90 years of the Autocar road test: How interiors have changed

In mainstream cars, leather was largely ousted, via a cloth- backed, varnished material called Rexine, by vinyl. Adopted in the 1950s, this modern substance was enthusiastically embraced by US manufacturers which exploited the futuristic look it could offer, with more intricate panel markings formed by welds instead of stitching, and even metallised colours. But to this day the default finish for vinyl, and its other plastic relatives, is to attempt to look like leather, sometimes achieved with uncanny accuracy, often not. Meanwhile, cloth trim has always been with us, with increasingly colourful patterns from the 1970s and the plushness of faux- suede Alcantara from the 1980s.

As for the plan of the interior itself, the average width from driver’s door to front passenger’s has got ever greater over the years. Pre-war car bodies were narrow, often set well within the inside faces of the wheels and tapering towards a proud, upright radiator. The post- war ‘full-width’ look pulled the doors outwards, beyond the wheels, allowing space for the 1950s and ’60s fashion, US-inspired, for a bench front seat. It could accommodate three people at a pinch, provided the gearlever had been moved to the steering column. Ford’s Consuls, Zephyrs and Zodiacs offered the archetypal front bench.

Hot on the heels of the wider body came thinner roof pillars, a lower scuttle and a massively improved view out through wider, deeper windows. Windscreen pillars got very thin in the 1960s and ’70s (look out from a BMW 2002 for a perfect panorama), but first fashions changed, bringing back a sense of bodily substance, and then ever- tightening safety rules caused pillars to thicken massively. Combine that with today’s penchant for a high waistline and letterbox-size rear window, and we’re practically back to 1930s cabin claustrophobia.

The same trend applies to interior space, even though humans are, on average, rather larger than they were half way through the last century. Huge rear leg room was once commonplace, helped by placingthe rear seat far back between the wheels, but as luggage compartments grew and wheelbases began to shrink, rear room got squeezed. Today, many cars are no roomier than their ancestors two or three model changes ago, despite being longer, wider and taller, and they also often have less interior storage space in their smaller door pockets, console cubbies and gloveboxes.

Safety is the reason, causing doors to be both thicker and set further from seats, and crash structures to take up more space as they encroach into the boot and dashboard. The electric parking brake is one attempt to regain storage space between the seats, but it brings its own problems. We are unlikely to see again such a miracle of packaging as the BMC Mini of 1959, in which four people could travel comfortably in an interior that occupied 80% of the car’s 3.05m length. Nor do buyers any longer seem interested in the idea, invented by Renault in the 1980s for its Espace, of a one-box MPV whose middle and rear seat rows could be removed to create a van.

Gearlevers have become shorter and, thanks to power steering, steering wheels are smaller and driving positions more laid-back. Instruments, once off-the-shelf generics, started to become a part of a car’s specific design from the 1950s, again led by the US, and particular marques began to develop their own dial-looks, such as the vertical ‘thermometer’ speedo of a 1960s fintail Mercedes, or the crisp clarity of a 1980s BMW. Digital dashes arrived in that decade, went out of fashion and then returned, as real needles gave way to virtual images on increasingly sophisticated screens.

Switchgear became more logically laid out to take account of how often they were used and how quickly the driver needed them: Rover’s 1963 P6 was an early example of functions moved from the dashboard or even the floor to stalks on the steering column, while Vauxhall shape-coded its switches so they could be identified by touch. Then in the 2000s BMW invented iDrive, through which many functions could be controlled by a single knob and a screen, and everything changed.