When you pull into a classic car show, your eyes will be greeted by gleaming chrome and polished paint. The carefully tended Classic Cars at Shows are lovely to behold, and that’s half the fun.
But a good classic car meet is more than just a show-and-shine. It’s like wandering onto the set of an epic 1950s movie that still needs to be made.
Retro caravans and Elvis impersonators also tend to appear. And, everywhere, inexplicable men.
But today, the kinds of automobile accessories and ubiquitous cock-ups that make you stuff a double-take. Yes, I’m talking about those furry dice dangling from the mirror, those stubby little metal thingies sticking out by the wheels, and those dolls that appear to be morphing into the bodywork.
Today’s attraction is 9 things you will see on classic entries at shows that will make you think.
9 Quirky Gimmicks You’ll Spot on Classic Cars at Shows
1. Fuzzy Dice
You’ve seen them bobbing from rearview mirrors: furry dice, the defining accessory of the classic car.
Love or hate them, hanging a pair of fuzzy treats is a rite of passage for some classic car purists, just as important as the final coat of wax.
Make a playful wager: ask the owner of such a bar what the dice mean!
Chances are, he doesn’t know. But the usual explanation is intriguing enough.
On returning home from the war, some of these pilots took their superstition into the developing culture of automobiles in the 1950s and ’60s.
For a time, fuzzy dice seemed inescapable. But like so many cultural hangovers from the 1960s, this most instantly identifiable symbol of the cursed hope that once snaked its way through US cars has fallen into the hazier domain of cliché.
2. Antenna Balls
Do you remember those slender metal rods that used to adorn cars’ bodies from pre-roof antennas? For many owners of classic vehicles, that chunk of bare metal was begging to have some personality.
But where did it come from? The gustatory fillip that is the antenna ball traces back, rather delightfully, to a fill-up. It was in the 1960s, from the mind of a mad marketer at the Union 76 gasoline chain (née ‘Chico’s Best,” famous for its station ‘Colonic Rooms, hence the blocky orange ball logo crowned with a spurting torch).
The company concluded that the most persistent exposure to its name was on car antennas.
So it devised a way to make itself a mobile marque: it produced miniature versions of its logo to be attached to your vehicle’s ear – free with every fill-up, augmenting the advertising benefit of frequent gasoline purchases with the bonanza of free mobile ads.
Drivers were enamored, and the antenna ball was soon, appropriately enough for a toy prancing at the peak of a vehicle, a full-blown fad.
In addition to the classic style, they came in every imaginable motif – Smiley faces, sports team logos, cartoon characters, you name it.
A tinyness joined the Getting-Small playbook by becoming a tiny mascot waving you on from atop your car.
Nowadays, with antennas of various shapes and sometimes no antenna at all on all but a few modern cars, you’ll see such bobbing baubles these days only on classics.
3. Taped Headlights
Imagine yourself at a performance-focused old-car show that doubles as a sort of rally-car exhibit.
You might see a few of the cars there with their headlights switched to the tape position, with a piece of tape across their headlamps, splitting them into an X-shape.
Glass headlights used to be standard. Picture yourself zooming down a dirt road on a rally stage.
All the gravel and road gunk flying around could easily break a headlight.
But don’t lose your headlights. Those projector housings can launch sharp, dangerous glass shards all over the road, just waiting to pierce the tires that follow you.
Most headlights are now fashioned from robust plastic anyway, so this tape is mostly just decoration these days, although it’s still commonly seen on classic-car rally displays.
For some of the owners, sporting this tape could be their way of imagining themselves in their car as having a rally past—or future—when perhaps the closest that old car gets to being driven is a gravel parking area.
4. Windup Keys
Fans of the Volkswagen Beetle will also need to stay tuned. Did you ever notice a monstrous windup key stuck behind a Bug? It’s not because the owner forgot to recharge his electric car (though sometimes you might wonder if classic Beetles run on anything fancier than a giant rubber band).
This silly key fob pokes fun at the Beetle’Beetle’sin some countries as a tiny, cute, plastic-toy-in-the-shape-of-a-car. It’s so it’s and simple; the gag implies that all you have to do to make it move is to wind it up.
The joke was so well received that Volkswagen themselves reveled in it, using the windup key in some of their commercials. Talk about brand identity!
One can buy windup keys in two varieties: static ones, which merely sit there and look silly, and more elaborate ones with little electric motors that cause the key to spin very slowly.
Nor are they exclusive to Beetles, as a casual drive will reveal many other small, oddballs with these outsized keys.
This charitable gesture on the owners’ part is designed to let passersby know they don’t take themselves altogether seriously and recognize the playful aspect of small, antique car ownership.
5. Car Coolers
It’s Like a warm summer day in the 1950s, and you’re driving down the highway in your new American car.
There’s a problem, though: you need to be cool. Sure, there is a cooling option, but air conditioning is an extra-cost feature available only in the most expensive models. What should a budget driver do? And so, into the car cooler (also called an ‘evaporative cooler‘ or ‘stamp ‘cooler for cars’).
You might have seen something like it at a show: it’s a cylindrical cylinder attached to the car’s window or roof.
Here’s how it worked:
The cylinder contained water. Moving air was drawn across it as you drove, picking up the water and cooling it in the process. The now-cooler air was then ventilated out to the cabin.
Was it the equivalent of modern-day A/C? It was nothing close, but on a warm day, a bit of cool air in the cabin could make the difference.
It was simple, inexpensive, and surprisingly effective – not bad for the early 1950s. When regular air conditioning took off and became economical, these route coolers disappeared from popular memory, except as period-appropriate equipment at car shows (even when the car itself is garaged in California).
It’s a tribute to those car-hacking ingenuity and a reminder of how far automotive comfort has come.
The next time you crank the A/C in your modern car, think of the drivers of yore, huffing along on their water-cooled air and praying for wind.
6. Continental Tire Kits
The Continental pressed into service a feature that many cars had in the 1930s: the extra spare permanently mounted on the body somewhere (usually the rear), but made it a stylistic statement.
They designed the Continental to have the spare built into the rear-end styling, a system that came to be called the ‘Continental tire kit.’ Soon enough, other makes and copycats clamored to follow suit.
As car designs evolved and trunks became deeper in the late 1940s and ’50s, some automakers and aftermarket offerings brought back the Continental tire kit as a styling feature by the mid-1950s.
These kits typically consisted of a tray extension affixed to the rear bumper to hold the spare at the rear of the car.
Some of these kits—being primal and practical of the 1950s—grew to cartoonish proportions, to the point where the spare tire was practically useful as a picnic table at rest stops.
Vintage Continental tire kits still populate classic car shows today.
They are often unnecessary flourishes for owners, like the proverbial extra pocket of frosting on an already decadent cake—perhaps a bit excessive but also unmistakably fabulous.
7. Yellow Headlights
Have you ever driven a classic car with yellow headlights instead of the more typical white or bluish-white? Did you think, ‘What i’ that?‘ or ‘I’ that even allowed?‘ Select yellow‘ lights’ were not only allowed for a long time but they were required for fog lights in some places and headlights up through 1993 in France – until yellow headlights were outlawed.
But, more importantly, why yellow? The explanation hinges on physics.
Yellow light is less scattered than white light, so it is less likely to be blocked by fog, dust, rain, and snow. This makes it the preferred light color of classic rally car enthusiasts.
These days, the rules are tighter in most places, and yellow fog lights are often the only allowable shade.
The yellow beams are unmistakable at classic car shows, especially those featuring prewar racing and rally cars.
For testosterone-fuelled classic car guys running amber headlights or fog lights, it’s not about function: it’s about evoking the pure competition look of their favorite cars from golden-age rally racing. And if their imaginary machine ever finds itself in a thick soup of fog one day, it’ll be ready.
8. Curb Feelers
Check out the recessed wheel wells on a classic 1950s car, for example, and you’ll see a few metal rods sticking out—these are curb feelers, responsible, as their name implies, for helping a driver ‘feel‘ to close the vehicle’s tires are to the curb.
For a car owner with a shiny chrome rim and whiteside tires, the last thing they wanted to do was scrape a wheel on the curb.
So, a warning was in order. The silver metal whiskers were like intimates who could sense danger. When they bumped into the curb, the sound of their scraping as they moved up and down alerted the driver that they needed to stop – before it was too late!
And if your car is vintage, there’s a chance it offered something a little more useful than that – optional curb feelers, one side or two.
These were popular ’50s accessories; in fact, any car of the early postwar period with those super-susceptible whitewall tires is likely to have had them right out of the showroom.
In some ways, curb feelers were the great-grandparents of today’s sensors: both serve the same function; it’s just that curb feelers accomplished this function a little more, oh, scratchily. As automotive design evolved and whitewall tires fell out of fashion, curb feelers fell mostly by the wayside.
Now, they are a period-correct accessory to classic cars, and at shows, they are a talking point and a reminder of what it was once like to parallel park without the aid of backup cameras and beeping sensors.
9. Traffic Light Viewers
One of the orneriest accessories of all, easily missed unless you’re looking closely, is that odd-looking, mirror-like thing mounted in the dashboards of many classic cars.
No, it wasn’t used to help the woman in the passenger seat do her lipstick (though it has been used for that).
Instead, it was intended to serve a more practical purpose—as a traffic light viewer, or ‘windshield prism.’
But Why would you need a special device to view a traffic light?
Because cars are built low to the ground and on the other side of the intersection.’ ‘So the lights are different,’ I’ve been before. Putting their heads together.
I remember one-night last summer when we were driving through the food-processing country in Maryland, heading home from DC. The lights back there are all industrial, with bright spots, spikes, and twinkles—the chemical signature of deodorants, steroids, pesticides, and liquid lightning.
I wondered aloud why fact and I was ory light looked the way they did. We suggest that factory engines like to see the insides of their vessels and machines.
Enter the traffic light viewer, a little prism that reflects the light of traffic signals so you can see them without twisting yourself into a corkscrew.
This was a simple solution to a very specific problem for people obsessed with ergonomics: traffic lights—literally.
By the 1940s, when windshields became bigger and angled more sharply toward the roof, these viewers became unnecessary, and manufacturers stopped making them.
But classic car shows, are a reminder of the simple ingenuity of the people who kept those cars moving.
Final Words
A selection of classic car gimmicks and accessories. From the practical to the design quirkish, the inventive marketing to the bizarrely creepy. All are vital components to the rich tapestry that is classic car culture.
Look out for the next time you’re at your show: they aren’t just jetsam but signs of automotive history, evolution in design, and the boundless ingenuity of the car-customizing crowd.
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