The science of ergonomics didn’t really exist in 1928.
The cabin of a car from that era was a chaotic place: dashboards had dials sited wherever was convenient for the plumbing or cabling they required, switches were scattered with the same expedience and there was still no convention for pedal placement.
Alvis’s FA 12/50, apart from its surprising feature of front-wheel drive, is typical of the time. Autocar’s then sports editor, Sammy Davis, raced one at Le Mans in 1928 and had to wrestle with an accelerator pedal placed between those for clutch and footbrake, while the steering wheel was so close to his chest that croissants had to stay right off the 24 Hours menu. I know; I’ve driven it.
A semblance of planning started to appear in the 1930s. The accelerator was generally to be found on the right, and there was a move towards placing the main instruments in front of the driver, where they could be seen at an easy glance. Britain’s car makers seemed oddly resistant to this trend, however – some of them maintaining a symmetrical dash design, with central instruments, into the 1950s and even beyond.
Dashboards in many early cars were made of wood, because it was strong yet easily shaped. Seats were often clad in leather because it was durable and readily available, but these materials underwent a change in status as the decades passed. Synthetic and mass-produced substitutes became the norm, the brown Bakelite dashboard of a Morris 8 Series E being an early example, while the traditional substances took on a new role in upmarket cars, suggesting solidity, craftsmanship and an adherence to the certainty of old values.
It was during the 1960s that wood ceased to be a structural element of a dashboard, one exception being the Lotus Elan, whose veneered plank not only anchored the steering column but also contributed significantly to the fibreglass body’s stiffness. Wood became mere decoration instead, and often it wasn’t even real (Ford’s 1990s Timberlex is a fine example). It’s worth noting, incidentally, that cars that were both rapid and upmarket seldom had wooden dashes back in the 1960s, as a contemporary Ferrari, Aston or Jaguar E-Type will show.
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Thick pillars, poor
Thick pillars, poor visibility, the loss of any sense of the extremities of the car, claustrophobic cabins - these are current cars' biggest failings.
Volvo experimented on lattice structure for the A pillar but it came to nothing. Instead we rely on cameras. Electronics give you infomation about the outside world, not your eyes.
As 289 commented above, compare the beautifully designed and crafted cabin of the W111 SE Convertible with the vulgar cabin of the current S class Convertible shows how far automative art has fallen.
Car Interiors
The Mercedes-Benz SEL Cab and the Ferrari 250 GTL are two examples of automotive art and hark back to an age when style was everything in premium brands. Contrast this with todays juke box lit/iPad gargoyles. Progress.....I dont think so!
"The science of ergonomics
"The science of ergonomics didnt really exist in 1928". It doesn't exist now for an increasing number of manufacturers, with the obsession for touchscreens. Fine for all those intricate driver mode settings, but how can it be good for driver safety to have to access climate and basic audio through menus on a screen. The concern for minimalism shouldn't take precedence in a car interior, but, as ever, its encouraged by motoring journalists, who criticise the number of buttons, even when there hardly are any. On a seperate note, its nice to see companies such as Mercedes bringing back leather look vinyl seating...
Is there any evidence...
...of accident-rates increasing as the number of cars with dashboard touchscreens increases?
I disagree about the leather-look thing. If it's leather it should look like leather; if it's vinyl it shouldn't.