It's a couch-mobile
On lumbar support, smoking habits, and why the luxury cars of the 1970s fall short of the mid-range cars of today
Some of the most opulent and over-the-top vehicles of the 1970s featured interiors that paired velour with overstuffed seats. At the time, people undoubtedly thought of them as luxurious. But they were being driven at a time when gasoline contained lead and death rates on the roads were 80% higher than they are today. (The death rate has fallen by even more, when measured in passenger-miles traveled.)
■ Sometimes a veneer of extravagance is really just a way to cloak inadequacy in the fundamentals. What good is an overstuffed velour interior compared with heated seats with lumbar support and stain resistance?
■ Besides, any car from the 1970s was likely to smell of cigarette smoke: 37.4% of American adults smoked in 1970, compared with 13.7% today. A car with one driver and one passenger had basically coin-flip odds of containing at least one smoker. (And smoke sticks to velour.)
■ It's often remarked that any middle-class American lives with certain advantages completely unavailable even to J. Pierpont Morgan or Andrew Carnegie in their day: Both died before the discovery of penicillin, the arrival of jet aircraft, or the invention of the digital computer.
■ But the shortcomings of even the most expensive production Cadillac of the 1970s compared with the features of even a mid-range Kia today (Air bags! Dual-zone climate control! Touch-screen displays! Hybrid power! Self-parking!) ought to be a reminder that oft-maligned capitalism manages to make a lot of things better even within the span of a lifetime.
