Voice synthesisers, headlight wipers, a 'serviceklappe'... where's all the weird car tech gone?

I’ve talked before about my theory that old, boring cars are secretly the most interesting cars, so I decided to put my modest admission fee where my mouth is and head to the UK’s most genteel car event, Festival of the Unexceptional.

It’s the perfect antidote to the algorithm-driven, notification-riddled rush of modern life as people drift idly around the grounds of a manor house in the sunshine, ogling mid-1990s hatchbacks. The only raised voice I heard was when someone shouted to inform their friend that they’d spotted a Talbot Samba, in red no less.

Like most attendees, I was on a mission to find a specific car from my own personal history. In my case, it was tracking down a Renault 25, the car whose back seats I spent hours sitting in on long drives to the South of France for family holidays.

The reason I loved that car was its voice synthesiser, which would report on issues like blown bulbs and improperly shut doors. Alright it sounded like someone was drowning a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell, but to me that car was KITT from Knight Rider and my dad was David Hasselhoff. Albeit with mercifully looser-fitting jeans.

Seeing a Renault 25 again, with all the tactile memories of the switchgear and upholstery in that Gandini-designed interior flooding back, it got me thinking about all the bits of weird, unique 20th century technology we’ve allowed to be taken from us in modern cars, replaced by jumped up AI versions of the Microsoft Word paperclip.

Take the tiny headlight wipers on an old BMW E30 wagon I stumbled across. Alright, back in the 1980s most headlights were like two candles in a howling gale and nowadays a set of Xenons on full beam could slice a man in half, but nothing says ‘ultimate driving machine’ like extracting every last lumen out of your full beams. And let’s be honest, adding tiny wipers couldn’t possibly make the front ends of the current crop of BMWs look any worse.

I was also rather taken by the Skoda Felicia Fun’s novel ability to switch from a two to four seater. This banana yellow pickup had unique folding rear seats which were both practical for managing bootspace and an effective way to threaten the kids with being left by the side of the road if they were bickering too much in the back.

Finally there was the Audi A2’s ‘Serviceklappe’ (pictured above), a convenient panel that could be popped open to top up oil and washer fluid without having to lift the whole bonnet. This minimised the amount of road filth that ended up all over your fingers and thus reduced the chances of you painting your face like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando when scratching your nose.

Sure, in modern cars we can navigate via GPS to our destinations, avoiding traffic jams as they occur, while listening to the sum total of all human musical output, but think of the things we’ve lost...