Long Gone Silver: Options Which No Longer Exist
An entire dissertation could be written - and probably has by a student of academia somewhere in the world - about how society’s perception of luxury changes over time. Whether it’s due to shifting tastes, new technologies, or some other variable, some items which were once the latest and greatest do eventually fall to the wayside.
These falls from grace can happen gradually, like the slow slide of a color into obscurity, or might occur virtually overnight, like when America turned on disco music as if it suddenly grew the properties of a leaking nuclear facility. Naturally, this phenomenon afflicts to cars to an outsized degree since the automobile is arguably one of the biggest (or at least most visible) items most people will ever buy.
[Images: Stoqliq/Shutterstock.com, Oleg Krugliak/Shutterstock.com, Murilee Martin, Ford, Derek Kreindler, jittawit21/Shutterstock.com]
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Our first example? Just about any type of in-car entertainment. Families could once wow entire suburban blocks with a top shelf Ford Windstar in the late-’90s since it included a television screen and - wait for it - VHS player in the center console. This incredibly bulky piece of media history was quickly supplanted by the much more compact DVD player, leaving anyone owning a VHS-equipped van with an instantly outdated piece of kit.
These days, any used car with a CD player (or - horrors! - a tape deck) gets similar raspberries thanks to recent proliferation of digital media in all its forms. Don’t forget: at least one Detroit automaker tried to put record players out on our nation’s highways.
So-called ‘carriage roof’ treatments were a luxury fad this author never quite understood. Most often applied to jumbo Detroit luxury barges - but European marques were not immune, if a bit more tasteful - and found on cars in Florida retirement villages, this (mostly) dealer-installed feature attempted to simulate a convertible roof on vehicles which were decidedly tin tops.
The half vinyl roof, complete with a fake seam near the car’s rear window where it would have folded if it were a real droptop, was even more curious; apparently, it was meant to evoke machines like the Packard One-Twenty from the ‘30s in which only the rear seat passengers (read: the owners, not their chauffeur) got a removable roof.
Some clueless and greedy dealers insisted on dragging this outdated symbol of luxury into the new millennium, meaning more than one cutting edge ‘Art & Science’ Cadillac left the lot with this treatment - despite GM firmly frowning on the process as it was trying to leave that image in the past. And this is to say nothing about the tendency of this roof covering to eventually crack, peel, trap moisture, and hasten rust.
