We now have positive proof of 4 major forest fires in North America having been started by a still burning cigarette being thrown out of a car window. Nearly all vehicle have carpets and no smoker is going to stomp his cigarette out on the floor of the vehicle.
I don’t smoke but some of my passengers do and and I have kept the removable ashtray in my Toyota for them.
I can’t stand smokers who toss their butts out the window…even an old soda can makes a better ashtray than the ground does…
Smokers still tossed their butts out the window when cars had ash trays. They didn’t want to clean out the ash trays. In my experience, smokers by and large tend to think it’s perfectly OK to litter as long as it’s a used cigarette.
I totally did. Hey, I was a young punk, so that’s definitely not the worst thing I did. I didn’t want the smell in my car (don’t smoke in the car then, right, but apparently that wasn’t an option to my younger self’s brain). But, windows all rolled down and keep no butts inside generates a lot less lingering smell than smoking with the AC on and keeping a pile of ashes and butts in the ash tray. I eventually graduated to not smoking in the car at all when I got a new vehicle. Smoke free for a couple of decades now, thankfully.
Isn’t up to the smoker to place an ash tray in the vehicle?
Houses don’t come with ash trays either, smoker have to buy them.
Those people would not ride in our vehicles .
Well, you do have to place a lighter in the vehicle. I don’t think they come with those either anymore.
OP, get some of those coffee mug looking ash tray deals that fit in the cup holder. Or buy those folks some nicotine gum lol.
At least one I’ve found also has a built in lighter.
Didn’t know any still had lighters, but I haven’t looked for a lighter in one either. I assumed they were all USB ports and 12 volt receptacles now, like my wife’s 2013 Toyota. And cup holders…enough cup holders to store enough drinks to get a crew of pirates drunk.
Yup!
Back in "The Good Old Days’'–when every car had multiple ash trays–it was fairly typical to see mounds of cigarette butts as certain intersections. Apparently a red light meant “toss that butt out the window”, in addition to “stop”.
I don’t see many discarded cigarette butts anywhere nowadays, and I haven’t seen a pile of them at an intersection for many years.
I would bet that’s less because smokers have suddenly started littering less, and more because the number of people smoking in the first place has fallen sharply over the years. Smoking rates are below 15 percent these days. Used to be a lot closer to half the adult population.
a lot of smokers switched to vaping. like me. now I just have to quit that.
but at least I dont smell like smoke anymore. I cant stand the smell since I switched.
… if not more…
If you watch movies from the '40s, '50s, '60s, and the '70s, almost everyone was smoking… constantly.
If you watch Bogart’s performance in Dark Passage (1947), after he emerges from plastic surgery, the first “vital” information that the surgeon gives him is how to smoke. After that, the surgeon spoke of lesser concerns such as eating, drinking, and shaving.
The bottom line is that the bulk of the public was completely addicted to nicotine in those days, and it was considered to be… normal.
I remember when I started my career as a college faculty member in the fall of 1965. I think over 80% of my colleagues were smokers. By the mid 1980s, the buildings were all smoke free.
My parents weren’t smokers, but the 1939 Chevrolet my dad owned had a cigarette lighter and ashtrays. I remember riding in a 1950 Nash Ambassador Custom. In the arm rests for the rear seat, there were built in ashtrays and cigarette lighters.
Yup!
I began my undergraduate studies in 1965, and smoking was permitted in college classrooms. This was also the era of random bomb threats. I clearly recall a courier arriving in a Psych class, which was taught by an older lady sporting a Gibson Girl hairdo.
The courier handed the professor a memo, which she had to initial. She–like some of the students–was smoking at the time. She opened her handbag, extracted a pen to sign a memo regarding a possible bomb threat on campus, and then proceeded to put her pen in her mouth, and her lit ciggie was placed into her handbag.
Within a minute or two, smoke began to spew out of her handbag, and nobody said anything for…
a while.
Good times!
Part of the reason for that is that the entertainment industry made a lot of money pitching cigarettes, both in commercials and in the show itself.
I have some old recordings of Abbott and Costello, The Aldrich Family, etc. And all of the ads on them are for Camel cigarettes (good for the T-zone! T for taste, T for throat, more doctors choose Camel!)
I actually kinda miss ash trays in cars, though. They were a good place to keep a garage door opener. 
I remember flying out of an Albuquerque airport on a govt chartered plane when I used to fight wildfires. This was probably 2002 or so. The fact that the plane had ashtrays in the seat backs or armrests (can’t recall for certain now) concerned me a little. Just how cheap was that bid and just how old is this plane?
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez pimped Phillip Morris ciggies on the highest rated TV show of the mid-fifties:
I keep my garage door opener in the “sunglasses” holder in my Outback.
Planes are valuable, worth keeping running. Your likely plane was a C-130, introduced in 1956, still a workhorse in civilian and military fleets with its 4 engines and low stall speed. Machinists can make new parts - it doesn’t need a parts supplier.
The B-52 is still our principal bomber; it was introduced in 1955.
Since we’re bringing those up:
