Since Autocar has been around since 1895, we’ve covered nearly all of them in detail across our history. But in nearly every case, a particular innovation that moved the automotive world on a step arrived in one particular production car for the first time.

In this latest edition of our long-running series, we’ll tell you about the first car to have a V8, to have an electronic parking brake, air conditioning, and even that tiny but oh-so-useful arrow which reminds you which side your fuel filler cap is on. For this update we’ve dug up a whole bunch of new and interesting innovations to savour and dropped a few of the less notable.

As usual, we’ve rated all of them with a groundbreaker score out of 10 – this rates the long-term impact of the technology: the higher the number, the greater the impact. It’s not a rating of the car itself, or how successful it was; indeed, some of these cars proved too ahead of their time. But they all started something, and usually something that made driving better. We salute them all. It’s quite a journey, so climb aboard: