‘I NEED ONE OF THOSE’

Car accessories have been around for very nearly as long as cars themselves, although the market for them has shrunk somewhat as cars are increasingly equipped with many so-called ‘toys’ as standard. But to hold your own in any conversation about the more risible examples, you need to have at the very least the following essential knowledge of the best and the worst of the extra bits of frippery that car owners over the years have convinced themselves are vital for proper motoring.

One of the odder early accessories was the ‘Bosco Collapsible Driver’, dating from around 1910 and marketed by one Lemuel Bosco of Akron, Ohio who, enraged after a $5 anti-theft device failed to prevent thieves making off with his car, came up with the idea of a fake inflatable driver to sit in it and frighten them away.

Bosco’s blow-up motorist closely resembled Charlie Chaplin and came equipped with a hat and moustache. Despite claims that the mannequin was ‘so lifelike and terrifying that nobody a foot away can tell it isn’t a real, live man’, the air went out of the inflatable driver business within a couple of years, and history sadly did not record whether anyone nicked one of Bosco’s dummies as well as the car it was guarding.

When cars first got windscreens they came without wipers, so accessory makers were quick to fill the gap with clamped-on, hand-operated wiping devices that worked with levers or cranks. Some enterprising US accessory makers came up with automatic wipers that worked from a vacuum from the car’s carburettor (the thing that mixed fuel and air before fuel injection). The only trouble was that the faster the car went, the less vacuum became available and the slower the wipers went.

During the 1980s, carmakers still sold cars without headrests. It was a case of ‘pay more or risk a nasty case of whiplash.’

Carmakers generally used to be pretty mean about standard equipment and charged extra for items that today are thought of as essentials. Thus 1950s and 1960s buyers of small cars like the Austin A30 and Standard 8 would not get the luxury of a heater unless they paid extra, and when seat belts appeared many carmakers charged more for these as well.

Even in the 1980s the cheese-paring continued. If you bought a limited-edition Fiesta Flight in 1985 and wanted sun visors that swivelled to the side, this cost more than ones that didn’t. And during that decade, carmakers still sold cars without headrests. It was a case of ‘pay more or risk a nasty case of whiplash’.

At least by this stage most cars had heated rear windows, but since many 1960s and 1970s models did not, accessory makers enjoyed a roaring trade with stick-on demisters which, like many accessories, rarely worked properly.

There was a large market in extra gauges for things like Minis and Ford Anglias. These rarely worked either, but many drivers seemed to like having rows of them on the dashboard anyway.

And with many cars having headlamps with the illuminating power of an ailing glow-worm, there was a roaring trade in ‘auxiliary driving lights’ which owners festooned across the fronts of their cars. Drivers imagined that these made their vehicles look like rally cars; in fact, they made them look like road cars with a lot of redundant, under-powered headlights tacked on to their bumpers.

Other reliable sellers included the clear plastic driver and front passenger window-mounted air deflectors, which had absolutely no discernible purpose.

External windscreen visors were another big hit in the 1950s and 1960s. These things both shielded the car’s screen from reflections and ruined its aerodynamics. Weathershield would sell you a steel one that fitted a Ford Zodiac for £3 17s, while KL, a big maker of everything from aftermarket car heaters to seat covers, charged around double that for its visors, which had built-in car radio aerials. Unsurprisingly, they rarely made any difference to radio reception.

In the era before airbags, there was a roaring trade in tiny ‘sports’ steering wheels, which the driver would grasp in a ramrod-straight posture with determinedly straight arms. These were almost as ridiculous as the ‘square’ Quartic steering wheels which came standard on a brand-new Austin Allegro. Oddly enough, Quartics didn’t become highly coveted accessories.

Since few cars had headrests, you could buy ‘clip-on’ ones that fell off if you tried resting your head against them and offered no protection at all in a collision.

Front-seat passengers on more boy-racerish cars would often find themselves squashed into high-backed sports seats which looked a little like giant versions of modern child seats and were designed to strap their occupants in just as firmly and inelegantly.

The 1950s and 1960s were eras when cars suffered from chronic rust, and it was possible to rip rotting wings and bonnets from popular models and replace them with single fibreglass front ends, perhaps with flared wheel arches to cover the ‘Rostyle’ sports wheels that were popular at the time. In fact, plastic wheel-arch ‘eyebrows’ were sold by the shedload by accessory shops and are one of the few accessories that have stood the test of time.

Then there were the much-coveted alloy wheels. A bloke called Keith Ripp can be credited with helping to make these popular. The one-time sausage salesman from Enfield raced Minis, began flogging accessories for them and built a huge business called Ripspeed, selling bits that made all sorts of cars look lower and wider and sound louder. Ripp was also one of the first people to start selling the speakers and amplifiers that allow other motorists to enjoy a boy racer’s taste in music before they hear his engine.

Even though he got out of the car accessory business some time ago, Ripp’s name is still synonymous with the thud of bass speakers and gaudy accessories, as Halfords bought the brand name and began churning out a range of Ripspeed must-haves (which include in-car DVD players).

Bumper stickers displaying varying degrees of witlessness have been popular since the 1960s, from triangular ‘flag’-shaped ones that let the world know that their owner has been to Devon or that they’ve ‘seen the lions at Longleat’ (but not, presumably, that they’ve had a baboon’s bum on their windscreens, shortly before the loveable primate made off with the windscreen wipers).

There was a 1980s vogue for claiming that ‘My other car’s a Porsche,’ although strangely Porsche drivers didn’t feel the need to invest in stickers claiming that ‘My other car’s a Lada.’

For a time, van drivers liked to entertain other road users with stickers that said, ‘Don’t laugh: Your daughter might be in here,’ which was never remotely funny.

This brings us to more recent offerings, including some rather clever ones favoured by older drivers in motorhomes, such as ‘Adventure before dementia’, or silver foxes in convertibles boldly proclaiming: ‘To infirmity and beyond!’

Things that dangle and distract have a long tradition, too. There are air fresheners, chains, phalluses and beads. Nodding dogs, a feature of rear parcel shelves for decades, continue to survive, although who invented them (and why) is not clear. Figurines that drop their trousers are a more recent innovation.

Waving hands with witticisms written on them are long gone, along with waving-hand Prince Charles and Lady Di cut-outs that car owners could stick to the insides of their windows. However, plastic eyelashes for headlamps and soft antlers for car roofs have filled the gap.

The idea of car radios can be traced back as far as 1904, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that these became a practical reality. In fact, 1920 was the year Chevrolet offered an optional Westinghouse radio for $200. This was a valve-operated thing with its own suitcase-sized battery pack and an aerial wire that was so long that it had to be wound into the roof space.

Twelve years later and the technology had matured and shrunk, and American motorists had the choice of around 10 car radios, at more competitive prices. In Europe, Philips in the Netherlands and Blaupunkt in Germany were selling radios for cars, as indeed was Austria’s amusingly named Hornyphon which appeared in 1934, the same year the lowly Hillman Minx became one of the first British cars to be offered with a radio as an optional extra.

Car radios remained power-hungry and were quite bulky things until the late 1950s, when transistors arrived. Soon the likes of Pye were offering transistorised car radios with things like push buttons.

There was even a brief surge of interest in car record players that could play 45 rpm singles. 1960s customers for the Philips Mignon player included Paul McCartney, who had one fitted to his Aston Martin DB6; George Harrison did the same with his E-Type Jaguar and John Lennon is said to have used the one in his Rolls-Royce Phantom limo – the car with the psychedelic paintwork – to play Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ repeatedly.

By the early 1970s, music-loving drivers were getting their acrylic flared trousers in a knot over the eight-track cartridge player, made by long-lost manufacturers like Ross. These things used bulky cassettes but had the potential to fill the spartan interiors of Austin Allegros and Morris Marinas with quadraphonic renditions of Tubular Bells and The Dark Side of the Moon, which would at least have the advantage of helping their occupants to momentarily forget what they were rattling around in. The cartridges’ habit of jamming when the tape got old and grubby, and the arrival of the smaller cassette tape, consigned it to history.

By the 1980s, even the most meanly equipped cars had radios and as the decade progressed these generally sprouted their own cassette players. But there was a huge market in allegedly better players capable of letting the world know that your personal taste in in-car music inclined towards Duran Duran or Haircut 100.

By the new millennium, CD players with lurid, illuminated displays had succeeded cassette players, and a whole subculture, which became known as ‘in-car entertainment’ or ICE, was vigorously promoted by the likes of Keith Ripp.

Some car hi-fi obsessives buy kit purely to make a lot of noise, like American Troy Irving who, in 2003, equipped a Dodge Caravan people carrier with 72 amplifiers, 36 16-volt batteries and nine 15-inch speakers designed to blast out a single frequency from 130,000 watts of power. The idea was to create more wide-spectrum noise than a jumbo jet taking off. Apparently it succeeded, although worrying reports emerged that Troy’s brain had turned to tofu in the process.