Basic Instincts: Charting once-optional equipment that’s now largely standard

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Thinking back to the ’80s and ’90s, formative years for a few of us in the Driving offices, there was no shortage of new vehicles on sale with the same equipment level as a typical Russian prison cell. Radio? That’ll be extra. An exterior mirror on the passenger side? Only if you’re  made  of money! And if sir or madam would like a fifth gear in the manual transmission of their econobox, then they’d better prepare to dig a bit deeper into their wallet.

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Facts like these are part and parcel of why most of us choose to look at the past through a set of heavily tinted rose-coloured glasses; parts of it weren’t really all that great. Gazing even further into the past will reveal cars with horsehair seats, cardboard gloveboxes, and a metal dashboard just waiting to eat your face in a crash.

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And don’t get us started on carburetors. All you old-school zealots who stand by the opinion that carbs were better conveniently forget the things would rarely work properly on a cold Canadian morning, provided only a loose approximation of proper air/fuel ratios, and contained fiddly little jets that needed to be cleaned but not before being removed with surgical precision and placed in a cardboard holder only for someone to step on that holder and send every single jet flying into the weeds.

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Perhaps that last example is strangely specific only to your author.

Nevertheless, it is true that even the most basic of today’s cars and trucks are loaded to the gunwales compared to their entry-level counterparts of yesterday. If, twenty years ago, anyone had dared suggest they could buy a brand new Chevy hatchback equipped with wi-fi and other tech for roughly $10,000 they’d be eyed with the same level of suspicion one would give to a pack of red peppers that has suddenly appeared in your beer fridge out in the garage.

We’ve assembled a rogue’s gallery of equipment and features which were once optional but are now commonly found even on the cheapest of vehicles. Buying a base model vehicle used to be a rolling advertisement that its owner was tighter than two coats of paint and didn’t mind sweatin’ to the oldies in a car with no air conditioning. No longer. If we’ve missed an option or feature you feel should be included on this list, be sure to chime into the comments below.

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Air Conditioning

Let’s start with the item we just mentioned. It is exceedingly difficult to find a new car on sale in Canada without air conditioning these days, though there are a few notable exceptions including the base model Chevy mentioned a couple of paragraphs earlier. Binning the A/C permits GM to maintain the near-$10k price point of its Spark LS, and they’re obviously selling enough of the things if the trim has not been broomed by pencil-necked accountants.

Another outlier in the comfort wars? Jeep, with its least-expensive Wrangler. Notice we said ‘least-expensive’ and not ‘cheap’, since the Sport trim starts just shy of $40,000 without air conditioning . Why someone would pay forty large for a vehicle with no conditioned air is beyond your author’s comprehension. It is easily fitted for the sum of $1200. Barring these two examples, air conditioning has proliferated like rice at a wedding; even the budget Mitsubishi Mirage has this feature as standard equipment.

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Backup Cameras

Chalk this one up more to government legislation than a desire on the part of automakers to imbue their cars with more stuff. Since the middle of 2018, all new vehicles sold in Canada weighing less than 9800lbs (read: just about every non-commercial rig) needs to have a backup camera that shows an aft view when the driver selects reverse gear.

Rearward visibility came under scrutiny after statistic appeared suggesting far too many people were being injured or killed by reversing vehicles. In fact, any number more than zero is too many, making this one of the few areas of government decree with which your author is onboard. Plus, it helps the Type A personalities among the population reverse their car into a space at the mall with exacting precision.

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Power Windows

If gubbmint decree is the best friend of a backup camera, then economies of scale is the sweetheart to power windows. In huge manufacturing scenarios such as auto assembly, time means money. Investors like it when a car company is profitable, so if the factory can crank out more examples of a high-dollar machine by deploying some sort of efficiency, you can bet your bottom dollar they will enact that change — even if it means equipping every car with a feature which was once an option.

Even in highly automated assembly environments, streamlining the type of door to be fitted on a particular model can produce major savings — often more than enough to cover the cost of fitting power windows to all the cars instead of a select few. There’s no need to design two different interior door cards, two different armrest styles (manual crank vs power buttons), and no need to train people (or code robots) to install two completely different sets of window regulators.

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Cruise Control

Sometimes, digital technologies permit carmakers to include or offer features that would have once added an exorbitant cost to the bottom line of a vehicle. Modern cars are now frequently fitted with electronic throttle controls, for example, making the modulation of power a matter of just a few lines of computer code. These systems often work with other computer-driven items, such as speed sensors and traction controls, to modulate the car’s speed after the driver has mashed the ‘set’ button on the steering wheel.

Compare this to the amount of headache required to develop a cruise control system before all these electronic controls. It wasn’t uncommon for vehicles to require a second throttle cable, electric motors on the carburetor to adjust butterfly valves, and adjustments made via vacuum controls. The latter was a convenient take on technology of the day but also a scourge on humanity, since effective operation required the use of sealed rubber hoses that dried out over time causing air leaks which led to inconsistent speed — the whole point of cruise control in the first place.