Currently reading: 90 years of the Autocar road test: How interiors have changed
Today’s cars’ cabins are an extension of the modern home, but it wasn’t always so

The science of ergonomics didn’t really exist in 1928.

The cabin of a car from that era was a chaotic place: dashboards had dials sited wherever was convenient for the plumbing or cabling they required, switches were scattered with the same expedience and there was still no convention for pedal placement.

Alvis’s FA 12/50, apart from its surprising feature of front-wheel drive, is typical of the time. Autocar’s then sports editor, Sammy Davis, raced one at Le Mans in 1928 and had to wrestle with an accelerator pedal placed between those for clutch and footbrake, while the steering wheel was so close to his chest that croissants had to stay right off the 24 Hours menu. I know; I’ve driven it.

A semblance of planning started to appear in the 1930s. The accelerator was generally to be found on the right, and there was a move towards placing the main instruments in front of the driver, where they could be seen at an easy glance. Britain’s car makers seemed oddly resistant to this trend, however – some of them maintaining a symmetrical dash design, with central instruments, into the 1950s and even beyond.

Dashboards in many early cars were made of wood, because it was strong yet easily shaped. Seats were often clad in leather because it was durable and readily available, but these materials underwent a change in status as the decades passed. Synthetic and mass-produced substitutes became the norm, the brown Bakelite dashboard of a Morris 8 Series E being an early example, while the traditional substances took on a new role in upmarket cars, suggesting solidity, craftsmanship and an adherence to the certainty of old values.

Interiors 043

It was during the 1960s that wood ceased to be a structural element of a dashboard, one exception being the Lotus Elan, whose veneered plank not only anchored the steering column but also contributed significantly to the fibreglass body’s stiffness. Wood became mere decoration instead, and often it wasn’t even real (Ford’s 1990s Timberlex is a fine example). It’s worth noting, incidentally, that cars that were both rapid and upmarket seldom had wooden dashes back in the 1960s, as a contemporary Ferrari, Aston or Jaguar E-Type will show.

Back to top

In mainstream cars, leather was largely ousted, via a cloth- backed, varnished material called Rexine, by vinyl. Adopted in the 1950s, this modern substance was enthusiastically embraced by US manufacturers which exploited the futuristic look it could offer, with more intricate panel markings formed by welds instead of stitching, and even metallised colours. But to this day the default finish for vinyl, and its other plastic relatives, is to attempt to look like leather, sometimes achieved with uncanny accuracy, often not. Meanwhile, cloth trim has always been with us, with increasingly colourful patterns from the 1970s and the plushness of faux- suede Alcantara from the 1980s.

As for the plan of the interior itself, the average width from driver’s door to front passenger’s has got ever greater over the years. Pre-war car bodies were narrow, often set well within the inside faces of the wheels and tapering towards a proud, upright radiator. The post- war ‘full-width’ look pulled the doors outwards, beyond the wheels, allowing space for the 1950s and ’60s fashion, US-inspired, for a bench front seat. It could accommodate three people at a pinch, provided the gearlever had been moved to the steering column. Ford’s Consuls, Zephyrs and Zodiacs offered the archetypal front bench.

Hot on the heels of the wider body came thinner roof pillars, a lower scuttle and a massively improved view out through wider, deeper windows. Windscreen pillars got very thin in the 1960s and ’70s (look out from a BMW 2002 for a perfect panorama), but first fashions changed, bringing back a sense of bodily substance, and then ever- tightening safety rules caused pillars to thicken massively. Combine that with today’s penchant for a high waistline and letterbox-size rear window, and we’re practically back to 1930s cabin claustrophobia.

The same trend applies to interior space, even though humans are, on average, rather larger than they were half way through the last century. Huge rear leg room was once commonplace, helped by placingthe rear seat far back between the wheels, but as luggage compartments grew and wheelbases began to shrink, rear room got squeezed. Today, many cars are no roomier than their ancestors two or three model changes ago, despite being longer, wider and taller, and they also often have less interior storage space in their smaller door pockets, console cubbies and gloveboxes.

Back to top

Safety is the reason, causing doors to be both thicker and set further from seats, and crash structures to take up more space as they encroach into the boot and dashboard. The electric parking brake is one attempt to regain storage space between the seats, but it brings its own problems. We are unlikely to see again such a miracle of packaging as the BMC Mini of 1959, in which four people could travel comfortably in an interior that occupied 80% of the car’s 3.05m length. Nor do buyers any longer seem interested in the idea, invented by Renault in the 1980s for its Espace, of a one-box MPV whose middle and rear seat rows could be removed to create a van.

Interiors 061

Gearlevers have become shorter and, thanks to power steering, steering wheels are smaller and driving positions more laid-back. Instruments, once off-the-shelf generics, started to become a part of a car’s specific design from the 1950s, again led by the US, and particular marques began to develop their own dial-looks, such as the vertical ‘thermometer’ speedo of a 1960s fintail Mercedes, or the crisp clarity of a 1980s BMW. Digital dashes arrived in that decade, went out of fashion and then returned, as real needles gave way to virtual images on increasingly sophisticated screens.

Switchgear became more logically laid out to take account of how often they were used and how quickly the driver needed them: Rover’s 1963 P6 was an early example of functions moved from the dashboard or even the floor to stalks on the steering column, while Vauxhall shape-coded its switches so they could be identified by touch. Then in the 2000s BMW invented iDrive, through which many functions could be controlled by a single knob and a screen, and everything changed.

Back to top

Now, no modern car is complete without a least a piece of that revolutionary multimedia interface. A car’s dashboard displaying the functions of a mobile telephone: in 1928, not even science fiction had thought that possible.

Read more

Renault Megane RS review

Paris motor show 2010: Lotus Elan

Electric Jaguar E-Type Zero to enter production

Join the debate

Comments
5
Add a comment…
abkq 24 October 2018

Thick pillars, poor

Thick pillars, poor visibility, the loss of any sense of the extremities of the car, claustrophobic cabins - these are current cars' biggest failings.

Volvo experimented on lattice structure for the A pillar but it came to nothing. Instead we rely on cameras. Electronics give you infomation about the outside world, not your eyes.

As 289 commented above, compare the beautifully designed and crafted cabin of the W111 SE Convertible with the vulgar cabin of the current S class Convertible shows how far automative art has fallen.

289 23 October 2018

Car Interiors

The Mercedes-Benz SEL Cab and the Ferrari 250 GTL are two examples of automotive art and hark back to an age when style was everything in premium brands. Contrast this with todays juke box lit/iPad gargoyles. Progress.....I dont think so!

catnip 23 October 2018

"The science of ergonomics

"The science of ergonomics didnt really exist in 1928".  It doesn't exist now for an increasing number of manufacturers, with the obsession for touchscreens.  Fine for all those intricate driver mode settings, but how can it be good for driver safety to have to access climate and basic audio through menus on a screen. The concern for minimalism shouldn't take precedence in a car interior, but, as ever, its encouraged by motoring journalists, who criticise the number of buttons, even when there hardly are any. On a seperate note, its nice to see companies such as Mercedes bringing back leather look vinyl seating...

beechie 23 October 2018

Is there any evidence...

catnip wrote:

"The science of ergonomics didnt really exist in 1928".  It doesn't exist now for an increasing number of manufacturers, with the obsession for touchscreens.  Fine for all those intricate driver mode settings, but how can it be good for driver safety to have to access climate and basic audio through menus on a screen. The concern for minimalism shouldn't take precedence in a car interior, but, as ever, its encouraged by motoring journalists, who criticise the number of buttons, even when there hardly are any. On a seperate note, its nice to see companies such as Mercedes bringing back leather look vinyl seating...

...of accident-rates increasing as the number of cars with dashboard touchscreens increases?

I disagree about the leather-look thing. If it's leather it should look like leather; if it's vinyl it shouldn't.