I’m not going to lie to you: it’s not always easy thinking of what I want to write about. Well, really, I should clarify that: it’s not always easy thinking of what I want to write about in the amount of time I have available before I have to publish it on the site. This is one of those times. Luckily, I have a plan! A plan that uses the troubling magic of hoarding!
Yes, I have way too much automotive crap around, but some of that crap are old car magazines, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can grab one of those those magazines and open it to a random page, and the powerful and elusive gods of Interesting Car Stuff will smile their chrome smiles upon you and reveal something of genuine interest.
That’s how I stumbled upon this ad from a November 1952 issue of Motor Trend:
Hey! I’d love to stop being a “weather-worrier” as the ad suggests, because that sounds freaking miserable. Reading on, you can see what the whole point of this ad for the AUTO-UP is all about: it’s a rain-sensing system that will automatically close the roof of your parked (powered-top only, I presume) convertible if it gets caught in the rain.
What a fantastic idea! I used to have a convertible myself – an ’82 VW Rabbit Convertible – and I almost never put the top up. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and I think it did get caught in the rain a couple times, which was a massive ass-pain, and a system like this would have been incredible. Of course, it was a manual top, so that would have to be addressed too, but still.
This fundamental concept wasn’t unheard of, and I don’t think the makers of AUTO-UP, which could be the R.H. Philbrick mentioned in the ad, came up with the idea. I’ve only found one other reference to R.H. Philbrick that seems plausible (another R.Philbrick was the author of Freak the Mighty, which my son had to read last year in school; I read a lot of it with him. It’s not bad!) is this patent for a Life Preserver Storage Unit and Seat for Motor Boats. I have a feeling that’s the same guy.
I think the best-known application of this idea was on the GM concept car XP-300, known as the LeSabre, which featured
“A rain sensor was connected to the car’s convertible top; when it sensed rain, the top and windows were automatically raised to keep the occupants dry.”
This is just a video of the automatic top raising process of the LeSabre; you can imagine the rain.
The rain-sensing/top-raising system seems to have been an option for Chevrolet Bel Air convertibles from around 1955 to at least 1957 or so; you can see the little gridded rain sensor here on this ’57 Bel Air convertible that was sold through Mecum Auctions:
I’m not exactly sure how that sort of old-school rain sensor works, but if I had to guess, I’d suspect that a conductive droplet of water on that grid would close a circuit, much like how a rubber-dome-type key switch works, where a conductive pad closes contacts on a conductive grid:
Now, I’m not positive that’s how those rain sensors worked, but it’s my theory. Interestingly, modern rain sensors, the kind used for automatic wipers, are actually optical in nature, where they measure the diffraction of infrared light, which will differ when shining through glass than through water. Here, like a gym teacher, I’ll just ask you to watch a video explaining it so I don’t have to:
Pretty cool, right?
These modern rain sensors are quite good, which begs the question: why don’t modern cars offer this feature? By this feature, I mean putting up the top when the car is parked. Plenty of modern convertibles have powered tops, and while I realize that nearly all of them require some sort of physical handle-latching on the inside to fully close, just getting the top 99% closed and all the windows up would be vastly better than the whole car interior getting soaked in a rainstorm.
It seems like it would be so easy to implement, too! Is there some downside I’m not seeing? The car could check for sufficient battery power before doing it, so I don’t think fear of depleting a marginal battery should be an issue. Convertibles should offer this again!
Are there any modern convertibles that do? So far, I haven’t found any, but I could be missing one. I mean, it appears even a Rolls-Royce convertible doesn’t offer this feature, at least according to this video evidence:
Maybe that’s the entry-level DX Rolls that doesn’t have all the features and has black plastic bumpers and a big blanking plate over where the radio should be, but I doubt it. And if a newish Rolls doesn’t have this feature, what are the chances anything else does?
Convertibles need this. I’m baffled why this didn’t catch on.
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