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.
It’s Time We Stopped Clowning On Convertibles
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More dumbproofing, it seems. More like dumbkeeping. People get smarter when they do something stupid and learn from it.
Could easily have an app warn you of rain. Costs nearly nothing.
That pricing structure is like a math quiz: Windows only is $59 windows and top $69, so $10 to add top to windows, top only is $39 (??) $20 less than windows. Near I can figure is that the circuitry for the window option is more expensive than the top circuitry, so windows and top are disproportionally cheaper
1 switch for the top vs 2 to 4 for the windows
There it is… nice
Because lawyers
(powered-top only, I presume)
You don’t need a powered up top for the rain sensor to work. Just make sure you keep an extra servant locked up in the trunk in case it rains and you need to let them out.
Your Trunk Monkey should be able to handle it
That would be Chim Chim! Spritel could help too!
Ah, chance to share one of my favorite car anecdotes ever…..
Was at BTT50s in the Twin Cities (huge pre-62 meet, no comps, just cars and friends hanging out, 12k+ cars registered not counting everything not on the grounds). We were waiting to meet up with some folks from the HAMB (hot rod message board group) when the skies opened up. People running everywhere for shelter and racing to cover hot rods. Dad and I take shelter in a building next to a guy and his kid. Kid asks why everyone is covering the cars. Guy says it is because the cars are very old and rain can ruin them.
Enter Bob K, a legend in the hot rod community, rolling up in his 52 Chevy, top down, grinning from ear to ear without a care in the world. The car is a legend in its own right, having taken Bob literally across the continent many times over. Guy beside us was shocked as the kid asked “What about that one?” Dad and I just laughed at the perfect timing.
If you have a convertible it’s when it rains with the top down, not if.
i used to put a tarp over driver’s seat with closed roof of 95 miata if rain was expected. then one day after a strong thunderstorm i learned to also leave footwell drain un-plugged.
This is what your chauffeur is for.
I bought this automatic top controller, which really just automates a bunch of features that my 06 Mini Cooper S convertible top can already do –
https://www.outmotoring.com/smarttop-comfort-roof-control-module.html?srsltid=AfmBOorGS3tCz-JQ9i68p5RyLkfPVetxBTmmcNqSG5FTg1V1wFHQ1ZGS
But no rain sensor feature!
If you are interested in interesting convertible tops though, the Mini is the only one I know that has a “sunroof mode”. More convertible tops should have that, IMO.
The VW Eos is a hard top convertible with a functioning sunroof.
For safety reason I’m not sure it’s possible. Like all motorised closing systems you have two options :
my sunroof has an auto-stop sensor, but I still have to hold the button down the whole time to close it.
I’m nearly 100% sure this is the reason. I remember on my Saturn Astra, the car had express down and express up windows in Europe, but the express up was disabled in the US because the anti-pinch sensor didn’t meet US requirements.
I’ll have to look into whether this is the same reason for the Maverick. After driving the Honda Fit as my daily and getting used to its one-touch up and down, it’s a little annoying my decade-newer Maverick only does down.
A lot of Fords have auto up windows including my ’24 Mustang and my ’16 Fusion
In SE TX, where rain showers (sometimes intense) could pop up out of nowhere, especially in the summer, my normal modus oporandi was to put the sunroof in tilt up mode rather than flatly open it up, because most of the water from an unanticipated shower would run down to the front two drains. Both front windows would be open a crack, to allow air to move through the car and not be a kiln when I got to it. A small amount of water could/would end up inside the car, but never enough to do any damage.
We also had an Acura MDX with sensing/automatic wipers and to be honest, it wasn’t ready for the big leagues. What would be the interval wipers “setter” in my Honda, adjusted the sensitivity of the automatic wipers in the Acura. I found myself having to fiddle around with that a lot more in the Acura than the Honda. Such a “first world” problem.
My 2001 Jetta was the first car I had with even interval wipers. And one thing it and the Honda do that is pretty clever is, once you came to a stop at a light or whatever, the interval was doubled. That feature saved a LOT of aggravation.
Even having a “one wipe swipe” available on the wiper stalk was such an advancement over everything I had driven prior to my ’86 Accord. And often times I resort to that.
At freeway speeds on open roads (and not dealing with aerosols coming off of everyone else’s tires) I’m fine with just letting the water make its way up the windshield. Above 60 mph or so, the airflow does a pretty good job of getting water out of the way.
In Austin, I35 was some meteorological anomaly. I have left the house under clear sky on the motorcycle only to get drenched after passing under the 35. Or vice versa work/home/dry/wet, I kept a clean set of clothes at work just in case.
On my 2008 VW R32, I enabled “rain closure” in the programming. If it rained when the windows and/or sunroof was open, it would close them. Sometime in summer I would stop for gas, clean the windshield, then be confused for a few seconds after seeing the windows and sunroof automatically closed!
“Oh shit! My keys are still in there! Stop! STOP!!!”
“Hello, locksmith? Yeah, just put it on my tab….”
VAG-COM trick or was it a stock option?
I know there were some 2000-era BMWs that would automatically do that, but I’m still baffled that the feature is so rare it’s not bragged about constantly. Those of us in the Sun Belt know pretty well how big a difference it can make to leave windows cracked when parking outside.
Heck, the Prius has (or had) a battery-powered interior ventilation system that could run when parked.
It was VCDS enabled option, it was the European programming we didn’t get here. I’m assuming for us dumber and more litigious Americans we didn’t get it.
I’d love one of these that can detect birds nearby and close the top. I have a habit of parking with my convertible top open and last week I came back to my car with a near miss of bird poop that hit my door. A couple inches towards the right and it’d have hit my driver’s seat.
Now I make sure to keep interior wipes in my car just in case.
i typically don’t close my windows in summer in the company lot, and one amazing markscrow got me last year: not a visible speck on approach, nothing to casually see stepping into car, but the inner (outer?) side of the door pull was exceedingly pleasant to grip. after the shock (and copious curses), investigation revealed the bulk of the deposit was in the door cubby and the narrow carpeted gap between the drivers seat and the door frame.
Ooof got lucky there. My bro threw up in my dad’s car from drinking (long story he was under age drinking at my cousin’s wedding) and somehow all of the vomit ended up in the door pocket
Just want to add that adjusted for inflation, that $39.50 price for only the top is equivalent to $467 today.
Convertibles aside, nothing pissed me off more than the first time I had a car with rain-sensing wipers and it didn’t have the logic to roll the windows up and close the sunroof when it was parked and raining. Those two should go hand in hand.
Just like all power seats should have memory presets. These are really cheap additions that go a really long way for customer goodwill.
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.
I believe that while driving, there should be a rain-sensing person installed in at least one of the seats that can both detect rain and possibly operate the top at appropriate road speeds. Maybe an engineer can chime in?
Under normal operating conditions there is a person installed in the drivers seat; rain detection abilities are an optional feature, available with the selection of an intelligence upgrade.
I hear that intelligence upgrade keeps getting harder and harder to come by lately, hopefully somebody can get production back up for that soon
Isn’t that option only by subscription?
The advantage to the in person rain sensor while driving is the ability to make informed decisions. How hard is it raining? How fast am I going? Is it stop and go traffic? Light rain, highway-ish speed, no stops/lights – leave the top down (hint: aerodynamics).
“Because if it happens while driving, I can see a few issues in having my top activating at speed.”
Most convertibles have a sensor that prevents the operation of the roof above a certain velocity.
But did they have said sensor back then, was my question 🙂
Because for a system from the 50’s, I take nothing for granted.
Oh – in the 50’s?
Doubtful.
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.
Powered convertible tops have been a thing since the mid 1930s, the technology was 20 years old by the mid ’50s (retractable hardtops are pretty much equally as old, also)
And the 1969 Mercedes 280SL came with both a powered convertible top and removable hard top.
Nope – No Mercedes-Benz SL had a power soft top until the R129 of 1990.
My mistake. Not finding it, I did find that it could be ordered with just a removable hard top, that also surprises me. Knew hard top was extra, didn’t know you could opt out of convertible.
Yes – the Pagoda could be ordered soft top only, soft top and hard top – or just the hard top with the soft top and it’s compartment completely deleted (this was known as the “California Coupe”)
My late FIL had a 1965 Pagoda (230SL) and that hardtop was a beast…it took two guys with good shoulders to move it, and hopefully not drop it on the paintwork. But on the plus side, that thing could support the weight of the car upside-down, despite the tiny pillars. Pretty nice feat.
An ’82 VW Rabbit Convertible? Jason, did you actually own a bitch basket?
I’ll try to process that.
My wife (then GF) drove it as her daily, but I liked to drive it lots! It was the 90hp Wolfsburg edition witha 5-speed and was a blast. Pretty reliable, too!
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!
It is electric and has a ton of different sensors and motors. When I try to put the top down, the tonneau cover will open, but the top won’t fold itself into the area. At this point everything stops moving, with the tonneau cover stuck open. I then have to use little Allen keys to manually spin the motors (which are hidden very well in the trunk) that move the tonneau cover, and the motors have a *ton* of resistance so it’s a two man job.
There’s no one in the DFW area that wants to touch the thing so one day I’ll have to try and fix it myself, again
I have the same issue with my 350Z convertible. I’m convinced it’s the 5th bow motor (the one in the middle) as that seems to be the common failure mode. Before this summer I’m going to take it out and try to get it rebuilt/replaced.
Course first I may have to fix the actuator I bent trying to force it all down manually…
Hah! I’ve replaced that motor. It didn’t fix anything, though it is the fix for most people it seems. I have also replaced the straps and these two strut things, I forgot the official name for them. Be very careful with forcing anything, there are a ton to sensors and things that can become unhappy when you do that.
I have the dealership service manual for the convertible top, I can email it to you if you want it.
You might be right, just seemed like the best place to start. The top is in pretty rough shape overall, if the easy fix doesn’t work I’ll likely look into replacing it entirely. I’m curious – what else have you tried?
A service manual would be fantastic, thanks! My email is bjh212@gmail.com
The service manual is buried somewhere deep on my home pc’s hard drive, so I’ll email it later.
When I got my Z, the top was falling apart and was partially held together by bathroom caulking. It would go up and down but after i replaced the top, my issues arose. My hypothesis was that the motors were too weak for the new, tight top. I also probably upset some sensor too, so if you do replace your top, be very, very careful.
Besides replacing the 5th bow, elastic straps, and lift supports, i have also tried fixing an issue where the pull down latch and mechanism won’t work. There’s a few different motors inside the tonneau cover that control the latch, and they pull down the convertible top the rest of the way so that the top sits flush with the tonneau cover. I can email you the process that i went through for trying to fix those motors (it is a lot,) but I determined that I should basically just replace the entire tonneau cover with one that has working motors. For now, to seal the gap, I unbolted the latch and masterfully cut a rubber tube that creates a seal.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/KjpbDpYmc9t27wyp6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/opm4xorsHR8HtUh56
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.
I remember, early in my driving years when my dad and I shared his 1989 Saab 900 Convertible. He had the top down when he was driving, and to his credit he DID remember to close it up, but he didn’t remember to “latch” it.
The very next time it’s driven, by me, everything is fine and I didn’t even notice it wasn’t latched, until I hit the mid 60s on the freeway. The sheer noise as it got blown halfway backwards was quite a surprise.
Ouch! That’s painful. Had an ‘86 myself (non-convertible). Sweet ride.
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.
Okay, so mitigate it by having the hazards going for 10 seconds while a voice says “caution: top closing” (or something similar…maybe “pinch hazard”?) alternating in English and Spanish (in the U.S.; presumably the popular languages of whatever area they’re in), then after a 10-second delay it begins to close and the flashing and audible warning doesn’t stop til the top is fully closed?
Feels like you’d have pretty good standing to say “the car warned them to stay away”.
Like JT said, this would seem to be an immensely useful feature. I never leave my car with the windows open precisely because I’d be fucking distraught if this ever happened.
Right but the car warning you to stay away is worse — it explicitly acknowledges that the owner isn’t acting to change the state of the car. Saying “warning, I’m doing something unsafe” doesn’t release you from liability, the opposite is true.
It’s the same reason why any lawyer worth their salt will tell you never to say “sorry” after a car accident. Once you’ve acknowledged that you were aware of the danger or tort, you have to fight the legal case from the back foot.
I get what you’re saying, but I’m a bit confused–if a roller coaster has enough tall fences and huge warnings signs discouraging you from stepping under a roller coaster, at some point the fault is pretty clearly on the person trying too hard to break the rules.
By a similar token, it’s not like we don’t have all kinds of industrial machines that are inherently dangerous–even if we take steps to mitigate that, it doesn’t change that they’re still dangerous.
And finally–I’m sure people still break bones or worse when any car door is slammed on them. Those don’t get an automatic audible warning.
It depends on who is taking the action. If you walk under a roller coaster, you’re clearly at fault. If you slam a car door, you’re clearly at fault.
Similarly, if you slam a car door on someone’s foot, you’re at fault.
Who is at fault when the car closes a door, roof, or window without a human confirming that it is safe to do so?
If I put a hand on someone else’s vehicle, I’m the one touching their personal property. I shouldn’t be doing that regardless.
That’s not how liability works.
If you drown in someone else’s pool, they’re liable even if you were trespassing.
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.
Hey, sometimes you just have to introduce Jumbo to some new female acquaintances at the bus stop
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.
A good downpour should automatically take care of the penis danger. “I was in the pool!” -George Constanza
Shrinkage!
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.