Throughout the history of cars, just about everyone has driven a car at one point in their life, and many people have cars. The only thing that changes over the years are the different car fads that we seem to go through. A fad can go through a society very quickly or can stick around for a while, and while many people don’t think about it, the auto industry has had a lot of random car fads. This list goes over the different car fads that we have witnessed.
One of the more recent fads are spinning rims, aka Spinners. Spinners were created in the 1980’s and sadly, are still seen today. A spinner is a rim where the inner part of it continues to spin even though the vehicle has stopped. Sounds kind of, ridiculous, yet very expensive since getting a full set of spinners can cost you thousands of dollars and all they do is spin. No other bells and whistles, just shiny metal spinning. Awesome. They may have been awesome when they were invited, but hopefully this fad that has stuck around will hopefully spin itself out soon.
The “Baby on Board” signs are another fad that started in the 1980’s, but unlike spinners, they aren’t seen as much anymore. Some people think that it was originally created because an infant was killed in a car crash because he wasn’t found in time, but that’s just not the case. Michael Lerner created and manufactured these signs because a friend actually saw something like it in Europe. So, after developing Safety 1st, Lerner manufactured these signs to hopefully warn other drivers that there was an infant in the car. The signs took off like wild fire and could be seen in just about every American family who had a baby’s car.
A fad to scream about is the train horn substitute for a traditional car horn. This is a pretty recent fad that has a lot of people yelling and screaming at the possibly teenage driver who fixed up their car. This addition can be pretty expensive just to change the car horn. A lot of teenagers upgrade their car with this feature, mainly to get reactions out of people. They were originally created by Gabby Szuster who decided to put a set of train horns under his tractor-trailer truck. Luckily these have kind of dropped out of rotation. But for those who still have this addition, please get rid of it or you may be seeing more “no honking” laws in your town.
Another fad that wasn’t really annoying was putting bobbleheads on the dashboard of your car. Bobbleheads like what we have grown to know and love today started to make their appearance in the 1950’s, however, when they started showing up in cars isn’t really known. Dog, cat, and even sports figures were placed on the dashboard of cars, not really sure why except for maybe then you had someone to agree with you that you had to run that red light because you may not have stopped in time. Which if that’s the case, hopefully your Chihuahua bobblehead nodded yes when you asked it if you needed auto insurance.
