When my Chevrolet Bel Air was new (1958), it came from the
factory with a cigarette lighter and an ashtray. That’s not exactly shocking
news, since virtually every car sold in American that year had the same equipment.
The 1958 Cadillac Eldorado came standard with 2 cigarette lighters in the
front, and 2 more in the back. Air conditioning, however, was an extra cost
option. More than 50% of the adult males, and nearly 30% of adult women, smoked
cigarettes.
At this point, you’re probably wonder what made me think about
this topic, and the answer is simple.
Robert Mitchum
The same year that my Chevy was sold to its first owner,
Robert Mitchum produced, wrote, and starred in a movie titled “Thunder Road”.
One of my friends in Wisconsin recently sent me a clip of part of the movie.
The story was inspired by a real incident that occurred in 1952, when a driver
transporting moonshine crashed and died while being pursued by the police.
https://historygarage.com/birth-death-automobile-lighter/
If you would like to see the clip that I watched, just click
on the link below:
Thunder Road Asheville - YouTube
One thing that caught my attention is that Mitchum used a book of matches to light a cigarette while driving his 1950 Ford, which got me wondering why he simply didn’t use the cigarette lighter, and there IS a logical reason for his actions.
The car did not have one.
So, my curiosity got the best of me, and I tried to find out
when cars first came equipped with cigarette letters.
Although the closest patent for the design we’ve come to know
hit the patent office in 1919, the first car lighters made an appearance long
before the Model T.
The inventor of the electrical cigar lighter, Fredrich Wilhelm,
registered his invention in the 1880s. It wasn’t necessarily a car lighter, nor
was it for cigarettes. Back then one smoked a pipe or a cigar. It was a
stinkier time.
Cigarette smoking didn’t popularize until after the Great War.
WWI was when the cigarette companies first put the sticks into rations,
triggering a smoking trend and marketing strategy that would stick around for
several wars.
In 1919, J.M. Morris registered a design for a spring loaded
“electrical lighting device for cigars and the like.” It wasn’t much different
than what I had in my high school car, a knob with a heating element on the
business end. You would plug it into a 12v socket until the heating element
glowed.
Then, in 1956, someone coiled the heating elements, a
design patent submitted by L.E. Fenn.
The Fenn design was so popular, it made it into not only cars
and trucks as a standard, but boats and general consoles too. You read
that right, from cars to consoles.
If you worked someplace, especially a military installation,
where they had large equipment for tracking stuff, there was a lighter and an
ashtray somewhere on said equipment for tracking stuff.
The cigarette companies made sure of it. They couldn’t put
matches or Bic lighters in everyone’s pockets, but they could play Johnny
Lighter-seed to the world. Heaven forbid someone would have to search for fire
when he wanted to light up.
There were so many lighter sockets, in the 1980s, someone had
the bright idea to retrofit and repurpose the lighter socket.
It was the dawn of portable electronic device, but mostly the
first car phones. Those sockets put 12v of power right there, no wiring
necessary. By that time, cigarettes were getting a bad rap, so many had quit
the habit.
That open socket was asking for it.
The crazy demise of the car lighter was a multifaceted attack.
First, all those health officials started saying cigarettes caused cancer and
heart disease. That got a lot of folks to stop smoking.
Then, portable CD players and cell phones started kicking out
the lighters, taking their place. Drivers would move the lighter to the
unused ashtray until they would lose the part altogether. Somewhere, L.E. Fenn
flipped in his grave.
The car lighter market destabilized so much, it became more
costly for manufacturers to install them in cars, pushing the lighter from the
standard features category into supplemental one. You had to ask and pay more
for a car lighter.
What’s even more ironic, today’s cars, even economy versions,
come with more than one socket, but not necessarily a lighter. This is less
common outside the United States and Canada, but slowly changing elsewhere.
The car lighter may not be dead yet, but its days are numbered.
Even as cigar smoking regains its clout as an acceptable form of smoking,
car manufacturers continue to eliminate the coiled car lighter.
Modern cars come with at least one USB port, and at least one
socket that could be used to power a cigarette lighter, but you’ll need to go
to Walmart, and a few other outlets, if you want to have a cigarette lighter in
your vehicle. However, it would be impossible to find a modern car that still
had an ashtray.
I sold new and used cars for 7 years, and found that very few of
the cars that I took in on trade had been smoked in. The most reliable
statistic about smoker’s cars is that are worth, on average, about 9% less than
cars that are smoke free.
There are more than 4000 chemicals in secondhand smoke, and nicotine levels are 30 times higher in smoker's cars than ones which are tobacco free. Car dealers use a variety of chemical to remove tobacco smells from cars, but sometime it takes more than one treatment to make the vehicle smell fresh again. Even if people don’t smoke in their cars, its also wise not to transport your dog in the car, since canine scents are also a bit difficult to get rid of.
https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/smoking-harmful-to-your-cars-resale-health-25412
By the way, in case you are wondering which other once common features
are almost non-existent, consider this:
You can still buy new vehicles with manual windows:
https://www.cars.com/articles/yes-you-can-still-buy-a-new-car-with-manual-windows-
