Eight car features that went from rare luxuries to standard must-haves - carsales.com.au (2024)

It's late when you hit the row of airport rentals, sling your bags into the carpeted boot of a mid-priced SUV and watch as the hands-free hatch closes itself. Inside, the car comes alive without a key being turned and you adjust the seat, climate control and stereo by touching a few buttons. Then set your destination, check the camera-linked screen for obstacles before reversing and marvel as the carpark gloom turns to daylight thanks to self-acting Xenon headlights.

This is equipment that not many years ago didn't exist at all or was only available in expensive luxury vehicles. So how did a change of this magnitude occur almost un-noticed and how can manufacturers afford to load even the cheapest cars with increasing amounts of equipment and do it at a fraction of the price charged for those luxurious models from 20 years ago?

Marketing pressures and the need to offer greater value than a rival. This is particularly important to brands that are battling to secure fleet deals, where cruise control or a reversing camera included in the price of a low-cost car can swing a deal involving many thousands of sales.

Here are eight features that have gone from luxury only to as-standard in cars.

Automotive A/C seems to have been with us almost forever and in fact it has been. The first A/C equipped car was a Cadillac dating back to 1939 but it was cumbersome and expensive. Serious production began in 1953 and by the 1960s almost every full-sized US car had 'air' as standard or an option. Australian cars of the same era could be specified with 'under-dash' air-con units but it took until the 1970s for upmarket local models to feature integrated air. Quite extraordinarily though it would take until 2008 before the fleet buyers' favourite Holden Commodore Omega would be supplied with factory-fitted air-conditioning standard.

Tragic accidents involving young children have hastened the availability of rearward-facing cameras in vehicles. This could have happened much sooner but the technology sat largely unused for decades until picked up by Toyota, more as a gimmick. Today pretty much any passenger vehicle in the market has at least one external camera. Some manufacturers linked their cameras to the car's in-dash display screen but a few including Mitsubishi displayed the image in a section of the interior rear-view mirror. Whatever the method it has been working and accompanied by a down-turn in deaths due to reversing vehicles.

Mercifully, it is still possible for the human eye to detect the presence of rain spots on a vehicle windscreen and for the human hand to activate the wipers. But why go to all that effort when a complex system of sensors and electrics can do it for you? During the 1950s, General Motors experimented with the automatic wiper, but not until the 1970s did an infrared detection system - attributed to Australian inventor Raymond Noack - come into use. It compared the amount of light reaching the sensors through a dry windscreen and also a wet one and automatically activated the wipers. Later versions can vary the frequency of blade sweeps according to the amount of water hitting the glass.

Driving a car without airbags seems incongruous today, yet the airbag was for a very long time ignored as a safety device and for years afterwards available in just a handful of high-priced prestige models. Airbags in rudimentary form have existed since the 1920s but only made their automotive debut during the 1970s. However, General Motors' foray into Passive Occupant Safety ended in 1977 due to 'lack of consumer interest'. Four years later the idea was adopted by Mercedes-Benz, then Porsche and by the 1990s several European and US manufacturers were offering bags as standard items or options. Japan and Australia followed and by 2010 there was not a car in our market without airbag protection for both of its front-seat occupants. All went well until one rogue manufacturer sparked the most costly and extensive recall in automotive history.

Cruise control for motor vehicles was invented by a blind automotive engineer (truly) and appeared in 1958 as an option on upmarket Chrysler models. Marketed under the name of 'Auto Pilot' it may have given buyers an unrealistic impression of its capabilities and lent credence to a range of tallish tales. These relate mostly to motor-home drivers who, after setting the 'auto-pilot', would wander to the back of their van to check on a child or make coffee. Recent advances include systems that maintain a set distance between your vehicle and the one ahead and apply the brakes if the system thinks the cars are going to collide. All of this technology is helping smooth the way for viable 'driverless' vehicles, which will allow us to indeed wander off in search of that cup of coffee.

The days of distracted, drowsy or plain dopey drivers wandering all over the road could be numbered once this technology becomes available in every vehicle. It is among the most recent of automotive advances, having appeared in trucks at around the turn of the current Century and being widely adopted by car makers (notably Honda, Nissan and Audi) within a short space of time. Known as Lane Assist or Lane Keeping, these devices use a forward-facing camera to monitor the vehicle's position between lane lines and sound a warning in the cabin if drift is detected. The later, more intrusive 'lane keeper' systems developed by Toyota employ an electric motor separate from the vehicle's power steering system which moves the steering wheel independently of driver input to reposition the car.

Those who believe heating the seat of an Australian-spec car to be a complete waste of money have never experienced an icy leather seat on a sub-zero morning in Armidale or Augathella. Developed by General Motors and popularised during World War 2 as a means of keeping crews of armoured vehicles from freezing at their post, the idea of electrically-heated seats in motor vehicles took a long time to find commercial credence. Australia and markets like it were among the most tardy of adopters but in parts of Europe and North America where a vehicle parked outside overnight can resemble a chunk of polar ice by morning, they were welcome additions. Not surprisingly, it was Swedish-based Saab that in 1972 pioneered the automotive seat heater.

The law forbids (and with good reason) a driver watching television or consulting their mobile phone while driving. However no sanctions currently apply to those who scroll through pages of data via their car's in-dash display. Cadillac (once again) pioneered the 'trip computer' which back in the 1950s provided useful information including average speed and fuel consumption. Japanese manufacturers during the 1980s were responsible for widespread adoption of touch-screen technology, but to be fair they also embraced the seriously flawed Head Up Display which projected information onto the windscreen. By 2000, luxury models in markets across the world had a multi-function screen linked to the car's computer and within 15 years even basic models like Toyota's Yaris and the Hyundai Accent were able to tell their drivers via a dash-mounted display where to go and how much fuel they would use getting there.

Related: How seven car technologies we take for granted came to be

Related: Automotive style fads that are well and truly consigned to history

Related: Eight of the most outrageously expensive car options on the market

Tags