Automotive style fads that are well and truly consigned to history

If you wore a perfumed wig in the days of Shakespeare or danced the Charleston during the 1920s you were under the influence of a fad. The automotive world is a wonderful place to go looking for fads. We all want our cars to look and maybe sound different from the one next to it and there have been thousands of inventions spanning this century and the one before that were intended to 'personalise' motor vehicles.

To constitute a fad in the automotive world, an item or activity has to exist for purely illogical reasons. It must provide little or no practical benefit, span a wide range of vehicles, be adopted world-wide and survive for years - sometimes decades.

Items that constitute a fad may come from the motorsporting world or a vehicle manufacturer's back-room. Movies and music can hasten adoption of fads and today that might extend to the influences of online gaming. Car owners lock onto fads in the belief they make vehicles appear fast, luxurious or expensive when in reality they are none of those things. So were you ever in a cheer squad for any of these ancient or relatively modern fads?

They have to be the most obvious automotive fad of all; influencing the shape of cars built during the course of three decades, leaping across continents and adopted by virtually all of the world's vehicle manufacturers. The first fin appeared on a 1940s Cadillac and was inspired by World War 2 fighter aircraft. By the 1960s they had been fitted to millions of cars across the USA, Europe, Japan and even Australia. Vestigial fins survived into the 1970s and were generally regarded as a stylistic device with no practical value. Not true. The Jaguar's Le Mans-winning D Type is very likely the most famous finned racer of all but there were plenty of others. Even today in the 400km/h world of endurance racing, 'shark fins' to aid stability are in common use.

The Beach Boys drove their '34 model to Surf City and television's Brady Bunch had one almost continually sitting in their driveway, however vehicles with wooden body panelling never did huge business outside of the USA. Bodies with wooden frames were fitted by Ford to its early station wagons; a cost-saving measure by the canny Henry Ford who just happened to own huge forests close to his Michigan assembly plants. Other US brands followed Ford's example, building the equivalent of today's SUVs. There were also timber-panelled sport coupes and family sedans, although sometimes the 'wood-work' was mocked up in plastic. Britain saw several brands including Morris and Standard slash the cost of their 'estate' cars by making the rear body framing from timber but Australia showed little interest in the concept. That was until Ford followed the parent company's lead and built a few hundred 1963-65 Falcon Squires with chunks of timber-patterned fibreglass bolted to their flanks.

No sports car of the 1930s-60s was complete without a set of gleaming - usually chromed - wire-spoked wheels. Plenty of these cars survive and spoke-wheel classics from back then still entertain owners for an entire day every few months with a ritual known as 'cleaning the *#^@ wires'. Little wonder that alloy rims would during the 1970s overwhelm the market for wire wheels, however they remained in production to keep cars that had them on the road. However they no longer would be standard on new cars or even an option. Until recently that is. Thanks to US suppliers like Dayton and Tru-Spoke, the wire wheel has made a comeback with sizes and styles in keeping with low-slung, highly-embellished - or 'blinged' - vehicles. Rim diameters run to a massive 24 inches and yes, gold plating is available.

At around the time that people were wearing pants with cuffs large enough to obscure their shoes, cars were also acquiring extensions. The so-called 'guard flares' were usually rudimentary sections of plastic or fibreglass intended to keep tyres legally covered and avoid attention from passing policemen. The first 'flared' cars to achieve popularity in Australia were Cooper S Minis, followed by Holden's V8-engined Torana SL/R5000. In the USA, extensions were fitted mainly to off-road 4x4s but it was the Japanese who were mad for bolt-on mudguard extensions. They were a feature of Nissan's early Skylines and the ones used by Toyota's early-1980s Supra made it look so steroidal it should have been chucking drunks out of a low-end Tokyo nightspot. Flares are still apparent in automotive design but today the swollen wheel-arches that enclose an oversized wheels are integral to the vehicle's structure, not a cheap add-on.

If you've ever admired the swirls and colours that occur when oil encounters a damp road you will have witnessed just some of the visual tricks performed when microscopic aluminium flakes coated with magnesium fluoride and chromium come into contact with automotive paint. As light hits the painted surface from different angles, the colours swirl and shift, turning from blue or purple to greens and shades of gold. The coating was devised in the USA and for all its intrinsic fascination and beauty has come to be regarded as more trouble than it's worth. Downsides include the cost - upwards of $1000 per litre for paint alone - and the difficulty of repairing small areas of damage without stripping and repainting the entire vehicle.

Using leather to weatherproof the timber roof on a coach was a long-held trick of the carriage building game and replicated by another famous old innovator, Henry Ford, when trying to add some class to his Model A coupe. Riley in the UK used a similar ploy but to cut costs and make the feature available in various colours, roof coverings after the 1950s were made in vinyl. By the 1970s there was barely a mainstream brand worldwide that wasn't offering vinyl roof coverings across its model range; saving on paint and body sealant in the process. Problem was, the vinyl usually had seams which leaked and because the metal below often hadn't been properly finished the roof panels would rust faster than a sardine can on a salt pan.

Those in the business of selling cars know that every square centimetre of a vehicle plays a part in attracting buyers and that includes the tyres. That more correctly should read 'tires' because America was the place where colour became the nemesis of the black and boring tyre wall. White rubber tyres were available on some early vehicles but they didn't stay white for long. During the 1920s broad 'whitewalls' that covered almost the entire tyre wall became available. However they were difficult to keep clean and easily damaged. By the 1960s they were being replaced by 'banded' whitewalls with just a thin a coloured strip embedded into the tyre structure. From there the process of adding different shades became easy; red, yellow even blue-walled tyres became available for most of the US 'muscle car' period and migrating to Australia in the late 1960s with the launch of the Holden Monaro.

Action to rid the planet of waste plastics should perhaps expand to include a range of useless items that have been attached to motor vehicles during the past 50 years. Since the 1970s there has existed a small but significant industry devoted to producing chunks of polypropylene, fibreglass or even fabricated metals for attachment to vehicles that would not ever be fast enough to require aerodynamic aids. While it is true that such devices have a place in the automotive world, that place is on a racing circuit keeping cars stable at very high speeds. The items sold to gullible enthusiasts do nothing except add weight, create drag and increase fuel consumption. From there they head to land-fill, having been crunched against tall gutters or reshaped by shopping centre speed bumps.

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