marginal battery should be an issue. Convertibles should offer this again!
Are there any modern convertibles that do? So far, I haven’t found any, but I could be missing one. I mean, it appears even a Rolls-Royce convertible doesn’t offer this feature, at least according to this video evidence:
Maybe that’s the entry-level DX Rolls that doesn’t have all the features and has black plastic bumpers and a big blanking plate over where the radio should be, but I doubt it. And if a newish Rolls doesn’t have this feature, what are the chances anything else does?
Convertibles need this. I’m baffled why this didn’t catch on.
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So wait, when does this work ? When the car is parked with the top down ?
Or while driving ?
Because if it happens while driving, I can see a few issues in having my top activating at speed.
Btw, in the nice and forgotten 1953 movie Johny Dark (Tony Curtis racing for Fielding motors, blah blah) – the lady designer assigned to his car had a similar sensor in the blueprints. Between the two seats. Along with plenty of other comfort amenities, whereas Tony Curtis was looking for a car to race with and cared little about ashtrays and luxuries. Cute movie.
That’s hilarious, I laughed out loud. Also yeah, that’s cool!
Regarding the 1952 product, I’m mainly sitting here amazed that there were powered convertible roofs in the 50s! I thought that was a totally modern feature. That must have seemed like magic back then!
The only aged convertible I’ve really been around is the 1969 Mercedes 280SL my dad had for a little while when I was in high school. Not only was that roof not powered, it was so incredibly not powered that you had to take the entire roof and back window off, and leave them at home! My dad built a pulley system in our garage to lift it up and hold it in place. Looking back, I sadly didn’t appreciate that as much as a teenager, as I would/do now.
An ’82 VW Rabbit Convertible? Jason, did you actually own a bitch basket?
I’ll try to process that.
My car does this, 1934 Bently, It gets annoying.No it its not a convertible it just pretends it is (its a stupid thing) It has rain sensors, they are not connected, see all the posts around not slicing finger stuff,
I never have to worry about rain, since my 350z roadster’s convertible top doesn’t work. Its like having a coupe but with all the drawbacks of a roadster!
(if anyone knows the black magic of the z’s automatic top, please reach out)
I assume it’s electric, so you can’t drain the hydraulic fluid and manually work it (like I did on a former girlfriend’s VW Cabrio), but it doesn’t even have a cutout for the system as a whole – that sucks!
gym teachers are just enjoying a torch article when, wham!
Did this system have some kind of an ignition disconnect? Be awful inconvenient if you were driving top down and a rain shower popped up and your roof began to raise while you’re tooling down Route 66. To quote Popeye, “Well, blow me down.” Instant roadster.
That was my first thought, too.
When that Rolls owner parked it was probably a glorious sunny day with no rain in sight. I’m betting they were a visitor to Melbourne (the weather here is, shall we say, rapidly changeable).
Well, you’re clearly not a Personal Injury Attorney. The problem with these systems is liability. It’s just not worth cutting peoples fingers and penises and such off for the feature to be viable.
Exactly. There’s a reason that we can’t close our windows with the key fob even though it’s a feature on basically every VW and BMW group product in Europe. And yet we can close windows with the key in the lock cylinder on a bunch of cars.
Pressing a button with physical presence means the user rather than the manufacturer is liable in an accident.
It would take a man with predilections stranger than those of a clergyman to end up in a situation where his penis could be cut off by a automatically closing convertible top.
Perhaps I would make your average priest blush with my adventures (kidding, I’m an insurance agent after all), but it would involve certain fluids flying around after an abrupt pull out on a warm summer evening while parked at Lovers Leap being mistaken by the system as rain.
Golden showers might also be risky.
Yup. In Europe, Mercedes will close your windows if it rains automatically – not sure if that also applies to convertible tops. But here in the States? Nuh-uh.
I believe it was the ’59 Eldorado Biarritz that featured a rain sensor on the rear deck of the car.
Most every car has rain sensors for wipers nowadays – It would not be a stretch to use that sensor to put the roof up in a parked convertible or close the sunroof of any other vehicle.
As someone who has left his sunroof open, and later my roof down, and been caught running out to close the roof in the rain – it’s a no-brainer.