Trendy vehicles are packed to the gunwales with delicate options which are designed to enhance the motive force and passengers’ consolation and security whereas being as unobtrusive as potential. In ye olden days these items had been extra apparent — the driver-facing, fender-mounted flip sign indicators on 70s-era land yachts, for instance, or energy retractable radio antennas — however at the moment stuff like that is so built-in and automatic as to be almost invisible except you are searching for it. Considered one of these options, a rarity as of late except you drive a automobile Of A Sure Age, is the windshield shade band.
If, like me, you got here of age within the days when vehicles had been nonetheless cool (and would kill you with none hesitation), you would possibly keep in mind how automobiles as soon as had a broad deep blue or inexperienced tinted stripe throughout the highest of the windshield. That is the basic shade band. It was designed to work together with flip down solar visors to maintain the solar out of the motive force’s eyes and a number of the warmth off the passengers. When the solar was at a sure angle, particularly in the summertime, the great previous shade band might be a life saver.
You do not actually see windshield shade bands anymore, although, at the least not on most model new vehicles. Why is that, have you ever ever questioned?
We simply do not want ’em anymore
The rationale that carmakers do not actually do windshield shade bands anymore is a fairly easy one, and the identical one which’s made issues like in-car cigarette lighters, steel whip antennas, and handbook transmissions uncommon as hen’s tooth on new vehicles: obsolescence. The regular march of time and enhancements in glass expertise have relegated the great previous shade band to the dustbin of historical past.
Trendy security glass is so significantly better than it was even just a few years in the past, not to mention 15 or 20 years. New automobiles have highly effective anti-glare coatings embedded in the whole windshield these days, not simply on the high. That is why new windshields have delicate inexperienced or blue coloring. The supplies utilized in fashionable auto glass present higher UV safety and warmth regulation, too. The power to make use of new, high-tech supplies all through a automobile’s complete greenhouse — as an alternative of only a six-inch stripe on the windshield — was an enormous enchancment, and the shade band all however disappeared.
So, there you may have it. That cool blue or inexperienced stripe on the high of an previous automobile’s windshield is just a few previous timey manufacturing facility tinting meant to maintain you feeling and looking cool on the highway.
