Motoring experts from a car hire comparison site have revealed six things only ’90s car kids will probably remember.
No air con, roll down windows, and cassette players are just some of the now extinct features of cars that everyone born before the millennium will probably remember.
And, we expect most kids today would be baffled by some of the features that many adults took for granted in the cars of yesteryear. Lucky them!
A spokesperson from Stress Free Car Rental said: “Motoring is changing and advancing all the time with new technology. As a result, many once popular features of cars have become redundant in the last couple of decades. Many children will never understand the physical workout that came with having to manually wind down the windows, or rewind a cassette tape with a pencil.” Ahh the good ol’ days eh? Maybe not…
Anyway, here’s the top six:
Cassette players
In the 1980s and 1990s, aside from the radio to get your tunes on in the car, you’d have to play cassette tapes. From Bryan Adams to Now That’s What I Call Music 24, childhood memories are made on road trip cassette tapes. Sometimes you’d even need to use a pencil to rewind the cassette. Yes young people, really!
Car stereos
If you were lucky enough to have a new model car in the 1990s, then you will have had a car stereo that plays ‘compact discs’ or CDs. Partial to the occasional scratch, skip and often very noisy, CD’s allowed 90s kids to be in charge of the album choice. Many would even have to detach the front of the stereo and bring it into the house to prevent theft.
Cigarette lighters and ashtrays
We have now waved goodbye to the inbuilt cigarette lighter and in car smoking, mostly. This is probably for the best as you’d press a button and a glowing hot piece of metal would pop up, ready to light a cigarette or set the car interior on fire. Not the safest to handle while driving either. Along with the cigarette lighter was the ashtray, a dirty pit of fag butts, chewing gum and left over cancer stick ash. Nice!
Roll down windows
In older models of cars, there weren’t electronic windows like we’re used to today. Kids in years gone by had to crank the window up and down with pure brute strength. True story! And on a cold winter morning, even Thor couldn’t open a manual window.
The trusty wheel lock
Whilst still available to buy and used by many older people still, cars today have more sophisticated security systems. Yep, ’90s kids will all have experienced wheel locks either by their own parents, or that uncle who pulled out the big yellow deterrent disc thing at every family road trip.
Broken or no air-con
Sweating in the back and rolling down windows might be a familiar memory to many, as cars typically wouldn’t have had air conditioning. On long journeys, chocolatey snacks needed to be eaten first before the car turned into a sweltering hot tin of chaos with mum or dad’s level of anger rising in line with the temperature.
