3 of the best (or worst) retro car accessories

If you learned to drive in the 1980s, the chances are your first car was pretty basic. OK, very basic. Plastic seats, metal steering wheels, no mod cons, no cassette player (what are CDs?) and a distinct lack of instrumentation.

So, a decade before the modification scene really kicked in, we did our best to personalise our cars with all manner of naff accessories. Obviously, at the time, we thought they were cool, but they mostly weren’t.

Specialist insurance broker Adrian Fluxx has been providing bespoke cover for modified cars since (mostly) youngsters first decided their car just wasn’t funky enough as it left the factory.

Here are 10 retro accessories that “improved” our cars while our parents looked on in horror.

Furry dice

Arguably the most iconic car accessory of them all, furry dice originated in America, where they were called fuzzy dice, in the 1950s.

It’s thought that US airmen hung dice in their cockpits during World War II, either for good luck or as a sign that returning safely from every flight was literally “a roll of the dice”.

When they returned from the war, they carried on this practice in their cars, and the dice were taken up by street-rod owners who competed in illegal street races.

Later, the dice entered the general alternative motoring culture and the trend travelled across the Pond where boy (and girl) racers made them ubiquitous

These days, furry dice are an ironic nod to the past, a kitsch piece of motoring nostalgia hanging from rearview mirrors gazing back to a rebellious past.

Personalised windscreen sun shades

If you had the furry dice, you may have also been tempted into a stick-on windscreen sunstrip with your name on, or yours and your partner’s.

Not everyone in the 70s and 80s was called Kevin or Tracy, but these sunstrips - which actually served a practical purpose in the days before windscreens came with sun-shading built-in - became synonymous with two of the most popular names of the era.

Even back in the day these were generally considered a bit naff, but at least Tracys everywhere could be fairly confident their Kevin couldn’t give lifts to random Sharons without facing some awkward questions.

Furry seat covers

If you’ve ever driven a car with plastic seats and no air conditioning on a scorching hot day, you’ll understand why a huge market grew up in seat covers. Wear jeans and you roast, wear shorts and you end up peeling your bare legs off the sweat-soaked plastic.

So a seat cover could be seen as necessary. But a tartan seat cover, a leopard-skin seat cover, a seat cover so ludicrously furry you feel like you’re being swamped by a bear that leaves fluff all over your clothes? Not necessary.

Steering wheels suffered a similar fate - many were made of metal in the bad old days, becoming as hot as the surface of Mars in the sun. While some opted for leather or soft plastic, which needed to be intricately laced into place, some could not resist turning their wheel into a monstrous circle of lurid fluff.

Nodding dogs

Apparently originating in Germany, the nodding dog was supposed to be more cutesy than cool, and was therefore shunned by the furry dice brigade and taken up instead by the same sort of people who had stick-on Garfields in their cars and model butterflies adorning the front of their homes.

The dogs usually sat on the rear parcel shelf, with their heads nodding (and generally rotating) with the motion of the car, no doubt intending to amuse following motorists but more likely to irritate or distract.

The dogs have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, largely thanks to a certain insurance company’s mascot.

After-market cassette players

Not many basic cars of the 70s, which is all most of us who started driving in the 80s could afford, came equipped with cassette players. Indeed, the first in-car stereos only started appearing towards the latter end of that decade.

So come the mid-to-late 80s almost every young driver out there wanted tunes in their car, and turned to the burgeoning market for in-car stereos. If you had the cash you could get a flashy number with garish lights, a graphic equaliser and marry it to some huge speakers cut into your rear parcel shelf or front door inners.

But all many of us could afford were cheap units, often with three buttons - fast forward, rewind and eject. We often fitted them ourselves, or asked a mate with a tiny bit more electrical knowledge than our own zero.

If there was no space in the dash for a radio, they were crudely bolted into place, shoved in the dashboard or fitted into chipboard centre 

consoles that squeaked maddeningly and often fell apart quite quickly.

Wooden beaded seat covers

Loved by taxi drivers, especially in New York it seems, the wooden beaded seat cover was a staple car accessory for many in the 70s and 80s.

Distinctly uncool, ironically so as keeping you away from sticky plastic seats in hot weather is a key attraction, the wooden beaded seat cover was mostly used by the same people wearing driving gloves who had a tartan rug draped over the back seats and a picnic basket in the boot - old people in other words (and people with bad backs).

And millions of taxi drivers can’t be wrong…

Musical air horns

The Dukes of Hazzard was almost certainly to blame for the rash of musical air horns that started blaring out from every Capri, Escort or even Mini in the 1980s.

Those Duke boys played the Dixie horn fitted to the General Lee at almost any opportunity, and a craze was born.

The Dixie horn wasn’t originally planned for the car, but when producers heard a Georgia hot rod racer drive by sounding his horn they rushed after him to find out where he had bought it and the rest is history.

Although you can still buy the Dixie horn (the internet is full of them) they are mercifully illegal in the UK.

Anti-static strips

Remember those magic little rubber strips that dangled down from the back of cars and touched the road?

They were sold as a cure for all sorts of niggling motoring ills, from radio interference, car sickness, lightning protection and to prevent electric shocks when you opened car doors.

The trouble was, they cured nothing, unless the placebo effect did the trick with car sickness.

The theory was that these strips prevented static electricity from building up on the car body, but it doesn’t take a genius to deduce that car tyres already do that job, about 10 million times more effectively (and they don’t cure car sickess…).

Trading standards even got involved and stopped retailers making these claims. A few people may have just thought they looked cool…

Stick-on dashboard instruments

Long before we were all sticking sat navs, mobile phone holders or bluetooth MP3 devices to our car dashboards or windscreens, some of us were adding stick-on clocks, digital thermometers and, most puzzlingly, compasses.

I had a compass stuck to my car dashboard and you can still buy them now despite the low cost of sat navs and mapping on smartphones. But even before those innovations, I never used my compass - road maps and road signs served me pretty much fine on their own without the need to know where north was.

So unless you’re planning on entering a rally or you do a lot of proper off-road driving, I suspect you don’t really need - and never needed - a compass.

Plastic wheel trims

Many cars of the 70s and 80s had came with steel wheels, some of which rusted.

But for whatever reason, many people were desperate to cover them up and invested in cheap plastic wheel covers, often bought from markets or Halfords.

They often fell off or were stolen within a few days.