The science of ergonomics didn’t really exist in 1928.
The cabin of a car from that era was a chaotic place: dashboards had dials sited wherever was convenient for the plumbing or cabling they required, switches were scattered with the same expedience and there was still no convention for pedal placement.
Alvis’s FA 12/50, apart from its surprising feature of front-wheel drive, is typical of the time. Autocar’s then sports editor, Sammy Davis, raced one at Le Mans in 1928 and had to wrestle with an accelerator pedal placed between those for clutch and footbrake, while the steering wheel was so close to his chest that croissants had to stay right off the 24 Hours menu. I know; I’ve driven it.
A semblance of planning started to appear in the 1930s. The accelerator was generally to be found on the right, and there was a move towards placing the main instruments in front of the driver, where they could be seen at an easy glance. Britain’s car makers seemed oddly resistant to this trend, however – some of them maintaining a symmetrical dash design, with central instruments, into the 1950s and even beyond.
Dashboards in many early cars were made of wood, because it was strong yet easily shaped. Seats were often clad in leather because it was durable and readily available, but these materials underwent a change in status as the decades passed. Synthetic and mass-produced substitutes became the norm, the brown Bakelite dashboard of a Morris 8 Series E being an early example, while the traditional substances took on a new role in upmarket cars, suggesting solidity, craftsmanship and an adherence to the certainty of old values.
It was during the 1960s that wood ceased to be a structural element of a dashboard, one exception being the Lotus Elan, whose veneered plank not only anchored the steering column but also contributed significantly to the fibreglass body’s stiffness. Wood became mere decoration instead, and often it wasn’t even real (Ford’s 1990s Timberlex is a fine example). It’s worth noting, incidentally, that cars that were both rapid and upmarket seldom had wooden dashes back in the 1960s, as a contemporary Ferrari, Aston or Jaguar E-Type will show.
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.
