Top 10 Strangest Automotive Inventions (from GM, Ford, & Chrysler) - Which is Your Favorite?

while today's Vehicles certainly have a lot of technology in them there's often few features that you can really show off to your friends or ones that are overly quirky most cars today just have that solidified black lava interior that's relatively drab and some oversized iPad looking thing is a touchcreen on the interior and because everybody drives a crossover mostly these days or a pickup a lot of the vehicles just simply look the same because you can't do too much with the proportions and overall styling as compared to the more typical vehicles of yester year where you had a bit more ability to provide interesting surfacing as well as styling in this video we're going to explore the top 10 inventions of vintage vehicles and this is obviously a subjective list and if you feel that I've missed something which I probably have because it's hard to construct the top 10 list put it in the comment section but these are at least some of my favorite cool wacky inventions that were installed on cars and certainly some of the most memorable in my mind let's start out with number 10 and that is these Paisley or mod tops that were put on a number of vehicles in late 60s and early 1970s now these tops I don't know who came up with the idea or thought that this was a good idea but they seem to be most prevalent on Chrysler Corporation cars during that time period and here you can see an ad for the 1969 Barracuda and Chrysler calls it a pop print or a mod top I don't know I just kind of call this one a floral pattern but there was also paisley patterns and different strange designs that in particular Chrysler put on their vehicles in the late 60s and early 1970s witness this particular Paisley like pattern on a Plymouth Fury Grand Coupe and boy is that ever funky I don't know if I could drive around in a car that had a top like this but for whatever reason somebody at Chrysler thought hm let's just put this pattern on tops so that as the previous ad said you can wear basically your car now perhaps the strangest application of one of these mod tops or Paisley tops was one that was completely unintentional and that found itself only on 1971 Imperials where a buyer had selected the burgundy vinyl roof you can see here that the roof has this Floral Pattern to it but this was not how the vehicle started its life what happened was that after a number of car washes and time in the sunlight what was once an apparently burgundy and solid colored top with no Floral Pattern devolved into what you see here it was a defect in the material some speculated that Chrysler had some old final material that was laying around and dyed it burgundy to try to offer that burgundy top option and then after car washes and some sunlight exposure it faded to this particular well awful vinyl roof and Chrysler ended up recalling all of these and installing new vinyl roofs for their owners in a different color because they didn't offer a replacement burgundy vinyl so while the overall I'll say inspiration for the tops was kind of cool and funky I I think the most humorous application of one of these mod tops or floral print tops was actually this unintentional one that found its way onto the 1971 Imperial at least after you own the car for a brief bit let's move on to number nine and at number nine we have GM's manual clamshell tailgate for the 1971 to 76 model years in 1971 general motor fullsize cars were all new and that also meant that the wagons were all new in 1971 and for that particular year GM introduced a novel design the so-called clamshell tailgate that you see here although this is not a 1971 vehicle that's pictured in any case the upper portion there the glass actually retracts into the roof and then the tailgate would drop underneath the bumper revealing a completely flat load floor it seemed at first like it was a better idea versus Ford's dual action tailgate for instance where you could either swing the door out which required a lot of room behind the vehicle or drop it down like a tailgate frankly that probably was a better solution from Ford but any GM was trying to do something different and they thought this clamshell was more Innovative because you really didn't have to worry about needing space to swing that door open in tailgate form or dropping it down you could just raise the glass and lower the lower portion of the tailgate and everything was out of the way now one of the things that's super cool and kind of quirky about these clamshell tail Gates is that most people know that they had the power operated glass so no matter what clamshell wagon you had the glass was always power operated as it would retract into the roof but a little known tidbit that most people don't know is that you could get both a manual tailgate as well as a power tailgate on these clamshell wagons had to pay extra for the power on most of them and here's how you can tell which one a particular vehicle has notice here on this clamshell wagon that around that cylinder on the passenger side there are two tabs above and beneath it this is the manual clamshell tailgate and another way that you can tell is see the little handle there in the middle of the tailgate that's to help you pick it up uh this tailgate was actually counterbalanced so you'd first have to raise the glass and then once you raise the glass you could turn that locking Tab and it would drop the tailgate down it was counterbalance so it wouldn't really drop down all the way you'd kind of have to push it down a little bit to lock into position and then when you would turn those tabs around the lock cylinder again it would release and it would pop up a little bit but you'd have to pick it up and raise it the full way now one of the interesting things was that GM made that little twist thing around the lock cylinder inoperable unless the glass was raised I believe at least 6 or 8 in so you couldn't just drop the tailgate unless the uh glass had been raised nor could you actually release it from its lower position so that was pretty smart you didn't get your fingers pinched but that was a safety feature that GM had on these manual tailgates I just think it's humorous that on a wagon that you could get either a power or manual tailgate but the window was always power on all these clamshell wagons in any case the clamshell is one of those iconic Motor Vehicles certainly of the 1970s and many people have memories riding around in them I do think one good thing that GM did on these is that as opposed to having the rear-facing rear seat the rear seat in these faces forward and I actually prefer that I don't know about anybody else but I tend to get motion sickness sitting in the back of these wagons if I'm facing rearward so I do think that that was one advantage of these clamshells over some of the other wagons although Fords you sat looking at one another as a opposed to forward or back and well that was an interesting design too that some people liked let's go on to number eight and at number eight we have Ford so-called gold glass that was found in particular in the Thunderbirds in the 1970s now the Thunderbird by this point had become quite the porker what had once started out as a vehicle that was a two-place sporty vehicle had now evolved into the so-called big bird of the 1970s and the biggest Thunderbird of all was this thunderer that was introduced for the 1973 model year here this is a 1974 model pictured but these Thunderbirds were absolutely huge and made even more huge by the super siiz bumper that you can see there both front and rear for the 1974 model year owed to impact standards that all auto companies had to meet now despite the fact that this was a relatively large vehicle in terms of its overall size the passenger compartment wasn't that big and in fact the rear window Windows which did retract into the sail panel couldn't even retract all the way whether they were on oper window cars or non oper window cars despite the fact that the car was absolutely huge but these Thunderbirds did offer a super novel option for the time and one that would come back for a little bit on vehicles in the 80s and 90s and then just disappear Al together and that was the so-called gold glass option that helped defrost the windshield as well as the the rear window and here's a picture from the 1974 Thunderbird brochure describing the option take a look there at the caption underneath the girl who's looking out the rear window and it says quick defrost windshield rear window new gold film laminated in glass quickly helps melt snow and ice and of course you could get the electric rear window deicer as well which is pretty common in most cars but really nobody else at this point had that gold film that would help instantly deice the windshield as well as the rear window again this was something that you know during the time as is the case today if you had ice on your windshield you basically had to wait for the car to warm up and defrost it with the normal hot air Outlets unless you exercised your muscles and got out your window scraper so it was a pretty cool and novel option and one of the things that's not mentioned here but when you did upgrade to this option you actually got two Alternators on the car apparently would draw so much current that one alternator wasn't enough so these cars that have this option have two alternators and if you ever see a Thunderbird that has two alternators you know it's got the gold glass I suspect that the option was sunset in part because people didn't like the gold glass and the tint that it gave the windshield but perhaps also because the replacement cost at least from an insurance perspective must have been astronomically high so in any event it was sunset after a few years and like I said some some auto companies brought it back even Cadillac in the early 90s had the electric deicing on the windshields but never really saw it again after that period for whatever reason I think it's a good idea I guess automakers just thought that they could get the windshields to defrost fast enough as is let's move on to number seven and that is the dealer installed dictation option in chryler vehicles the late 60s and early ' 7s here you see depicted a 1972 Imperial one of at least in my opinion the most handsome full-size Chryslers or the sea bodies of the era these vehicles had fuselage style styling as Chrysler called it that denoted their clean body sides and I think they're just some of the most handsome Chrysler vehicles ever produced unfortunately as is the case sometimes with well styled Chrysler vehicles like the 1957 models these cars well some of the engineering left a little bit to be desired but I should say maybe not even the engineering but the build quality in any case they were really attractive vehicles and they did have good engines and transmissions and other features and one of those features if you take a look at this picture from a 1972 Imperial brochure was this dealer install dictation option this basically rested on the transmission tunnel in the floor and you got a microphone with it and of course you could put a tape in and then dictate whatever you needed to to your secretary and presumably it would then be transcribed into whatever memo you were looking looking to issue I don't believe that such a dictation option was offered by any of the other big three or AMC I guess should include in that as well but here in the Chryslers I thought it was a pretty novel option and perhaps handy for some although I don't know how effective it would be particularly if you were dictating while driving that doesn't sound like it's a great thought but Chrysler offered this option for a number of years and I suppose it proved handy for some of those who really needed it let's move on to number six and at number six we have the continuously variable wipers offered by Ford on its Thunderbird and Lincoln Mark 3 now beginning in 1958 I believe Ford started offering hydraulically operated wipers on its Thunderbird and this offered a number of advantages first Remember by this point in time many cars still had vacuum operated wipers so when you'd step on the accelerator pedal and the engine lost vacuum just as you needed to see the windshield more as you were passing in someone for instance the windshield wipers would basically stop or kind of start moving very slowly and so in 1958 Ford introduced this new I believe it was engineered not by Ford but by Trio Hydro wipe wipers as they were called and it was a good setup it was powered off of the power steering pump and the power steering pump would effectively pressurize this motor that would operate the wipers and the cool thing about it is that this is before the days of of the delay feature on wipers where you'd have a time delay before they would wipe again so this setup actually enabled drivers to continuously vary the wiper speed so you could have the wipers wipe very slowly or you could have them wipe relatively quickly so they didn't cycle on and off on a time delay interval but they just wiped more slowly or quickly depending upon what you s desired and this feature when the Mark III was introduced in 1969 made it over to the Mark III for the 6970 and 71 model years and then for 1972 the Thunderbird and the markv then had just kind of the Standard Electric wipers but again a super cool setup an interesting idea although I don't know if I'd want the wiper wiping very slowly right in the middle of my field of vision and I suspect that's the reason why it was eventually just kind of sunset in favor of the delay wipers but another cool tidbit about these is that you can actually activate the wipers with the car off if you have the car off and then you open the wiper I guess I'll call it a switch it's really a dial that's opening an orifice in this particular setup so that it can basically determine how fast the windshield wipers wipe in any event if you open that orifice and then you turn the steering wheel back and forth with the car off the wipers will actually start operating so interesting Quirk of this particular option it's a good idea it was in production for a number of years 1958 to 1971 and I think customers generally liked it let's move on to the next one at number five we have the 1960 to 1961 Corvair gas heater Chevrolet introduced the Corvair for the 1960 model year and you can kind of think about it as a super sized VW it's got air cooled flat 6-cylinder engine in the rear kind of similar to the VW engine although that was not a flat 6 and just was a novel car for the time period it also had somewhat quirky styling as you can see here but it was a Charming car overall and it certainly sold well especially in its early years unfortunately as time would go on and a book would be written about its handling abilities or lack thereof by Ralph nater the car's popularity would eventually wne but in the 1960 and 61 model years Chevrolet offered a Corvair gas heater yes I said that right a gas heater was actually powered by the gasoline in the tank in order to help let's say get your cabin in your cor a warm on cold winter days the normal heater on these similar to vws Simply took air that was blown over the engine and would then basically blow it into the cabin to give you a little bit extra heat but if you wanted something more than that you could opt for this optional gas heater that used that gasoline in the tank to effectively heat up a heat exchanger which would then provide supplemental heat into the cabin and here's a page from the Corvair brochure describing this particular setup you see it says heater and defroster for your comfort no longer waiting for the engine to warm up the heater gives almost instant heat when the switched is turned on the fuel for operating the heater is taken from the gasoline tank of the car gasoline consumption to operate the heater is a very small amount per hour the amount of heat desired can be controlled by a temperature control knob a highly efficient operating heater and defroster well it may have been efficient but it also was as you can imagine dangerous and after a few model years as I mentioned this was no longer an option for your cor ver but super quirky you can see there that the fuel pump would basically be pumping fuel not only to the carburetor but through a pressure regulator which would then go to this gasoline heater and I mean I guess it was a good idea but certainly has some safety concerns although the vehicle overall was let's say pigeon hold for its overall safety but that was principally due to the rear suspension setup which by the way wasn't all that different from other cars of the era I think in some ways the Corvair was unfairly picked on but this gas heater is one of those quirky features that certainly is an interesting one I don't think I've ever seen that on a General Motors car ever since perhaps there were some of these in the very early Vehicles closer to the turn of the 20th century but by this point in time this was really the only GM car that was using it really because this was the only GM car with an aircooled engine I do love by the way how this heater employed an automotive style coil and spark plug to get it going you can see those on the top left there too so it really was an automotive gas heater let's move on to number four and at number four we have the 1960 to 1961 Buick so-called mirr speedometer in 1960 Buick Vehicles were in their final year at least the fullsize vehicles were in their final year and I think that it was an overall handsome design although it looked a little bit pudgier than the 59s the 60 Buick really has some interesting exterior sculpture and styling but on the interior the Interiors on these vehicles were also equally beautiful as the exterior and take a look here at this shot of a 1960 Buick instrument cluster now one of the things that you'll notice in this instrument cluster is what appears to be kind of a typical speedometer but this is far from the typical speedometer that you're used to more specifically what you're looking at is actually a mirror reflection of a speedometer that is laying down inside that Dash let's take a look here at a picture of this speedometer and more detail here's a picture of some speedometer clusters from Buick of this area and let's just take a look at the bottom one they're both the same but in the bottom one you'll notice that the speedometer is actually printed as a mere image and that's because this is the real speedometer on these vehicles and then there's a piece of mirror glass that basically reflects the speedometer so that the driver can see it the advantage of this was that the driver could tilt the mirror up or down and so if you were a different height than say another driver you could easily adjust the speedometer so that it was quite legible but the strange part about it is that in order to get the miror image to look correctly Buick actually had to print the speedometer as the inverse image as you see here this was also a rotating drum speedometer one of my favorite style speedometers that a drum would rotate and a line would basically appear as you sped up now as I mentioned this was offered in Buick only for the 1960 and 61 model years it's interesting that the feature crossed over Buick's introduction of all new full-size cars in 1961 that wore completely different exterior sheet met and even the interior of the 1961 Buick that you see here is totally different from the 1960 Buick except for that super cool speedometer I guess Buick customers liked it or at least Buick thought customers liked it and they kept it around for that extra model year before it was sunset in favor of just the typical horizontal speedometer in the 1962 model year but for 1960 and 61 if you got a Buick you get this super cool mirrored speedometer let's move on on to number three and at number three we have the 67 to 68 Imperial mobile director option now we previously talked about being able to get a dictation microphone in your Imperial but this is a far cooler option and was only offered for two model years 1967 and 68 in 1967 Chrysler's Imperial would be a new design and it was no longer riding a top a full frame it was now a unibody vehicle and it was starting to increasingly become a let's call it glamorized Chrysler as opposed to a separate and true Imperial in any case for the 1967 and 68 model years and interestingly only on coups a buyer could opt for the so-called mobile director option that you see here the option included this trick front seat that could swivel around and a console that could fold out into a table as well as a separate lamp for the table now it's quite interesting that Chrysler would offer this option just on the coups you would think that if anything you'd offer such an option on the Ford doors but the problem was that you couldn't get the rotating seat with a four-door car because the mechanism would interfere with the b-pillar thus you were forced into getting the twodo coupe if you wanted the mobile director option and as a result it really wasn't popular at all I think somewhere around a 100 ended up being sold and and they're super rare today I also don't know what you could really do this is before cell phones so you really could just basically use your typewriter or take notes or something you weren't going to be able to talk to anybody because there was no phone in the car so I suspect that people really just didn't quite understand the purpose and I think that the dictation microphone ended up being probably a better option because you could just sit in your car and speak as opposed to having to type and let's face it at this point in time very few Executives actually even knew how to type that's what they had administrative staff for so in any case very few were sold it was a cool idea I wonder if it would actually sell today I might pay some money for something like this in a modern car but to my knowledge nobody really offers it but Chrysler certainly did in 1967 and 1968 let's move on to number two and at number two we have a few half V8 4cylinder engines introduced by ponac as well as International Harvester in 1961 Pontiac introduced its Tempest a so-called senior compact that was introduced alongside the O mobile f85 and Buick Skylark but the Tempest was the only one of these vehicles that was powered by a Pontiac specific engine that was its so-called trophy 4 the 195 cubic inch half of a 389 cubic in V8 now what makes this four-cylinder so strange and unique and and weird is that it literally was half of a V8 engine in large part you can see that the passenger side cylinder bank is the one that's there the driver side cylinder bank is missing and so it's consequently leaned over at 45° and the space that is missing there on the driver's side because there's no cylinder Bank there effectively is where the starter is placed and the generator and some other accessories but this was really an ingenious design remember that the senior compacts from s and Buick came standard with a very expensive aluminum block 215 cubic inch V8 and here Pontiac was able to produce a cast iron reliable by and large 4 cylinder engine that really was cheap to build they could run this down the same tooling as the V8s and in fact they did exactly that and they would alternate running the cylinder blocks down alternate banks of the V8 Machining line so they didn't just wear out the tools on one side they would effectively I think part of the week they would run on one side of the line the other week part of the week they would run on the other side of the line the trophy 4 I guess worked somewhat well as you can imagine when you have a 4-cylinder engine that's 195 cubic in without a balance shaft the main gripe about it was that it shook quite a bit at idol and the other gripe I would say about it is that a aside from the idle quality well it did have some reliability issues mostly timing chain issues that owed to the vibration of the engine these would tend to throw timing chains eh in some cases after 20,000 mil 30,000 mil they would just really get stretched out from the vibrations of the four-cylinder engine and then jump time so that was really the other Achilles heel of this engine but aside from that if you put a a new and modern timing set in these they do prove to be pretty reliable engines and there even were some py 4-cylinder versions of the trophy 4 including ones with a four barrel carburetor so how cool is that now over at International Harvester a similar technique was employed by them actually at the same time when the Scout was introduced in 1961 it came standard with a half an International Harvester 304 v82 cubic in for cylinder engine the so-called commanche 4-cylinder engine and four cylinders would be the standard engines and Scouts all the way through the 1980 model year when they were Sunset the 152 even came in turbocharged form and then in 1968 International Harvester released a larger 4-cylinder engine that displaced 196 cubic in so there were a few of these four cylinders that were floating around between International Harvester and Pontiac the international Harvesters had a good rep reputation for reliability again they were somewhat crude but I would say that overall the individuals who had these in their Scouts were generally happy so long as they really weren't trying to accelerate hard or lived in hilly country they just didn't make very much horsepower even the turbocharged 152 cubicin 4 just made 111 horsepower so nothing all that great in any case these half a V8 engines are pretty sweet and interesting designs and certainly some of the strangest inventions in Automotive History let's move on to number one and that is the 1961 to 63 Pontiac Tempest rope drive shaft and transaxle now we just talked about the Tempest you say with the four-cylinder engine well yes the Tempest had so many strange and quirky features that it actually Garners number one and number two on this list and as I said number one is really this rope drive shaft setup as it was known and the rear mounted transaxle so let's start with the transaxle this is something that I won't say is common but is more common certainly now than it was in 1961 when the Tempest introduced it you'll see in Corvettes for a number of years they've had the transmission mounted in the rear really for weight distribution and they've had this rear transaxle setup but in 1961 this was really unheard of particularly on domestic vehicles and the Tempest introduced it for General Motors it's the Tempest mtic transmission is out back there as opposed to being coupled directly behind the engine and the interesting thing about the transaxle is that the torque converter on these is actually exposed if you look under the car while it's running you can see the torque converter spinning which is just bizarre you don't see that on any conventional Vehicles because the torque inverter is really encased within the transmission housing The Tempest Matic was an okay transmission it really wasn't overly reliable I would say but the other cool piece about this is the flexible drive shaft that was engineered to really help quell the engine vibration so that's what the engine attached to basically this drive shaft which would then be attached to the rear transaxle now because of that the drive shaft on these is really thin when you think of a drive shaft you often think of a very thick drive shaft that's let's say 2 3 in in diameter but this rope drive shaft is super small and that's because it doesn't have to take the torque that's multiplied by the automatic transmission and transmit that torque to the rear wheels here's a picture of the torque tube as well as the drive shaft from one of these tempests notice the torque tube is relatively large but there's the drive shaft that spindly little thing that's all it is on the automatic transmission cars it was 65 in in diameter on the manual transmission cars it was 3/4 of an inch in diameter and it was about 90ish Ines long so it's a pretty spindly piece of nickel Chrome Molly alloy but I guess in general it worked so this is just a super strange and unique design it allegedly helped quell some of the vibrations from the four cylinder it also gave the vehicle a flatter floor because the flexible drive shaft meant that it didn't have to have as large of a hump so interesting setup and that's why it's at the top of the list hope you enjoyed this Spotlight on all of these interesting Innovations if I missed one put it in the comment section and please like comment and subscribe that helps the algorithm and until next time take care

Channel: Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History

Views: 119,800

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Id: 4_HEDwu6tPs

Length: 30min 38sec (1838 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024