Top 10 _ Best Features of Classic Cars - What We Miss Most

Well , if you're a fan of the channel , you know that we hear rare classic cars enjoy vintage vehicles of yes year particularly those that you don't typically see at car shows today including vintage full size and intermediate cars that sometimes aren't of the particular sporting type , but certainly drive well and are good to look at in this video .

We're going to talk about 10 features that classic cars have that modern cars really don't .

And what makes these features so great on the classic cars and why a number of us miss them .

Let's begin with .

Number 10 , hidden headlights , hidden headlights really came into vogue in the late 19 sixties as various cars from the GM Ford and Chrysler Stables offered them or had them as standard equipment across the lineup .

More specifically for G M .

There were the Cadillac Eldorado , the Buick Riviera , the tornado and even the Chevrolet Caprice and Impala had hidden headlights as standard equipment or as optional equipment over at Ford for various years .

The Ford L T D mercury marquee Lincoln Continental and the Continental Mark series had hidden headlights as well .

And at Chrysler , a number of the fuselage er , cars had hidden headlights including the Dodge , Monaco and Plymouth Fury .

The hidden headlights were activated by various mechanisms , either vacuum or electric Ford tended to use vacuum more often than not .

Whereas Chrysler and GM sometimes employed electric motors to activate their hidden headlights .

And in any case , they gave the cars a really cool and sleek look .

Unfortunately due to reliability problems as well as cost and other factors , hidden headlights really started to go away in the late 19 seventies , aside from some specialty vehicles like on Firebirds and Corvettes , and they never have really returned in recent years .

Let's move on to number nine and that is usable trunk space in a passenger car until the 19 nineties , many passenger cars had plenty of trunk volume to accommodate significant amounts of cargo .

But the cars of the 19 sixties and seventies really had some of the largest trunks of the era , they were extremely spacious and could accommodate everything from golf bags to grocery bags to suitcases to well dead bodies and other things .

But this is something that really lost out over the years , particularly as cars had raising belt lines , steeply raked rear roof lines that intruded upon the overall passenger compartment as well as the trunk volume .

The diminishing trunk sizes over the years coupled with increasingly bulky gear for Children has likely contributed to the shift from passenger cars to S U V s that continues to this day .

It's a bit sad because there really aren't many passenger cars with overly large trunks anymore .

And many people who want to carry cargo simply get a pick up or a large sport utility .

Whereas back in the day , a car was basically a sport utility vehicle and had plenty of room inside and in the trunk for family vacation trips and even towing capacity to haul trailers .

Let's move on to number eight .

And that is something that is sorely lacking in cars today and that is outward visibility .

Well , many people say classic cars aren't safe because they don't have airbags or the brakes aren't as good as modern vehicles .

And some of this is true .

The one thing that many classic cars do have is excellent outward visibility owing to panoramic roofs , toothpick , thin A pillars .

In some cases , the lack of A B pillar , but regardless , one generally doesn't need a blind spot monitoring system to discern whether or not there's a car in the next lane , this outward sightlines and visibility and old vehicles I think is one of the most prominent safety features that they did have .

And that is that you can actually see around you and see the road .

Modern vehicles have to meet a number of well intended safety standards , including rollover standards that contribute to significantly chunky pillars and in some cases , the kind of gun slip greenhouse that you see on a number of vehicles .

This wasn't the case on classic vehicles and many of them consequently have wrap around windshields and other elements enable a driver to see around them .

And to me , this is a prime safety feature that you use all the time when you're driving , not having to rely on some computer assisted technology to figure out if you can change lanes or not .

Let's move on to number seven .

And that is well padded seats .

One of the things that is particularly irksome about today's vehicles is that it's hard to find a vehicle with comfortable seats and it's hard to understand why exactly this happens .

Well , the truth of the matter is that it now costs so much to validate seat frames for use in cars .

Many car companies employ the same seat frame across their entire line up .

So it has to fit everything from a small compact car to a large SUV and consequently , the overall comfort of the seat isn't great .

And nor is it the priority for engineers .

This is very different from what the priority was back .

In particular , in the 19 seventies is passenger seats became increasingly squishy and comfortable and some say , oh , they don't have a lot of side or lateral support , but who really cares who's flying around a corner in a large family sedan .

Really the overarching rule for designing seats for a family sedan should be comfort and very few cars unfortunately focus on that today .

But it was a focus back in the day as exemplified by a number of optional trim packages that gave even more comfortable seats over base models because it was such a key emphasis for customers and a great selling feature .

Let's move on to number six .

And that is interior colors .

Today's modern car interiors are really just a sea of gray and black plastic and something that is just extremely boring .

Even if the interior themes are quite attractive .

Back in the day , you could get so many different interior colors and it wasn't just the seats that changed color or the carpet , it was the seats , the carpet , the dash , the headliner everything .

Now , even if you select a different color interior , often the headliner color is the same something that A MC did back in the day , including on my 1971 A MC ambassador where the headliner was the same color no matter what interior you got , but many vehicles did not do that .

And I think something has been lost over the years and not being able to select from multiple interior colors and to have the interior color really be displayed on every element of the interior .

This is something that really just went by the wayside as a result of cost and complexity reduction opportunities and unfortunately is unlikely to return in the future .

Let's move on to number five and that is hard tops back in the fifties , sixties and part way through the seventies , you could get cars with no middle pillar , so called B pillar .

And this made the vehicles known as hard tops .

You could find hard tops in four door form like my 1974 Mercury Marquis Brome or two door form Ford .

In some cases called their cars with a pillar pillared hardtops because the door didn't have a frame at the top of it that the glass ran up and down in .

But these really weren't hard tops .

In any case , the true four and two door hard tops provide a driving experience .

Unlike what is offered today where if you lower windows , you often hear a significant amount of wind buffeting and your vision to the side is obscured by a chunky B pillar in the middle .

There's nothing better to my mind than driving around in a four door hardtop .

I actually prefer the four door hardtop body styles to many of the two doors because they have such an open and airy feel about when you lower the glass on the body sides and there's nothing like driving them around on a wonderful spring fall or somewhat cooler summer day , just windows down , having the air breeze through the cabin and taking in the external sights and sounds .

There are still some hardtops available today , but they're on higher end cars and they're extremely expensive because it's hard to engineer these vehicles for roof crush as well as crash standards .

But this was less of a consideration back in the day when these classics were made , let's move on to number four and that's serviceability .

Many of today's cars require highly complicated and expensive electronic equipment in order to even figure out what is happening with the cars and even more expensive equipment to fix them , including specialty tools and wrenches .

Well , back in the day when classic cars were made , many of them were made to be serviced not only by the mechanics of the dealership , but this also enabled one to service them at home relatively easily .

Although a number of jobs did prove still challenging even back in the day .

But one thing's for sure , the service ability of these classics is almost always much easier than modern day vehicles .

And it's something that endeared them to the hearts of many different buyers because they formed a relationship with their vehicle as they learned how to do their own oil changes and maintenance themselves and kept up their car to their own standards and did so efficiently .

At number three , we have something that is really gone today and that is soft and compliant rides back in the day , many full size vehicles in particular had compliant and soft rides .

And interestingly , the rides on these vehicles were better engineered for the roads of today than the roads of yesteryear , especially with all the potholes , we have the 15 inch wheels or in some cases 14 inch or even 13 inch wheels , couple with wide tire side walls , as well as compliance suspensions made for very comfortable cruising .

Something that just isn't a prime engineering consideration today .

At least , seemingly not one , as many cars are designed more for handling prowess than for ride and comfort .

And even when a modern car is supposedly engineered for ride , it really just doesn't seem all that good , particularly compared to these classics .

Not quite sure if it's the thin tire side walls or the suspension geometry or the shorter wheel bases .

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Than many of the modern vehicles .

If you've driven a well tuned classic from any of the big three from the 19 sixties or seventies and then you go in and drive something modern .

You will definitely note the difference in throttle response .

In particular , the old vehicles has significantly better throttle response than the new cars .

In many cases , albeit they're not as fast , but they sure feel faster just given the everyday driving torque that one is able to take advantage of because of these big block engines with great torque curves .

And while the electric power trains will enable customers to experience ultra smooth power trains with high levels of torque right from the get go .

Something about driving a classic with a very muted V eight burble with extremely responsive torque is something that really just puts a smile on my face and probably the face of many of the listeners of this channel .

Let's move on to number one .

The one thing that I believe is missing in many new cars that old vehicles have and that is great styling .

Now there are some attractive new cars .

But I think part of what's happening today is that designers have to design for so many different safety standards , roof crush , pedestrian impact standards , side impact standards as well as make the cars aerodynamic to improve their fuel efficiency that it really sets the overall mentions of the car and they're kind of shrink wrapping , sheet metal over a set of many predefined points .

This was true back in the day to some degree when designers had to accommodate certain wheel bases and overall lengths and packaging dimensions .

But there are more constraints on designers today than there were back in the era .

And consequently , I think that's one reason why vehicle styling just isn't quite the same .

And another is arguably that design talent really is now international and design fads and patterns travel across the world so rapidly that they almost become homogeneous .

Whereas in prior years , there were very distinct aesthetics for German cars versus Japanese cars versus American cars .

And that's something that I definitely miss is the style and that classic vehicles had that modern vehicles which generally resemble angry kitchen appliances , particularly if you're driving a crossover , just can't hold a candle to .

In any case .

I hope you enjoyed this video on some excellent features of classic cars .

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Thanks again for watching .