Stuff About 1980s Cars That My Kids Will Never Experience

As I was driving to pick up my son yesterday evening, I passed a car that didn't have its headlights on, and it suddenly occurred to me how rare it is to have a car without automatic headlights. And it also occurred to me that my kids will likely never drive a car where you not only have to turn the headlights on and off yourself, but you have to decide when to turn the headlights on and off. And the more I thought about it, the more things I thought of that are totally different now than when I learned to drive in the 1980s. Here's my list of "car stuff" that was part of my youth but which is and will be completely foreign to my kids. 

Ashtrays. Cars ALWAYS had an ashtray. And a cigarette lighter. Let's be honest: if you grew up in the 70s or 80s, at one point you stuck your finger in the lighter and burned yourself. Or at least lit a piece of paper on fire. 

Cassette Decks. If your car was fancy, it had a cassette deck as well as an AM/FM radio. And of course, that meant you also had to have a briefcase-sized box with all your favorite tapes. I'm still salty about the time my car got broken into and they stole my whole tape collection. As well as all the change in my ashtray. Which leads me to...

Change in the Ashtray. We always kept change in the ashtray, partly because you had to pay tolls in quarters (God forbid you have exactly the right amount of change but miss when throwing it into the basket), and partly because if you ever broke down somewhere, you'd have to find a payphone and use a dime to call for a tow. Probably from your dad.

Crank Windows. None of this electric button nonsense; there was a big metal crank you used to roll the window up or down. If you were really strong, you could do even it while driving. If you were in the car by yourself, the passenger window stayed where it was until you could pull over and reach over to crank it up or down. 

Manual Locks. Locks required a physical key from the outside. You had to lock and unlock each door separately, whether from the inside or the outside. From the inside, you used a little golf-tee shaped button, which was supposed to prevent a thief from breaking into your car with a bent coat hanger. Unfortunately, it also prevented you from breaking into your car with a bent coat hanger if you ever locked your keys inside. 

Antennas. Even if you were cool enough to have a cassette player in your car, sometimes you wanted to listen to the radio, so cars came with an antenna. Some people would stick a pom-pom or similar item on the end of the aerial to help find the car in the parking lot. Sometimes the antenna was on the back of the car sticking straight up, sometimes it was at the side of the front windshield at an angle. God forbid you forget to retract it when you went through the car wash.

Maps. In the ancient times known as the pre-GPS era, you always had a glove compartment full of state maps, as well as a large wire-bound set of street maps for your local area. If you had been on a trip recently, at least one of these maps would be a personalized, hand-highlighted TripTik from AAA.  

Missing Seatbelts. Massachusetts did not require seat belt use until 1994, which meant that even though people began to use seatbelts regularly in the 1980s, not every car had them. Well, they probably had them, but most likely the ones in the back seat had slipped into the crack, never to be seen again. If there were seatbelts in the back seat, they had giant metal buckles similar to the ones we now have on airplanes, which doubled as a weapon to be used if your sibling crossed into your "territory." Not that I ever did that. And they weren't three-point harnesses, they were only a lap belt, which meant that if the driver hit the brakes you got folded in half and smacked your face on your own lap. Fun times. 

Car Safety. Airbags? We'd never heard of airbags. Child seats? I spent the first decade of my life standing up (okay, "jumping up and down") on the "hump" peering over the front seat. If there had ever been an accident, I'd have been launched through the windshield like a tiny javelin. And yeah, we rode in the back of pickup trucks and station wagons with the gate down. On the highway. With a speed limit of 75 mph. I'm still not sure how any of us survived to adulthood. 

Station Wagons. Minivans and SUVs hadn't been invented yet, so the "big family car" of choice was a station wagon. If you were fancy, yours had wood paneling down the side and a tailgate that would open either gate or drop-down style. They were great to take to the drive-in. They also had a back-facing seat that allowed you to make faces at the people in the car behind you. Or wave at them. Or hold up signs claiming you'd been kidnapped. 

Gasoline. You didn't choose diesel vs. gasoline or your preferred octane, you chose leaded or unleaded. Leaded gas pumps had a bigger nozzle so you couldn't accidentally use it in a newer engine designed to use unleaded gas. Also, gas pumps didn't have a locking mechanism, so you had to stand there and hold the handle while you filled your tank. During the gas crisis, you could only fill your tank on your assigned odd or even day. 

Analog Dashboards. So. Many. Dials. Speedometer. Gas Gauge. Tachometer. Temperature gauge. Battery level gauge. Odometer. Clock. Radio dials. Don't forget, you tuned in the stations by turning that little knob until the static went away. You wanted 103.3 FM? Move that dial a little past the "102" indicator then tweak it and hope for the best. And then stay on that station FOREVER because there were no presets. 

Boxy Designs. We didn't worry about aerodynamics in the 1980s, so cars actually looked like the rectangles with wheels that we drew to represent cars when we were kids. 

Cool Cars. Although there are admittedly some pretty wild-looking new cars on the road today (Cybertruck, anyone?), the 1980s had a lot of very cool sports cars that people actually drove, that you would regularly see on the road. Chevy Corvettes were so cool that Prince wrote a song about one (kind of). The Camaro IROC-Z was equally awesome. Turbo-powered Volvos didn't look as cool but had impressive power and pickup. Even ordinary, non-sporty cars were pretty cool: the Acura Integra was introduced; hatchbacks like the Honda Civic, the VW Golf, and the GMC Gremlin were the poor college student's vehicle of choice; the Toyota Corolla and Honda Accord were a step up in both size and comfort from their smaller sister models; and the Chrysler K Cars were a precursor to the minivan. 

I'm sure my kids will get to experience plenty of car features that I never dreamed of at their age (self driving!). But I very much doubt they'll ever beat the coolness factor of a 1981 Delorean. 

Stories of My Childhood: Cars

The first car I remember my family owning was a pale green Chrysler station wagon with metallic panels on the sides, probably a 1972, similar to this one. 

Before the advent of the minivan, the station wagon was the go-to family car. Ours was big enough to pull our little canvas-top pop-up Coleman trailer behind it, plus it could fit all our stuff in the back and still have room for two parents and two children, and occasionally even a friend who didn't mind sitting in the middle of the back seat. The best part of a station wagon was that it had a tailgate, and if you were lucky, your parents (most likely your dad) would be willing to let you sit on it while he drove. When we went camping, my dad would sometimes let us sit on the tailgate, swinging our legs, while we drove from our campsite to the swimming beach. 

At the same time, or possibly shortly afterwards, we also had a dark blue Volkswagen Beetle, which must have been a 1968 or a 1969. 

The Beetle was quite a few years old when we got it, and we eventually replaced it with the first brand-new car my parents ever bought: A 1973 light blue Beetle!

I was about 4 years old when they bought it, and apparently I was quite concerned that it might not come with a "hump." Back in the early '70s, cars rarely had seatbelts and children used them even more rarely. So, being short, I always rode standing up on the "hump" running from the front to the back of the car, leaning between the two front seats. It was quite a quirky little car. VWs had terrible heaters, so there was never any heat in the back seat until you'd been driving 60 mph for half an hour or so. The defroster was so useless that my dad bought a little plastic fan with a suction cup on the base that stuck to the windshield and a long cord that plugged into the cigarette lighter in an attempt to keep the windshield clear. The car had "running boards" on each side between the front and black wheels that you could stand on, in our case generally only used to reach the top of the car while brushing off snow. The oddest thing about it was that the engine was in the back, rather than under the hood, so the "trunk" was in front. Once when the car was parked in our garage with the hood up, one of the little neighbor boys, who was probably about 6 years old at the time, glanced in and said matter-of-factly, "Huh. No engine," and then just kept walking. 

After a number of years, the floorboards began to wear through (as the previous Bug's had) to the point where the passenger's feet got wet when you drove through a puddle. Once it reached the stage where my dad was afraid his foot would actually go through the floor if he had to brake too hard, we got rid of that car. I was disappointed, because I was 15 by then and had hoped I could learn to drive on it. Not only was it old and beat up enough that my parents wouldn't be too upset if I dinged it up, but it had a manual transmission, and I knew I'd be grinding the gears quite a bit as I learned to drive stick, which I did not want to do on a brand-new car. But no such luck.

By this point, the big old green station wagon had given way to a bigger and less old brown station wagon. It was a Plymouth Gran Fury, purchased specifically for a cross-country camping trip we took when I was 11 and my sister was 15. 

The coolest part about THIS station wagon was that the tailgate could convert from a drop-down to a gate-style that swung open. I was mystified by the physics of how that was possible (I still am, actually). Well, that was really only the second-coolest part. The literally coolest part was that it was the first car we ever owned that had air conditioning! 

It was an absolutely massive car, which was great on vacation but a little tougher when I had to learn to drive it. But once I did learn to handle it, it was great because you could literally fit a dozen teenagers in there (and we occasionally did). 

I learned to drive on the station wagon rather than our second car, because my parents had replaced the old blue Beetle with a brand-new, light green Toyota Tercel. It was a stick shift, while the wagon was automatic, and I couldn't bring myself to grind the gears of my mom's beloved, brand new little car. It was tiny and very convenient for zipping around town running errands, but still reasonably comfortable for 4 passengers. 

By the time I finally got a car of my own, it was the summer before my senior year of college. I was living in an on-campus dorm, which meant cooking in my own kitchen rather than using the school meal plan, which meant I needed to be able to get myself to the store. I had saved up $2500 and planned on buying a clunker that could limp along for a couple of years until I had a "real" job and could afford something decent, which was what my older sister had done. But my dad put the kibosh on that, saying that he didn't want to get any more phone calls like he had from my sister saying that her car had died in the middle of nowhere and could he please come get her and also fix her car? So he gave me $1500 more to spend, remarking drily when I protested that he expected to save at least that much on repairs. I found a 1984 Honda Civic hatchback for exactly $4000 at a reputable shop the next town over, and I brought it home and named it Tess (the license plate included the letters TSL and I was studying Nikola Tesla at the time). 

I shared my on-campus apartment with 5 other girls, and my roommate and I were the only ones with cars. My roommate drove a 1962 Buick Skylark that I immediately dubbed the Pterodactyl, due to both its age and its size. It was even bigger than the Gran Fury I'd learned to drive on. Very quickly my suite-mates and I decided that my fuel-efficient little car was the one to take when running errands like grocery shopping or grabbing takeout, but the Pterodactyl was best for social outings with all 6 roomies and our pals. 

My Honda was, as my dad had hoped, a remarkably reliable car. After I graduated, I commuted to my job in Boston in it, and it continued to be a great little car. But eventually it began to show its age. Someone broke into it was and stole my whole cassette tape collection (most cars at this time had an AM/FM radio and a tape deck), my Bible (! I just hope they read it), plus the ashtray and all the change I kept in it. The CV joint went on my way home through Cambridge one day, landing me on the local radio traffic report. Since it was before the age of cell phones, I walked across the street to a little strip mall and found a store with both a pay phone and a reasonably current copy of the yellow pages, and was fortunate to find both a tow truck and a mechanic only a couple of blocks away. That repair kept me going for a few more months, until I got rear-ended by a hit-and-run-driver who mangled my rear bumper badly enough that my dad had to cut it off with a hacksaw so it didn't drag on the tire and then bolt the remainder to the frame so it didn't flop around while I drove. I think it was at that stage when I had my next embarrassing-but-not-really-my-fault commuting incident, when the person in front of me sat at a green light for several seconds so I beeped my horn at them and somehow my horn got stuck. I managed to pull over and had the presence of mind to disconnect the battery, which got the horn to stop, but I'm not sure what I would have done had not some gracious pedestrian explained to me that cars have fuses and if I had my car's manual in the glove box (I did), I could probably figure out how to remove the fuse for the horn, which I did. (The fuse for the horn was also the fuse for the brake lights, which made for a rather nerve-wracking drive home, but the car and I both made it in one piece.) That car managed to limp along until I was able to buy my first brand-new car, another Honda Civic hatchback.

This one was a beautiful blue 1993 model, much rounded and sleeker than the previous. I had thought about red, but then decided that I expected to own the car for at least 10 years, and I wasn't sure I could pull off a red car at age 30. (Ah, youth.) I named him Willie. It just seemed to suit him. Willie also had an AM/FM radio and a tape deck. 

Just like Tess had lived for 9 years, Willie also lived for 9 years. He was still in great shape when I decided I needed a 4-door car, so I bade him a fond farewell and upsized to yet another Honda Civic, this time a dark red ("Radiant Ruby Red Pearl," to be exact) 2002 four-door sedan named Marguerite.

Marguerite had all the amenities: air conditioning, not only a CD player but a CD CHANGER that could hold 5 CDs, AND power windows and door locks. Before that, car windows had to be opened with a little handle that you cranked. The Beetles also had little triangular wing windows at the back of each passenger side window that had a latch you could unlock and the angle them open for a little additional air circulation. I was still driving Marguerite when I got married and had my first child, and then we upsized again to a Honda Odyssey minivan when we were expecting child #2. 

A few other notes about cars: There was no such thing as GPS or satellite navigation until I was in my 30s. I always had a book of city street maps in my car, one for the state of MA and one for NH. Each page or pair of pages showed all the streets in a particular town, and at the back was an alphabetical index of all the streets in each town. So if you wanted to get to, say, Bachelor Street in Boxford, you'd look up Cross Street on the Boxford page and it would give you a number-letter combination like 3C, then you would go to the Boxford map and find the row labeled 3 and the column labeled C, and somewhere in the vicinity of where that row and that column crossed, you would find Bachelor Street. 

If you were ever going on a trip, you'd go to the AAA office and they would put together a wire-bound map book called a "TripTik," in which some poor AAA employee would have painstakingly used a highlighter to mark out the best route for you. 

Along with your TripTik, you'd get little booklets for the cities you'd be passing through with listings of hotels/motels, restaurants, gas/service stations, and attractions, along with descriptions and ratings. 

Driving was certainly a different experience back then!