50 Car Innovations We're Thankful For

Cars have come a long way from the first, strange, cart-like German contraptions that were louder than all hell and slower than a brisk walk. Countless innovations have been made, and the relationship between today's Mercedes-Benz E350 and the original motorwagens that Daimler and Benz built is all but indistinguishable.

The Europeans may have resisted for a long time, but us road-tripping Americans demanded a place to put our beverages. These days, it's a major design factor. Honda Fit owners can carry five people and seven cups.

If your A/C has ever gone out in the summer, you know how quickly you drove to the mechanic, and how much you overpaid, and how little you cared that you just got ripped off. A car without A/C can be a very sad place to be.

It's a lot easier to see when one's windshield isn't covered with water. If one's windshield is covered with water, the road probably is too, and it is therefore much easier to crash. Wipers help a lot.

The trunk area of most cars is useful, but not very useful for longer objects like skis. The fold-down rear seat allows a car owner to temporarily trade rear seats for tons more storage area. It's helpful on sedans, and it is what makes the wagon and the hatchback so brilliant.

It's simple and effective. The MacPherson suspension setup handles well, and is very easy to produce at a reasonable cost. The car you drive probably has this on the front wheels.

Steel disk brakes are wonderful when compared to drum brakes. But ceramic brakes fade less than steel and offer way more brake force. It's a massive improvement that comes at a seriously premium price.

Torque vectoring started as a technology designed to help Formula 1 cars take tight corners quickly. It works by applying brake force to the front inside wheel, while cornering to reduce wheelspin and help the car rotate more quickly. Since then, it has trickled down into sports and luxury cars and is just starting to make its way into more plebian offerings, like the 2012 Ford Focus.

In order to go somewhere, people used to have to either ask for directions and try to interpret the nonsensical babble that most people employ while giving directions, or trace their route on a map. Now they just tell a little gizmo where they want to go and it leads the way.

The MacPherson may be the go-to suspension type for decent performance in reasonably priced cars. But the double wishbone suspension system and its variants, like multi-link, rest in the domain of performance cars. Ferrari has double wishbones in its groundbreaking new 458 Italia, and that should say enough.

Body-on-frame construction is great for towing things, but it's heavy. Unibody construction allows the chassis of the car to do more than just support body and tub elements--by actually being the body and tub elements. This adds a lot of rigidity and subtracts a lot of weight.

Let's face it, so far electric cars simply haven't worked properly. They don't have enough range and it takes hours to "fill up." The hybrid is a way to use the power of electricity and a healthy amount of energy recycling to reduce fuel consumption. Hybrids may not be any fun to drive, but they sure do deliver when it comes to efficiency.

Before VVT, a car's camshaft was optimized for a certain RPM, which, of course, means that it was not optimized for every other RPM. As RPM limits began to get higher, this became more of an issue. So the valve timing was modified to always be in the most optimal position, no matter how high the engine was revving.

Obviously, cars need different things when they're doing different things. For top speed, a car needs low drag. For grip, it needs a lot of downforce. Not having a spoiler is better for straight-line speed, but a spoiler adds a lot for cornering. Active aerodynamics make sure that the car is in whatever shape is most useful at the moment.

It's totally unnecessary, but it makes such a big difference on a long trip. It's hard to imagine making a classic American coast-to-coast road trip without it.

Soft suspension is comfortable and firm suspension is fast. This is why rich people have, in the past, purchased a Bentley for the week and a Ferrari for the weekend. Today, however, we have suspension that can adapt and soften or harden as the situation dictates. Many of these systems are brilliant and allow supercars to be comfortably driven to work, and some of them don't work at all and just make cars slow and uncomfortable.

Aluminum is flexible enough to not break under serious stress, but still very rigid, and amazingly lightweight. While it took automotive engineers a while to figure out good manufacturing techniques, once they did, the change from steel frames to aluminum frames instantly made cars handle much better.

For the most part, car designers and engineers just think of this as "super-aluminum." It's extremely strong and rigid, but it weighs way less than any materials that could be used in its stead. The only downside is cost. But as the methods used to make carbon fiber products get better, the stuff itself gets cheaper. There are some futurists who think that carbon fiber will almost entirely replace plastics in our society in the future.

Having a low unsprung weight (all of the weight not carried by the suspension) greatly helps a car's handling and stability when going over bumps. The first cars had very lightweight wheels, which were also flimsy and made of brittle wood. After that initial era, wheels got a lot heavier by virtue of their steel construction. Today's performance cars use high-tech alloys and weigh so little it's surprising when handling them.

Before the crash test dummy, the only way to see how a human body would be flung around in a crash was to watch a human body get flung around in a crash. This presents a few ethical issues, so we should all be happy to have the dummies.

Today cars can be had with HD radios, satellite radios, CD players with MP3 data recognition, USB inputs, bluetooth cell-phone/MP3 player interfaces, and an amazing variety and number of speakers and subwoofers. They used to just come with the irritating puttery sound of a turn-of-the-century engine.

Diesel engines have a reputation for being loud, smelly, and inefficient. Modern turbo diesels offer fuel economy that rivals hybrids, without the abysmal driving dynamics. In Europe, diesels comprise a huge portion of the market because of their unique combination of great fuel economy and massive amounts of torque. Not just for tractors anymore.

Just think of how many things you would have accidentally hit in your car if it didn't have mirrors. The first cars didn't have mirrors. But that's because there weren't many other cars on the road, and also because they went only a few miles per hour.

Overhead camshafts are more complicated than the traditional set-up. But they offer much better performance by reducing the reciprocating momentum inside the engine. Whether SOHC or DOHC is used, it is certainly an improvement over the old days.

We all hate that punk around the corner with the stupidly loud car and the useless spoiler on his 1986 Honda Civic. But we have to respect the spoiler. Spoilers make cars hug the road better at speed, redirect air where it is needed, and reduce drag by moving the vortex shedding further away from the rear of the vehicle. No hatred there.

It usually makes a car a bit louder, a bit worse in the bend, and a bit less safe, but it's just cool. Who doesn't like the idea of cruising up California's Highway 1 on a nice day in a powerful, and preferably Italian, drop-top?

If you don't have one of these, you are probably uncomfortable in your car. Without the ability to adjust the steering wheel, you just have to hope you are the same size and have the same proportions as the car's designer. Judging by the variety in the human species, this is unlikely.

After a frontal collision in a modern car with a collapsible steering column, you'll probably feel terrible. After a frontal collision in an old car without a collapsible steering column, you'll probably have a gaping hole in your chest. The collapsible steering column is therefore a good thing.

Apart from modifying the fuel-air ratio, the best way to get more power out of your fuel is to put it under more pressure. A supercharger compresses the air in the engine, but uses up a lot of power itself. Superchargers create amazing amounts of power, but also consume amazing amounts of fuel.

The problem with the supercharger is that it takes a lot of energy to run, and therefore greatly impacts fuel economy. The Turbocharger is brilliant in that it just recycles the energy already wasted in shooting exhaust out of the back of the car. More and more cars are coming with turbocharged engines because of the ability to make tons of power without burning more gas.

They may be blamed for ruining the pure man-machine interface and turning cars into appliances instead of kinetic art. But they also make cars faster, more efficient, and safer. In the grand scheme of things, that is more important, even if us motor nerds keep whining about them.

Humans are not terribly resilient, and we have no way to control ourselves when flying through the air. Thusly, it is much better for us to be held in our chamber of aluminum space frames, airbags, and crumple zones than to fly free of all of those safety features and ironically into a stop sign.

The differential is a device that takes a torque input and splits it into two outputs. Simple differentials do this. But modern limited slip differentials can change the output percentage from one side to the next, sending the lion's share of torque to the wheel than can use it best. This makes for cars that not only accelerate better around corners, but also handle much better on dirt, snow, rain, and other undesirable surfaces.

Rarely in the automotive world do things increase power and efficiency. If they do, it's usually a three horsepower and seven more feet per gallon type of increase. Direct injection allows an engine builder to precisely control how much fuel goes into the engine, at what pressure it goes in, and at what point in the cycle it is injected. With all of this, a decent engineer can create an engine that would have only been a dream in the past.

What sucks more than getting in a car crash? Getting little sharp pieces of glass shot into your face during a car crash.

Rear-wheel drive cars are sporty, but novice drivers often lose control of them in slippery conditions. Front-wheel drive cars are stable and idiot-proof, but understeer like all hell. Eventually, someone got the great idea to just make an all-wheel drive car. There were a few road cars and plenty of trucks before it, but all-wheel drive's performance potential was realized with the World Rally Championship-dominating Audi Ur Quattro. The Ur Quattro's AWD is what gave it such a huge edge over its competition, especially on the dirt roads that comprised the majority of rally courses.

Drum brakes are enclosed, and therefore overheat, and therefore get decreasingly useful the more they are used... wonderful. Disk brakes are exposed to the onrushing air and cool much faster, thus offering much less brake fade when under hard use.

By now, we've come to terms with the fact that the automatic transmission has conquered the automotive world. New Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis can't even be had with manual transmissions anymore. All of this is because of the semi-automatic transmission. You can put it in "D" just like an auto, or you can take over and tell the thing when to shift with either the gear lever or paddle shifters. And when a good dual clutch shifts, it will make your left foot and right arm feel very, very slow.

A good power steering system will make a car faster around a corner, and will retain the feeling that a driver needs to understand what his car is doing. A bad power steering system still makes a car much easier to drive. Just imagine your 16-year-old niece/daughter/friend wrestling some unassisted steering and, once you stop laughing, you'll realize how much of a difference this makes.

Quite simply, this is a system that prevents the tires of a car from losing traction (hence the name). If you want to understand how much of a difference traction control can make to a car, find one where you can at least swtich it mostly off, like the Dodge Charger AWD Sport, find an empty parking lot, and see how much more trouble you can get into without it

Cars are awesome, and so is speed. Speed, however, becomes decidedly less awesome as soon as the option of stopping goes away and is replaced with the eventuality of smashing one's face into a tree. Most people don't even know how to drive without a set of anti-lock brakes any more. Just reflexively standing on the brakes as hard as you can does not end well in an older car.

Let's say you're cruising along at 60 mph on a country road. Now let's say you're very suddenly not. Would you rather hit your head on a fluffy air cushion, or on that $850 optional walnut burl wood trim? Enough said.

Luddites and nostalgists everywhere see these and think "I wish I had a car from when they were made of steel. Those were so much stronger and safer." If a person gets into a major accident in a new car, it will be trashed. But the person is much less likely to be in similar condition because of crumple zones. These absorb so much of the force of an impact that the passengers are much safer. If you take a look at the crashes that have killed drivers in motorsport, it's usually not the ones when the car goes spinning off into the distance. It's usually when all of the car's momentum is stopped by a wall and transferred to the driver.

When a car is moving at speed, aerodynamics are quite possibly the most important factor. Aerodynamics define handling, traction, top speed, stability, and efficiency. The Chrysler Airflow (pictured above) was the first car to use wind tunnel testing to create a more aerodynamically shaped vehicle. Even though it was a total flop, it was easily one of the most influential cars in history.

If you've ever driven a car with live axles over a bump or quickly around a corner (not counting the 2011 Mustang--Ford sold its soul to Lucifer to get that thing to handle well), you know how much of a difference independent suspension makes. Without it, a bump on one side of the car will push on the other side of a car. With it, the wheel just gets the hell out of the way.

Manuals may be way cooler, but the impact the automatic transmission has had on the auto industry cannot be denied. The vast majority of cars sold in this country are automatics. They used to be synonymous with "luxury," but are now synonymous with "car." For better or worse.

We all know about Henry Ford's assembly line. It gets talked about so much that a lot of people think the car was an American invention and that Henry Ford invented the car. It's not, and he didn't, but he did invent the affordable car. The assembly line is what keeps all cars from being $325,000 Rolls-Royces. Before Ford, cars were hand-built, extremely expensive to buy, extremely expensive to repair due to the hand-fitted parts, and out of reach for the vast majority of people. Ford started the chain of events that led to the rest of us owning cars. The Volkswagen Golf you drive and the BMW 335is you want wouldn't exist without the assembly line.

This is one we don't think about very much. In the U.S., you're hard-pressed to find anything with less than four cylinders. But the first motor vehicles ran on noisy, puttering, inefficient, weak, little one-cylinder engines.

The first thing a person should upgrade if he wants more performance out of his car is the tires. Think about it. If you have the world's best engine, the world's best suspension, the world's best chassis, the world's best brakes, and some cart wheels from an Amish buggy, your car will suck. The tires are the only part of the car that actually interfaces with the road. Good tires are what really make a good car.