Driving to my sister's place. Saw a squarebody with opposed exhaust tips, haven't seen that since high school or so.
What haven't you seen in a while? Why do you think it disappeared?
Driving to my sister's place. Saw a squarebody with opposed exhaust tips, haven't seen that since high school or so.
What haven't you seen in a while? Why do you think it disappeared?
Well, if we're going back to high school (class of '70), then a lot of stuff........vinyl tops, velour upholstery, fake Mercedes grilles on everything, RWD, leaf springs, etc.
Anti-theft slide-out and removable face head units. Around the time when I got my license, you'd see people in the mall toting their Kenwood like a tiny clutch in one hand while checking their beeper with their other hand.
In highschool for me(2005-2009) I remember every pickup having this style exhaust. I think they've all rusted out by now. I even got one from the junkyard and installed it on my 74 Bug.
Now the "cool kids" run exhaust big chrome tips that aim 45° down and 45° back behind the rear tires.
White wall and white letter tires. Fender skirts. Sidewalk feelers. Column shifted manual transmissions (getting closer to being joined by manual transmissions altogether).
Bench seats in cars, not just pickups. Windshield visors. Vent windows. AM radios, tape decks.
Manual windows. Full size spares. Bumper jacks, and the chrome steel bumpers required for the jacks to work.
Sealed beams.
I'll stop now. Get off my lawn.
Huge subs and boxes for sound systems used to be huge, that seems to have contracted. Probably too many got stolen or were too expensive and complex for people to want to keep up with the expense.
The tailpipes on the square body Chev were stock ones. 72 and prior had them coming out at a 45 degree angle, and everyone seems to have gone back to that.
As to things that are gone, continental kits.
In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :
Sealed beams were never a fad, they were the law! Replacing sealed beams with upgraded lighting is less popular than it used to be though :) Not that you'd know it from my fleet, all the sealed beams are gone!
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I miss sealed beams, they never clouded over like the modern plastic lenses.
Foot operated dimmers, those vanished in the 80s
In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :
This. I feel all of this.
Edited to add. Someone else mentioned crotch vents. My first decent car was an '81 Gutless Supreme. Best part of the car was the AC, it had the vent under the steering column and the back window would fog up on a hot humid day on the highway if the AC was cranked.
From before my time of actually driving but in those impressionable years before driving, it seemed every "fast car" had Hi-Risers or generally was "Jacked up" in the back giving it a drag racer look.
The popular brand:
Not sure if I'd call it a trend, and surprised no one else mentioned....ashtrays. Front and back, of course...
In reply to No Time :
But they sucked. The best thing about them was the standardized sizes so you could install European upgrades (with glass lenses) easily. I'm standing in my shop with five cars that all came from the factory with sealed beams, and all of them are now running either H4 bulbs or LEDs and have far superior lighting :)
Foot operated dimmers vanished by disappearing through the rusty hole in the floorboard they helped create :)
Undercar neon is coming back, but now it changes colors. I once did a turbo install on a purple Miata with a spiky Veilside body kit and had to reinstall the yellow undercar neon. I felt so dirty.
That car also had an in-dash DVD player that had a Journey disc in it. It played Journey all the time. We called it the Journey Miata, of course.
Here's a real trend that went away (in most circles): metalflake paint. We had a Miata in the shop with big metalflake when I joined FM. It was known as the Bass Boat. And an Autorotor supercharger, when I think about it...
Skinny tires stretched over wide rims. I haven't seen that much lately and was just trying to figure out when that fad faded.
You'll need to log in to post.