I remember when cars had...

When cars had heater controls driven by cable and you could easily regulate them. Cars that had plastic bags for washer fluid and only held about a quart. When cars had master cylinders that had both front and rear controlled by one sump. Big engines with dual point distributers. Choke plates controlled by exhaust manifold heat. Chasis with many many grease zerks. Automatic transmissions that did not have a Park setting. Bodies that rusted out in five years. No head rests. White parking lights. And 22 gallon gas tanks pretty much standard.
 
A small black metal box under the hood that housed a relay coil that would pull a contact to disconnect the field current of the generator ( not alternator, that was a big black thing that looked a lot like a big long Delco AC compressor of many years later, the car had no air-conditioning ) when the battery voltage got high enough, and when the battery voltage got low enough the spring ( that was adjustable to adjust the voltage the battery charged to ) would pull the contact closed to again provide the exciting current to the generator. My dads DeSota had that setup. And it also had a resistive wire that ran up from the bottom of the fire-wall to the top of the fire wall, in series with the feed to the points, and if you left the key on with the engine not running and the points happened to be closed, a small line of smoke would rise up from the firewall where that resistive wire was located. The first time it happened it scared the heck out of my dad. I was probably about 5 or 6 years old then, but remember it all. At the time I did not know what the black box was, or what a shiny reddish brown coil of wire was, or what a coil was or did, and did not understand why my dad was so upset about the smoke from under the opened hood towards the back of the engine by the windshield, and what that was all about. I remember the details of it happening, and years later found out what those parts were when I was at a local garage and the mechanic was working on a then very old car.
 
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No seat belts. My dads Chevy stationwagon that my dad and mom and there 7 kids and a neighbor kid could all travel in and no one had a seat belt. Mon held the youngest baby, and the second youngest sat between them, 4 kids in the back seat, no third row seat, any kids without a seat sat in the back of the station wagon on the flat surface with the camping gear. 5.5 HP outboard in the trunk, And we had a row boat on the roof, a canoe and a small sail boat on top of the boxed in utility U-Haul trailer that my dad bought and boxed in, and all the kids bikes roped beside the canoe and small sail boat, tents and kitchen tent, and fishing gear and all camping gear and clothes and some food in the trailer, and we all went camping with only one vehicle for 2 weeks. No child seats, no seat belts. And the car had no air-conditioning, and my mother would bring a bag with ice and cold water in a baby bottle, and cold wash-cloths for the youngest if it got too hot. We would lower the back window and open windows to get air to flow through the car to cool off. And we did that many years, always in late August when the lake water had had time to warm up to a temperature that was safe if anyone flipped any of the boats.
 
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Remember when GM had a door key and ignition key? I do
My Grandpa's F250 Ranger Explorer (79/80 I can't remember exactly) had separate door and ignition keys...
also, even though it was an Auto, the gauge in the center right above the wheel was a Tach., speedo was off to either the left or right...
 
I remember standing on the front seat while my Dad drove and hitting the dash pretty hard, then ending up on the floor when he had to brake suddenly...........
 
This is a bit more arcane than most previous posts: Radiator water bags.

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Manual transmission where you had to push down on the shifter to go into reverse.
Always thought that was a really dumb feature.
I thought that was only a VW feature. :unsure:

A Volvo I had, had a ring around the shifter that you'd pull up so you could get into reverse.
Similar idea executed differently on each car.
 
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