More great optional extras & car accessories.
<--- Car accessories - part 1
Upgrading the interior of a 1950s, 1960s or 1970s car.
In addition to the creature comforts touched on earlier, there were other tantalising accessories that were essential fitments to the gadget king or queen of the 50s and 60s. If your seats didn't come with head rests as standard, you could buy clip-on things that, they later found out, in an accident may well break your neck. Lumbar support was an alien concept to many seat designers in the days of black & white TV and polka dot bikinis, and if your Rootes or BMC car was a pain in the back on long journeys, you could aways invest in a KL back rest, which was a curved springy thing that you could tie to the back of your seat, to improve one's posture while hauling the wheel. Should leather or vinyl seating be too chilly for Sir's backside during the winter months, a sumptuous choice of furry seat covers could be specified, either plain or in a tasteful leopard-skin design. Those will a real eye for glamour could also specify a matching furry steering wheel cover, to really impress the neighbours and remind them of your eye for tasteful living.
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Once again the performance-minded automobiliste wasn't forgotten when it came to interiors either. So long as your pockets were deep enough, you could really go to town with the passenger compartment of your personalised car. Out went the dismal factory seats, to be replaced by comfy but awkward bucket seats, with black and white chequer effect to the centre sections. No need for a huge skinny steering wheel either, when companies such as Astrali or Les Leston could furnish you with a tasty chunky leather or wood rimmed wheel for the ultimate boy-racer appeal.
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One of the most popular aftermarket add-ons, beloved of souped-up car drivers in the 50s, 60s and beyond, was of course the auxiliary dashboard gauge. If knowing approximately how much fuel you had in the tank was not enough information, why not cut some holes in the dash and fit gauges to monitor your engine RPM, oil temperature and pressure, battery condition and, really importantly, a Redex gauge to monitor how effectively you were burning up the 4 star.
Gauges were available from Smiths, VDO, Speedwell and others to keep you informed of your engine's health, and was all essential equipment to the lead-foot driver.
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Personalising & customising cars
Alloy wheels have already had a mention, and could be fitted by even the most dim-witted of press-on pilot, so long as they remembered to use the correct nuts for their wheels that is. Fog and spot lamps could easily be fitted to chromium plated badge bars, or just holes drilled into the bodywork, although actually wiring them up to work would require an ounce or two of electrical nouse, which was not always a given. It would be the 1970s and 1980s when some of the worst body styling offerings were made available to the normal motorist. Nightmare-ish memories of cars clad with rivetted-on body kits, black rear window louvres (any Capri owners reading?), bodywork dripping with DIY coachlining tape, and stick-on tinted window film still haunt me even now, but were just a glimpse into the future for the 50s and 60s motorist. Things perhaps started going really downhill in the early 70s, when a product became available that could be fitted on any car. "Give your car the hairy look" was the slogan for the adverts in 70s motoring mags, and I seem to remember a full page colour ad of a car (maybe a Renault 16?) given the all-over hairy look. I probably still have the magazine somewhere, and I'd really like to see that ad again sometime, if only to shudder once again at the hideous-ness of it all. In comparison, Paddy Hopkirk roof racks and fire extinguishers were a whole lot easier to stomach.
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Devaluing your car in one easy stroke.
Fitting an accessory properly to a car may have increased its desirability, and perhaps upped its re-sale value if you were lucky. However it was just as
easy to decimate the value of your car, thanks to ill-chosen or ill-fitted accessory choices. The aforementioned hairy look, and pop-rivet body styling kits, were just two excellent ways to kill the value of a car that spring to mind. Lurid, or custom paint finishes, and excess use of once-fashionable stick on reflective tape, could also make the selling of toffee apples to denture wearers seem like a doddle by comparison.
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Going back to bodykits and after-market spoilers for a minute, perhaps it wasn't so much a problem with the basic product, but more to do with how competent the person actually fitting the parts was. Sales brochures would tempt the owner-modifier with glitzy photographs of denim-clad beautiful ladies and side-burned, flare-wearing, blokes with their uprated Mk2 Escort or Hillman Avengers, casually parked in the paddock at some international race meeting, drawing on an extra-long Rothmans Full Tar for added glamour. The reality of Joe Bloggs, chewing on a roll-up with a tub of Isopon to hand, replicating this dreamy image, was usually just a pipe dream. The roads of the 1970s and 1980s were regularly treated to the delights of Ford Cortinas and Capris, fitted with misaligned body styling kits and air dams, seamlessly (or not) blended in to the factory bodywork with enough polyfilla to re-render the Taj Mahal or the local cinema. Re-painting the car once the bodykit had been fitted was not a consideration for many backyard styling gurus, and many cars would go to the crusher still wearing a white, filler-encrusted, set of side skirts nailed on to their factory-coloured flanks.
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Of course tuning and accessorising cars is still a popular pastime. People still personalise and uprate their cars as much as ever, although many accessories, certainly of the tuning kind, are little more than 'plug in and play' upgrades, rather than oily conversions that require a bit of mechanically savvy to implement. Whereas once it was Minis with big wheels, and Mk1 Escorts with Mexico arches that dominated the dreams of teenage drivers, now it is Saxos with thumping sound systems, and Corsas with back boxes the size of a dustbin.
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