Tyres used to be white
Rubber is naturally a pale, milky colour, so the first car tyres were whitish grey. Then manufacturers found that mixing in carbon black — soot, essentially — made rubber far tougher and longer-lasting, and tyres turned black for good. For a while makers compromised by using tough black rubber for the tread and the old pale stuff for the sidewall, and the WHITEWALL became a badge of luxury: expensive, and impossible to keep clean.
That is why they look so right on a VINTAGE car today, and why a COLLECTOR will happily spend a Saturday morning with a brush and a tin of cleaner on four of them.
Fins borrowed from a fighter plane
The tail FINS on 1950s American cars came from an aircraft. Harley Earl, who ran styling at General Motors, had been shown a P-38 Lightning fighter with its twin tail booms in 1941 and never forgot it. Small fins appeared on the 1948 Cadillac, and every year afterwards they grew, until by 1959 they stood as tall as a small child and carried rocket-shaped rear lights.
Then they disappeared almost overnight. Fins did nothing for the car except make it look like the future, and looking like the future is a fashion with a short shelf life.
The hot rod came first
Modifying cars is as old as cheap cars. In 1930s and 1940s California, young mechanics bought worn-out Model Ts and Model As for almost nothing, stripped off the bumpers, bonnet, wings and anything else heavy, fitted a bigger ENGINE and raced them flat out across dry lake beds. The HOTROD was the result: ugly to some eyes, extremely quick, and entirely home-made.
That scene invented a lot of what car culture still does — tuning, club meets, timed runs and arguments about whose engine is best — long before any manufacturer sold a sports car to ordinary buyers.
Restored, or just survived?
Owners argue endlessly about how far to go. A fully RESTORED car is rebuilt to look exactly as it did leaving the factory, which can take years of hunting down correct parts. A growing number of collectors prefer the opposite: the unrestored survivor, thin original paint, cracked LEATHER and all, on the principle that a car can only be original once. Some now sell for more with honest scratches than with a flawless respray.
At the very top the numbers stop making sense. A 1955 Mercedes-Benz racing coupé changed hands in 2022 for around €135 million, the most anyone has ever paid for a car.
A hobby that keeps a trade alive
Running these cars needs skills modern garages no longer teach: beating a new panel out of flat steel, re-chroming a GRILLE, rebuilding an ENGINE with feeler gauges instead of a laptop. Classic car clubs run courses for that reason, and restoration apprenticeships are some of the few places those crafts still get handed on.
There is a quiet environmental argument in it too. A car built sixty years ago and still going has long since paid the cost of being made, and most classics cover only a few hundred miles a year: a POLISH, a show, a Sunday CRUISE and back into the garage. Britain encourages that in its own way — once a car passes forty years old it is exempt from road tax and from the annual roadworthiness test, on a rolling basis, so the pool of tax-free classics grows every year.