DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

You don’t need to spend a month at the Natural History Museum to study evolution. Perusing a biography of the automobile industry highlights one of the clearest examples. When the first cars were built they didn’t include windows. There generally was a roof of some sort…and no doubt the occupants had some way to try to block out inclement weather as they bounced down the rutted and sloppy dirt roads of the time. Umbrellas come to mind.

Eventually car bodies became sturdy enough to support factory-installed windows. Early models required they be lifted up and locked into place…or freed of their support posts and lowered to a full open position.

The next development resulted in windows that could actually be cranked up and lowered — and could stop at any point in-between. I imagine most drivers and passengers had arms like Popeye’s from the relative difficulty in operating them.

It was only a matter of time before technology made it possible to “let somebody else do it” and power windows were invented. There are as many stories concerning when the first power windows were used as the amount of stories I told my parents about why I didn’t come home the night before. However, heavy research from my poor, but hard-working research staff indicates the 1940 Package 180-model was the first. Within a year or two any number of upscale cars like Lincoln and Chrysler had themand after them the European Luxury vehicles. (However, they had a war to wrap up and millions of boot-wearing foreigners to shoo off their continent — not to mention removing a couple million tons of rubble — courtesy of the 8th Air Force.

Unarguably an option for many years, power windows became standard on the majority of the world’s vehicles, as did power brakes, cruise control and power door locks. However, there seemed to be something lacking and nobody could quite figure out what it was. They should have asked me…I knew the answer all along and I’ll give it to you in the form of a question: “If there was such a thing as one-touch, express-down power windows…WOULDN’T IT MAKE SENSE TO HAVE AN EXPRESS UP SWITCH AS WELL? Why should the downward position have all the glory? Granted, it’s not as if you had to crank the window up. But you had to hold the windows button in the up position until it completed the cycle…and even then it’s human nature to flick it a few more times to make sure it was all the way up.

There have been deaths related to victims (primarily small children) getting their heads lodged as the window is being automatically raised and that understandably made some shy away from depending on a self-functioning relay switch to keep their families safe. But again, technology caught up and a foolproof one-touch-down and one-touch-up function has been developed. Yet it has not been universally adopted…nor is there any rhyme or reason as to what vehicles get them.

You can pretty much take it to the bank that most European and Asian imports will have them, as well as some higher-end domestics. However, I’ve tested $40,000+ vehicles that don’t have them and $20,000 vehicles that do. Go figure!

Let’s look at this thing abstractly. Would you like to have a job where you could only work your way down…with no chance of any raises? Of course not! Then why should some poorone-touch control switch be subjected to the same future? If it can be trusted to lower the window with one touch then it should be given the opportunity of doing the same in reverse. Think of it as a round trip without requiring a Sunday night stay.