Convenience story

I needed to shift a 7ft length of timber and the only car available was our family Golf hatchback. The plank was far too long for the VW’s boot, I couldn’t drop the seats, and had no roof rack – but not a problem, I thought; I’ll flip the ski hatch down. Et voilà (or perhaps Und siehe da since this is a German car) it slid easily through the back seat so its front tip could rest on the front central armrest.

That handy little hinged panel, doubling as the rear seat central armrest and common in cars for decades now, made me wonder: who came up with the idea and, for that matter, so many other things that have made cars more liveable?

It’s a long list but let’s have a quick romp through a few of the handiest, starting with the ski hatch. I remembered a story I’d heard in Bavaria in the 1970s about an automotive engineer who got fed up with strapping his skis onto a roof rack where they got wet and icy. So he cut out and hinged the armrest section in his car’s rear seat and slipped his skis through from the boot to the cabin and could still carry three passengers. Colleagues copied the idea and before long it was picked up for production.