Forgotten car features now in the car graveyard

Time marches on and trends, features and products that were once popular can become a long-distant memory. So, just in time for the spooky season, let’s take a look at some of the car crazes, functional features and motoring behaviours that were once commonplace, but which have now found themselves in the car graveyard. 

Headlight eyelashes 

There’s nothing wrong with customising your car but some motorists go as far as to anthropomorphise their vehicles. Placing eyelashes over headlamps was once a reasonably common trend that has now fallen out of favour. It’s now a fairly rare sight to see a vehicle batting its eyelashes at us – and for that, we are probably relieved. 

Ashtrays have gone up in smoke 

With the world now switching out cigarettes for vapes, ashtrays and internal lighters are now long-forgotten car features that serve little purpose these days. In recent times, we’ve all become increasingly more aware of the health hazard that smoking presents, and have seen active attempts in the media to discourage it. This has led many manufacturers now to not even include ashtrays and cigarette lighters in the final designs. 

Motorised car aerials

Otherwise known as power antennas, motorised car aerials were considered an advancement on manually retractable car aerials. However, even the motorised version has now become out of date, being replaced on newer cars with sleeker shark-fin aerials or even hidden, internal antennas. 

Separate keys for ignition and unlocking 

It wasn’t out of the ordinary for older cars to arrive with one key for unlocking the doors, and another for starting up the ignition. As technology has advanced, these two keys are now often built into one for convenience, or have been replaced by fobs to unlock doors and push buttons to start the engine. 

Hiding a key on your car 

For convenience, a fair few motorised have dabbled with hiding a spare key on their car. Common hiding spots included behind licence plates, inside tyre wells or placed in the bumper. Though, with a worldwide awareness of security growing, you don’t hear of too many people hiding their keys on their cars these days, as it’s somewhat akin to hiding a spare house key under a plant pot. Simply put, it’s just not worth the risk. 

Anti-static straps 

Anyone remember getting an unpleasant electric shock when opening the car door? To sidestep this problem, anti-static straps were created and sold to vehicle owners. These ‘grounding’ devices looked like little plastic strips hanging from a car which trailed to touch the ground. Some even had reflective material on them for safety. They seem to have become less common in recent years, though. 

Tax disc holders

No doubt we all remember the little plastic tax disc holders that sat in the corner of our windscreens. They were a staple of all vehicles, acting as a way to fulfil the legal requirement of displaying your disc in the car window. However, in 2014 this requirement was scrapped, which has seen tax discs and their holders disappear from UK roads in favour of electronic lookup instead. 

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Here at Mr Tyre, we remember almost everything that’s gone into the car graveyard, and that’s because we’ve been serving customers in Central England since 1971. As a leading chain of autocentres for the region, we provide professional tyre fitting, diagnostics, MOTs and much more. Get in touch with our team today.