20 long-lost car accessories

The weirdest and wackiest car add-ons

These days we feel cheated if even the cheapest car isn’t equipped with electric windows and air conditioning, but trust us: things are a lot better than they were 30-odd years ago.

Back in the 1980s, if Ford Fiesta Popular owners wanted a passenger sun visor that swivelled they’d have to pay extra for it. In some cars, even headrests were an optional extra.

This sort of thing encouraged owners to add their own extras. Some drivers have always liked to personalise their cars, and we’ve found a selection of the brave, the bold and the bonkers in motoring add-ons down the ages.

1. Folding garage

In 1964, this picture of a small girl using a folding garage to hide her parents’ Standard 8 from the jealous eyes of the neighbours would be seen as cute; now it would be regarded as child exploitation.

The folding garage itself, a concertina car tent ‘available in seven sizes’, was very much from the era when most people didn’t have garages, and there were still plenty of World War II bombsites to park on.

2. Valve car radios

People were experimenting with in-car entertainment in valve radio form by the early 1920s, with sets needing extra batteries and yards of aerial wire, sometimes hidden behind roof linings.

By the 1950s car radios such as this Radiomobile were a bit smaller and often made from wood or Bakelite, and only a few vehicles had them as standard; others were fitted by brave owners or radio dealers.

Aerials, meanwhile, had become exterior chrome wands that school kids loved to snap off cars on their way to school.

3. Transistor car radios

A generation of middle-aged people cursed and stuck their fingers in their ears as hip, happening kids used new-fangled portable transistor radios to blast pubic spaces with rock, and indeed rolls.

Transistors also made car radios lighter and more practical, and push-button station presets meant less knob twiddling for music-loving drivers.

4. Car stickers

In the days before personalised number plates spread like an illiterate rash, people who wanted to demonstrate their wit and cultural sophistication on the road did so by plastering their cars with stickers.

There were little flag-shaped ones that told the world their owners had seen the Lions of Longleat, or some other tourist attraction. And who could forget ‘My other car’s a Porsche?’ Most of us, mercifully.

5. Plastic rear window demister

There was an era when car makers didn’t put little heater elements in the back windows of cars that sometimes didn’t have heaters, so seeing out of them on winter mornings was a trial.

One ‘solution’ was stick-on clear plastic heat pads. They were a fiddle to fit and sort of worked for a bit until elements and connections became permanently detached – at which point this Raydot RiteVue would become the NoVue.

6. Plastic replacement front ends

Forget crumple zones: back in the 1960s, cars such as Minis and Ford Anglias had rust traps, and in a few short years their entire front ends could rot and fall off.

Entrepreneurs saw an opportunity for vehicular plastic surgery, offering one-piece, tip-forward glassfibre fronts for these cars.

By the 1970s a generation of flared-trousered owners were bolting on these things, which as you can see are still being made.

7. Lit cigarette dispenser

We live in an era when passive smoking is frowned upon, but the 1960s was an era of active smoking, and what better accessory for the tobacco-hooked multi-tasking motorist than a machine that dispensed ready-lit cigarettes for puffing on the move?

How many cigarette addicts suffered burnt-finger misery as a result of this contraption isn’t clear.

8. Exterior sun-visors

In the 1950s and '60s American car styling trends were definitely in, with makes like Ford and Vauxhall in particular going for Transatlantic touches from tail fins to whitewall tyres.

Exterior sun visors, bolted over windscreens like an old-school journalist's green eye shades, were also fashionable US-style exports, and these tin or plastic protrusions made things a little shadier as they played aerodynamic havoc with the wind that howled round them.

9. Car record players

By the 1950s some American cars had more standard kit than a bevy of boy scouts. A few even featured car gramophones that played 45rpm singles, which meant turning over these hit-tastic platters every three minutes or so.

The mechanisms that prevented the player needles skipping eventually ground the records to death, but these devices were sold as extras in Europe some way into the 1960s.

10. Car radio telephone

In the early 1960s about the only cellular things people knew about were beehives. Mobile cellular phones were still science fiction for a world where telephones had dials and were plugged into walls.

Still, radio technology had spread to police walkie talkies, and what were known as car radio telephones. Is this chap phoning Vauxhall to ask why his PA Velox is already going rusty, or his barber to complain about that haircut?

11. Car picnic set

Back in an era when cars had wind-down windows and chrome bumpers, ‘going for a drive’ was often an event rather than a chore.

There was less traffic but more breakdowns, and what better way for a family to enjoy the beauty of a roadside layby while their Morris Oxford recovered from a bout of overheating than to have a picnic?

There were plenty of car-friendly picnic hampers, with plastic plates for processed bread sandwiches, and leaky thermos flasks for lukewarm instant coffee. Happy memories were made of this.

12. Eight-track cartridge tape players

By 1972 men with hang glider-sized wing collars, huge moustaches and an unhealthy liking for prog rock knew the best way to fill their Ford Capris and Morris Marina coupés with the 20-minute keyboard solos was to buy a cartridge tape player.

It was the in in-car entertainment device for on-the-move aural gratification. Almost the size of a vintage video cassette, cartridges sounded great until their audio tapes tied themselves in knots and snapped.

13. Radio cassette player

A generation of car burglars and music fans loved the radio/cassette player.

Allegedly easy to fit and – until car security improved – easy to nick and sell in back-street pubs, millions of these letterbox-shaped machines were legally flogged by the likes of Halfords and street-corner car spares shops to young men (mostly) who often blew them up by wiring them wrongly.

Smaller and more reliable than cartridges, the tapes took longer to die, and still have their digital-phobic devotees.

14. Driving gloves

What’s wrong with this picture? The model. The only reason that girl is wearing driving gloves is because she’s been paid to.

To get an accurate picture of the sort of person who actually bought them, a habit that largely died out in the 1970s, think male, over 40, keeps his own silver tankard at the pub, wears a flat hat, sports a Terry-Thomas moustache and needs those gloves because he always drives an MG TD with the roof down.

15. Dunlop Denovo run-flat tyre

In the beige-tinted 1970s when British Leyland made virtually every British car that wasn’t a Ford, Vauxhall or Hillman, Brummie tyre maker Dunlop came up with the clever, life-saving Denovo run-flat tyre and fitted it to the P6 Rover 3500 and the Mini.

This young lady was clearly so excited by the run flat tyre concept that she forgot to put on her trousers.

16. Car vacuum cleaners

In a time before today's assembly-line-like car valeting operations in redundant petrol stations, cleaning the car at the weekend was a British tradition, and the lady with the Rolls-Royce and hefty car Hoover has clearly dressed up for the occasion.

17. Extra dials

Cars like Morris Minors and Minis came from an era when instrument panels used feeble little lights to warn of terminal oil pressure drops and other crisis situations, so owners would buy extra warning gauges and screw rows of them to metal dashboards.

These monitored things like the enfeebled flickering electrical outputs of ailing dynamos and the imminent death of overheated head gaskets. Auxiliary gauge envy was a consequence of a lack of dials.

18. Seat belt

OK so seat belts still exist, obviously, but they do tend to come fitted as standard now. 

It’s strange to think in the 1960s, when car design was advancing quickly, many people were driving around in cars without belts, or just not wearing them even if they were fitted.

Still, there was a big aftermarket for retrofitted fiddly static belts, particularly in rear seats where they were almost unheard of. The lady in the back of this BMC 1100 probably spent ten minutes untangling hers.

19. Electric windows

As with seat belts, electric windows weren't always a given in a car – even a flash one. 

When Lancia made the elegant Flavia coupe in the swinging 1960s it boasted fine road manners, five-speed gearbox and disc brakes, but suave Lancia owners still had to crank open their own windows.

What better way to avoid the indignity of window winding broken nail injuries than fitting some switches and motors to wind them for you? Labour saving and a cocktail party conversation piece.

20. Automatic garage door

This Abigail’s Party-era lady has been driving a Volvo 340, so is probably in need of cheering up. Fortunately, this new-fangled electric garage door will surely lighten her mood.

Mind you she’s also likely to be opening every other electric garage door in the area and diverting aircraft from Heathrow to Gatwick as she does it.