Another car questions + opinions

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by MadMan

Steering wheel mounted throttle control was a thing for a while in the early days of cars. When the gas pedal showed up, there were still several car makers who included the old fashioned lever in addition to the pedal, presumably for people who were still used to that system, and hey, it could be used as cruise control too.

Apparently Model A's were among those cars.

I see Horn, Lighting control, and spark control on that steering wheel... The spark control would have an effect on the engine output but wasn't the same thing as throttle...Basically vacuum advance wasn't a thing in Fords yet when the model-A came to be. So Ford connected a linkage from that steering wheel control to the distributor and the driver became the vacuum advance computer...The only real advantage to that system I can think of was that back around the time of the Models T&A gas was pretty inconsistent and could be rather lousy....Manual spark control meant the driver could easily adjust the engine tune to avoid the damage of pinging/detonation regardless of what type of fortified water/strong liquor was in the gas tank.

Telecolor: the wipers in the A were probably human powered just like in the model T....Vacuum powered wipers if they were a thing then would have been only for luxury cars and would have trickled down to cheaper berands gradually. Once powered wipers became the norm they were primarily vacuum powered up into at least the mid 50's IIRC. I believe a fair number of cars still had vacuum wipers into the 60's.