My Grandfather’s old Mercedes-Benz cars all had them. Spring loaded, so’s they wouldn’t break when hit. As late as 1980 or so, my dad’s Oldsmobile had one.
Monte Carlos, Cutlass Salons - cars of the 80’s had them, but sadly they’ve gone away.
Seems like every car maker had one from the 1920s until maybe 1990 or so.
Only Mack, Mercedes Benz, and Rolls Royce still feature them, and the RR will hidewhen there’s trouble.
What gives? Cars use to have style and character. Now everything’s aerodynamic and boring. Did punks stealing them for necklaces prove too much for Detroit? Or are we just getting that boring as time marches on?
I can understand why we lost knock-offs - thanks, Izzy - but not hood ornaments.
My WAG - combination of the thefts as mentioned above. Plus, I’ll bet that once upon a time someone got injured by a hood ornament, sued, and that’s when the car makers gave up.
Style, it comes and goes. It fell out of style with Mercedes owners when it became stylish for gang bangers to have one around there neck. Also, hood ornaments are expensive to make make serve no useful function. I believe that you can still get them on some Rolls Royces. Jaguar claims that it wastoo dangerous for pedestrians and too tempting for thieves. Bentley even had a recall on hood ornaments.
I’d bet that gas mileage had something to do with it. Cars are designed for the air to flow over them in a certain way, and a hood ornament would break that up.
This was likely the case although I can recall the hood ornament on Grandad’s Buick having a spring mount so as not to gut the person as they slid over the hood.
Hood ornaments started out as a combined radiator cap and temperature gauge. As those became obsolete, they morphed into identifies/artwork for your car hood. Now, they seem to have been replaced with badges built into the grill.
Pedestrian safety has become an important design consideration for cars in recent years. Euro-NCAP has been testing and rating cars for pedestrian safety since 1997.
p.s. Apparently retractable hood ornaments are still OK, as Rolls Royce uses them. But I imagine it’s unjustifiably expensive for most cars. (If a retractable pedestrian-safe hood ornament costs $10 to produce, and GM put it on all their cars, that’s $2.5 million.)
I removed mine and replaced with a flush mounted one. It’s lighter and improved the aerodynamics and shaved 0.2 seconds off my 0-100 times. Also, my mileage is significantly improved.
(Everything after the first sentence is a bold faced lie… I just like the look of the flush mounted badge.)
In the game LA Noire there’s a traffic case where the detective protagonist is surprised at a hit-and-run victims grisly wound; the coroner tells him to check for hood ornaments as ‘those things are killers.’
Sure it’s a game but as recently a 2010 Bentley had a recall notice due to safety concerns regarding a hood ornament;
Interesting blog article on the fall of hood bling;
