My 1959 Pontiac had the radio with the “wonder bar” on it. Push the bar and it would seek the next station. Neat.
@Bing–I had the “wonder bar” radio in my 1954 Buick. It would go to the next station either by pushing the bar or by pressing a floor button between the clutch and brake pedals. I could change stations without taking my eyes off the road or my hands off the wheel.
“My caddy AM/FM radio actually had scan.”
Was it controlled with a button on the floor? That’s the case with my mom’s Series 62 sedan. I loved that feature.
My first job was a gas station and finding some of those gas caps was a challenge. As I recall, gas was about .35 a gallon and cigarettes .35 a pack. So how old does that make me?
One factory accessory available on the 1949 Nash AirFlyte was an electrically operated gas cap. Press a button on the dashboard and the gas cap flipped open.
I remember there were 45 rpm record players as aftermarket items you could install in your car. I don’t recall seeing one as OEM on a new car, but it’s certainly possible. And yes, it was fairly common in that era for the gas cap to be behind the licence plate. There was a certain advantage to this, as you could reach the gas pump from either side. You could park on either side of the gas pump in other words. I worked as a gas station attendent for a short time in that era, and I had to learn where all the various brands of car’s gas caps were located. It seemed that the car companies enjoyed to hide the gas caps for some reason.
OK I’ll tell the story again. When I was home from college with my 59 VW Bug, my Mom was using it one day. She wanted to put gas in it since it had no guage. Stopped at the station and looked all over for the gas filler but couldn’t find it. My Uncle happened to be there and he figured it out that it was under the hood. So together they opened the hood and there was a six pack of Grain Belt staring them in the face. My Mom was quite embarased but I think my Uncle just chuckled to himself and never said anything about it. I was not 21 yet, far from it. I used to keep the vodka behind the back seat though in a brief case.
"My Uncle happened to be there and he figured it out that it was under the hood."Your uncle knew where the gas cap and your stash were. He just wanted to surprise your mother?
My '58 Pontiac Star Chief had the filler cap behind the left hand backup light bezel. It was beutifully hidden. I would often pull into the gas station for a fillup, and let the gas jocky look for it for a while before showing them where it was. (How’s THAT for dating myself, there were still full service gas stations!)
It also had a “sportabout” radio. It looked like a normal radio, but if, say you were on a picnic, you could pull the body from the dash, and run it on internal batteries.
gotta say I’m liking this trip down memory lane with you guys
One more: car swamp coolers. Image search to see a pic. I never did hear how effective they were.
I had an uncle who bought every gadget that came out.
Quadraphonic 8-track.
B.t.w., the Muntz 4-track was called “stereo pak”.
On my Catalina I installed an FM modulator. Factory AM but now I had FM. Mounted under the dash and sounded like a transistor radio but…I now could listen to KSHE 95, Real Rock Radio in STL. Cool…
Discovered thathExpedition has an AM STEREO radio! We had one AM stereo station.
I remember used car commercial, It has heat, a cordless cigarette lighter and the radio even gets am!
I liked my cars that had the filler behind the license plate. On a couple of them you had to stoop down a little bit, but you could pull up to any pump without having to worry about whether you were parked on the right side to use it. They didn’t fill any differently than cars with the cap on the side.
I think the last car I had with a cap on the back was a 1992 Caprice.
When I was a gas jockey, back in the late '60s, we encountered quite a few cars with the gas filler located behind the rear license plate. Yes, it did enable you to reach the filler from either side of the car, but some of them were so low that they required you to kneel on the ground in order to actually get at the plate and the cap underneath.
It was not unusual to find that the spring that enabled the license plate to spring back to its normal position became very weak after a few years, and I can recall a lot of older GM cars that had their plates in a constant “lying down” position once the spring weakened or broke. That may have resulted in a few tickets for “failure to display license plate”…or something to that effect. And…need I point out that this rear placement of the filler neck was an added safety hazard in the event of a rear-end collision?
In addition to the gas fillers hidden behind the license plate, we got a lot of early Mustangs with a rear center filler cap. The very short lanyard that kept the large decorative cap from being lost was very inconvenient, and sometimes made it difficult to get the cap back on properly. I also recall that these Mustangs had to be filled very slowly, lest you get a reverse flow from the filler neck.
So…if you are guessing that I was not a fan of the rear center-mounted gas caps, you are correct.
However, I was also not a fan of the old VW bug filler, located in the trunk.
Spilling a few drops of gas in the trunk was a sure-fire way to stink-up the cabin of the car.
But–even worse was another foreign sub-compact car, rear-engine car (Renault Dauphine, perhaps?), that I used to encounter sometimes. This particular car–whose make I cannot remember for sure–had its gas filler in the engine compartment, separated from the hot engine by a very small metal partition, but still located above the engine. You better believe that I was extremely careful when filling one of these potential firebombs.
Does anyone else recall whether this ridiculous arrangement was on the Renault Dauphine, or was it another make of foreign car?
I vaguely remember the Dauphine being a horrible car for many reasons.
After alienating tens of thousands of US consumers with the Dauphine, followed by other Renault automotive disasters, I think it was inevitable that they had to leave the US marketplace. Even trying to fool people into buying their cars by having AMC assemble re-badged Renaults was not successful.
Here’s an interesting discussion of the Renaults, and comparison to VW, and why the Beetle succeeded where the Renault failed: