What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?
I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That's just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
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Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I've heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
Yes. I'd rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.
Yep! The height and slope of the car's front end is actually one of the leading predictors of health outcomes for pedestrians involved in motor vehicle accidents
https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU?si=xLLhl4Gb-Yt6lmvh
Now please give me back my cute flippy headlights 🥹 they make me happy and they're not even up during the day when you're most likely to encounter pedestrians!
I drove a '94 Ford Probe for awhile, it was already 15 years old when I bought it, so I had been hearing stories about the shoddy reliability of flip up headlights for years at this point. Imagine my surprise when I never had any issues with them then, even while living in northern Minnesota. I remember one time after a particularly bad ice storm, turning them on and watching them shatter the ice on my hood and send pieces flying while popping up just the same as always. I loved that car and wish I'd had the money to keep it going.
Ah, but at night is probably when you are more likely to actually hit a pedestrian. I wonder if the stats back up that intuition...
Edit: also, yes pop up headlights are way cooler.
Disregarding the safety comments (which should not be disregarded) purely for the purposes of this conversation, in older cars the vacuum tubes that operated the lights would frequently fail, meaning that the lights wouldn't deploy even when desired.
That was revised in slightly newer cars, where the vacuum lines from the engine were required to hold the headlights closed. So when the mechanism inevitably failed, you had permanently deployed headlights until/if it was repaired.
Huh, never knew. My sole exposure to this was one quite classic car. Thanks for the information!