Author: Paul Cowland
Motoring was better when the car accessories aisle had more in it, reckons Paul Cowland.
I popped into Halfords the other day to buy a battery. And while it was a perfectly pleasant visit, and the staff were most welcoming, I couldn’t help but look wistfully at the accessories section. What was once several aisles in this great store, was now relegated to just a few hooks.
You can’t blame the nation’s favourite motoring chain, of course. They’re simply selling what people want to buy. It’s us, the unwashed motorists that have changed. And so have our cars.
You see, back in the 1970s and 80s, when my burgeoning passion for all things automotive was truly blossoming, cars were pretty basic. Heck, some of them didn’t even have radios or cigarette lighters! Meaning that if you wanted something nice, fancy, luxurious or silly, chances were you were going to have to add it yourself. Thankfully, cars were much easier and simpler to work on in those days, and on any given Sunday, the ardent motorists of your road would be out in force on their drives, adding fog lights and covers, or simply artistically spraying a little rattle-can silver over the standard wheels, before slinging the factory hubcaps and adding a racy ‘trim ring’ and centre cap.
But why stop there? In the place where Halfords now purveys fluffy pink seatbelt pads and rental-spec steering wheel covers, once stood a magnificent rack of so-called ‘go-faster’ stripes. With a roll of one of these, you could easily enhance the flanks of your Sierra with a laser-straight swage line enhancement, or more than likely, create a slightly meandering mess that you’d later peel off in disgust. With the sides sorted, you’d turn your attention to the rear window, where your ‘Backflash’ – a block-graphic sticker that told EVERYONE that your Astra Merit was actually a GTE in 14 inch high letters – resided, in garish bright red.
And the icing on the cake? A nice screw-on chrome exhaust trim, beautifully augmented by a pair of twin-earthing strips, which would dissipate static electricity from the car’s body, having been generated from road friction with the tyres, down to the ground. Otherwise, you’d sometimes get a little zap on your finger when you opened the car door, or static on your already crackly car radio. Kids today? They’ve never been electrocuted once, and they wouldn’t know their longwave from their UHF.
With the exterior looking pristine, it was time to turn your attention to the interior. A brace of beaded seat covers would add a touch of feng-shui to your cabin ambience, as well as caressing your back and buttocks during longer drives. And you just paid HOW much for the massage seat option on your 2025 G-Wagen? These also had the added bonus of making your Hyundai Stellar look like an off-duty Mini-cab between commutes.
Your left hand could stretch out to your newly-fitted graphic equaliser, ensuring that every individual frequency of the latest Nik Kershaw album would be delivered with perfect fidelity through your Pioneer parcel shelf mount speakers. And, of course, when it was time to tune in to your favourite radio show, the electric aerial you fitted at home, complete with its elegant Meccano style bracketry, taking up a quarter of your boot space, would effortlessly power up and down with the sound of a expiring forklift. Pure luxury.
Of course, a great pilot needed great purchase. Your stringback driving gloves not only cut a stylish dash as you motored along, but the leather sleeve you self-stitched onto your rather thin factory steering wheel ensured that every corner could be taken like Eddie Irvine. Even if the resultant stitching looked and felt more like Ed Gein. Perhaps you should have just stretched the budget and gone for a complete aftermarket wheel swap from the likes of Mountney or Astrali? In the days before airbags, these things were much simpler to swap over and the chunkier grip made you feel like a rally legend.
In an era where information we take for granted today, like engine revs and which direction we were traveling in, was a little harder to come by, the additional gauge array was key! A pod mounted tacho would impress your fellow motorists, while a gimble-mounted compass meant you always knew your way to the pub. Serious stuff… But not too serious though. Just so the motorist behind you knew that you were in fact, a light-hearted legend, a stick on Garfield soft toy, or mooning ‘Seymour Buns’ figurine would leave them in no doubt as to your comedy credentials.
These days, of course, a lot of these products, or at least their direct descendants can be bought online from sites like Ebay and Temu, but it’s not quite the same. Modern cars come so well equipped, there’s very little need to enhance them in quite the same way, and for most motorists, that desire to tinker and tweak isn’t quite what it was. I mean, when was the last time you saw you neighbour fitting a rear-window louvre to their base-model Ford on a Sunday morning? Or trying to work out how to wire a CB radio into the dash of their Civic?
But I’m on a mission to bring it all back. My latest two purchases, a 1976 TR7 and 1974 Beetle are peak ‘Accessories Eras’ machines. The Beetle already has a head start, having been a period magazine feature star in the late 1970s and being lavished with period add-ons. The TR7 is rife for a little period goodness, as the machine that defined an era of cheesy accessories. So expect those cabins to smell of Feu Orange, safely assume that all fog-lights will be painted yellow and you already know that I’m adding a cassette holder to the centre consoles. I may even style my chest hair and sideboards to match…
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