In recent years, automotive laws (especially in Europe) regarding emissions, sound volume, and safety regulations have never been so strict. All of these laws, although some may be well founded, are in effect with automakers around the world. Their creative limits have been weighed down as the laws of different countries around the world are unique (and sometimes bizarre), crash tests are more brutal than ever, and there has been a new light on pedestrian safety.
All these strict regulations have led to unique characteristics, which were once presented in classic cars, to become banned, and also limit the modifications that can be made to your own car. These rules impact everything from exterior design elements to interior quirks and sometimes even certain mechanical components.
Worse yet, the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) wants to ban race cars from existing again, and that includes personalizing your trips around the house … but luckily for us, we’re part of an amazing community. . So to give you a glimmer of hope, the RPM law is here to save us.
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Car phones
Usually, remembering old cars and their features, we are overwhelmed with nostalgia, but this feature was just plain silly. Surprisingly, talking on a cell phone while driving was not considered a traffic violation until 2001, and before that, some car manufacturers encouraged drivers to converse while driving.
Some high-profile automakers like BMW have offered their top-of-the-line models huge portable devices in the center console, just for the driver to take calls on their branded brick phone. Never have we heard of anything more problematic than this.
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Manual wing mirrors
More common on sports cars and JDM sedans, wing mirrors had no other reason to exist than to look cool. The fender mirror name is extremely self-explanatory as it literally refers to little mirrors placed above the front fenders, but they couldn’t use a cool styling to compensate for the visibility it offered to drivers – or else its sound. absence.
Not to mention the manually adjustable aspect made them even more unnecessary than they used to be as there was now no easy way to adjust them without another person helping you.
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Huge chrome bumpers
Coating the front and rear of your car with a gloss coating was once a purely aesthetic appeal, but over the years so have safety measures. Bumpers had to withstand much more severe impacts in the ’70s than ever before, resulting in a complete overhaul of plastic bumpers and covers that began to gain popularity.
In the late 80s, it was almost impossible to adopt a huge chrome front panel into your design without falling short of legal requirements, so they were replaced with plastic covers and reinforced by carefully attaching steel structures or aluminum behind them.
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Ashtrays & Lighters
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In an effort to enforce the law that prohibits anyone from smoking inside a car with a child on board, automakers have teamed up to ban this combo pack in their new cars to end smoking in cars.
In 1994, Chrysler broke the ice by no longer offering ashtrays for its cars, and other brands quickly joined in. The manufacturers’ incentives differed, but one brand that had a brilliant and profitable idea was Hyundai; they reused what was once a cigarette lighter with USB ports.
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Car televisions
Of course, some luxury cars have the option of adding TV screens inside the headrests of the front seats, so that rear passengers can enjoy a movie on a long drive. However, some automakers have gone a little too far by implementing an option to tune in to live TV or play a DVD through the center infotainment screen.
In retrospect, it was like a horrible idea, constantly distracting drivers. It might sound like common sense to us, but in some states like Montana, watching TV while driving is perfectly legal.
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Thin A-pillars
Cars had to be able to withstand more severe impacts and more intense crash tests. Therefore, to pass their tests, automakers had to increase the width of the A-pillars in order to increase the overall stiffness of a vehicle and, of course, to prevent its roof from crashing. your skull in the event of a rollover accident.
By making these pillars bigger, there was a huge downside associated with it … huge new blind spots appeared that had never existed before. Brands unfortunately had to prioritize safety over visibility and style, and downgraded the look of cars with these new, thick A-pillars.
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Black cars
Yes, there is one country that has totally banned one color, the Turkmen government. They even go out of their way to impound black cars they see in public. And no, there are no other eye-catching colors, even the wackiest ones that get the same treatment.
No official reason was given as to why the rulers of Turkmenistan are so sickened by black cars, but all citizens have had to repaint or sell their black cars no matter when or where the cars were built.
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Rumble seats
Also known as dickey seats or mother-in-law seats, rumble seats were a type of compact folding bench neatly tucked away in the back of a car, specially designed to allocate passengers you prefer to sit that far away from. you as possible (hence the nicknames).
Rumble seats were extremely dangerous as they only accommodated a human inside a catapult stuck in the trunk without any form of seat belt.
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Exhaust noise
It really breaks our hearts to have reached a stage where rev limiters must be mandatory in all production cars in order to reduce the amount of pollution emitted. Obviously, if any exotic cars come out of the factory with a disappointing exhaust note (and basically no popping noises unless you have a Hyundai N car), modifying your exhaust system is illegal. and don’t even think about the right piping.
The legal limit for a vehicle’s sound level is 95 dbA in California, and most factory-installed exhaust systems – regardless of the car – cannot exceed 75 decibels.
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Retractable headlights
Whether you live and breathe cars, or don’t know the difference between a turn signal and brake fluid, you have a soft spot for retractable headlights. There’s just something so unmistakably cool and timeless that we give a pair of pop-ups on every car, but like all good things are, they had to come to an end. Retractable headlights had to face their final demise when stricter European pedestrian safety laws claimed they were too harmful for pedestrians in the event of an accident.
We do wish, however, that some mathematicians would find a way to resurrect these pop-ups in a pedestrian-friendly way. The silver lining of this cloud is that Donut Media paid homage to the pop-up headlights with their song, Pop-Up Up and Down Headlights.
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