The Dacia Sandero is an affordable small car that has a lot of space inside. It's a good option for people looking for a practical vehicle without spending too much.
The Volkswagen Up is a very small car that's great for driving in the city. It's easy to park and uses less gas, making it a smart choice for city dwellers.
The Ford Fiesta ST is a small, sporty car that is fun to drive and has a powerful engine for its size. It's popular because it offers a lot of excitement without costing too much money, making it a great choice for people who want a lively car.
Electric windows let you open and close car windows by pressing a button instead of using a hand crank. They are common in most cars today, but how they are designed can show how much money was spent on the car's features.
Left and right hand drive means which side of the car has the steering wheel. In left-hand drive cars, the steering wheel is on the left side, and in right-hand drive cars, it's on the right. This can change how a car is built and sold in different countries.
The Volkswagen ID.3 is an electric car that is designed to be affordable and practical. It's part of Volkswagen's new line of electric vehicles, which are becoming more popular.
The Land Rover Range Rover is a fancy SUV that can handle rough terrains while providing a lot of comfort inside. It's often talked about because it's both stylish and tough, making it popular among people who want a vehicle for both city driving and outdoor adventures.
Tolerance means how much a part can be off from the exact size and still work properly. It's important for making sure everything fits together in a car.
One touch windows let you open or close a car window all the way just by pressing the button once. It's a nice feature that makes using the windows easier.
The Mercedes-Benz 190E is a smaller luxury car that was made in the 1980s and early 1990s, known for being very well-built and reliable. People talk about it because it has a classic look and was popular in racing, making it a cool car to own.
Lexus is a brand that makes luxury cars, and it's part of Toyota. They are known for their comfortable and high-quality vehicles.
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Welcome to this bonus episode from The Intercooler. We're launching a brand new product specifically
for those of you who love podcasts and want more great stuff to listen to. We're calling it
The Intercooler Daily Podcast. And yes, we are going to be publishing new audio every single day
of the week. Better still, it'll be ad free. That's never been done before. You'll get our regular
Monday show completely ad free. Plus our new Thursday show called Ask The Intercooler where we
answer your questions. Throughout the rest of the week, you'll get to listen to audio versions
of the award-winning articles that we publish on our digital magazine. Those articles are written
by the best team of automotive writers working anywhere in the world today. And they're voiced by
real people, often the authors themselves, be it me, Dan Prosser, my co-founder Andrew Frankel,
or a top writer like Richard Porter from the Smith & Smith Podcast or Steve Suckliff to name
just a few. That's around two and a half hours of great audio ad free every single week. And it
costs just £6.99 a month. Bargain. Just head to The Intercooler's main podcast feed on Apple podcasts
or Spotify to sign up. You'll find instructions in the description of this episode. By the way,
existing TI subscribers get all this stuff already, plus loads more. This is a new product for
those who just want to listen. And here's a sample of the sort of thing you'll get to listen to.
This is Richard Porter with some weapons grade geekery about electric windows switches. Enjoy.
Geek out. What goes up? You wouldn't believe how much you can tell about a car from its electric
windows switches if only you knew what to look for. Happily Richard Porter does. That's me, talking
about myself in the third person. When I worked on the old Top Gear TV show, one of my jobs,
as the office's self-elected nerd king, was to write briefing notes on the cars we were planning
to film. These would start with all the basic stats about power, performance and so on.
Then move on to nuggets of less well-known trivia, in line with our belief that the show should
provide pub currency people could use to impress their mates when they went for a pint later.
I would lose myself in press packs and other sources, put the whole thing together,
and then share it with the presenters so we could decide what we wanted to put into the script.
In one series, when this dates things immediately, we planned a road trip across Ukraine in three
affordable hatchbacks, a Ford Fiesta, a Volkswagen Up and a Dacha Sandero. I put together my usual
document on the cars and shared it with my colleagues, after which I received a puzzled message from
TV's Jeremy Clarkson, which simply said, there seems to be a lot about electric windows switches.
I suspect he regretted raising this since my reply was an impassioned and slightly too long
explanation, which could have been summed up simply as this. You can tell a lot about a car by its
electric windows. In the case of the three hatchbacks, I remember that the sanderos were controlled
by switches in the middle of the dash, an immediate giveaway that money had been saved.
Switches on the door need to be handed for left and right hand drive. They demand extra wiring
to extend into both doors, which adds complication during the assembly process and cost,
and they have to be capable of working perfectly after getting a bit wet in case someone leaves the
door open in a downpour. In bed the switch is in the middle of the car, and you avoid all of this,
saving a few pennies, which become many pounds over the production life of a popular car.
The way you dropped your window in that generation of Sandero was a subtle but important clue,
as to how Dacha was able to sell the car at such an attractively low price.
The electric window controls in the Volkswagen also told a story. No central switches here,
but the driver's door contained only a control for the window on that side.
If you were alone behind the wheel and wanted to drop the other window, you had to lean across and
jab the switch on the passenger door. I'm going to guess that VW engineers reasoned it was a narrow
car, so this was no great hardship, and armed with this line of logic, they were able to save a
bit of money, not having to run up two sets of door mouldings. Right there you learned a little
about how Volkswagen was able to create a bespoke platform for a small cheap car and not lose a
packet on each one sold. Later in its life the app got a facelift by which point I assumed the
original development costs had been amortized. Perhaps customer feedback said people don't like
leaning across the car to work the other window, and the driver's side gained a second switch
to operate the passenger window without an undignified stretch. I still think electric windows
are deceptively interesting, and there's still an area in which car makers try to save money.
In fact, Volkswagen came up with a particularly egregious example of penny pinching when it
announced the ID3 and ushered in a new system whereby a car with four powered windows has two parallel
switches on the driver's door set to operate the front windows by default. To gain control of the
back windows you have to dab a touch sensitive pad marked rear which toggles the function of the
switches so they work the windows behind you. For VW's accounts department this is bloody great
because it saves the cost of two mechanical switches multiplied across the millions of
MEB platform cars that use this setup. For customers however it's bloody awful, especially if you
have small children, and its existence is a profound demonstration of how carefully Volkswagen wanted
its new generation of EVs to be simplified by which I mean cheaper to make. There's another
more subtle thing about electric windows that can say a lot about a car, and it's the one touch
function. In fact, one touch windows are at the heart of one of my favourite apocryphal car
industry stories relating to the original shape Range Rover. In the late 1980s Land Rover decided
that for the major 1990 model year update its flagship would be given a full one touch driver's
door window, upgrading it from the down only single touch feature installed a few years earlier.
One touch closing is more complicated since it requires obstruction detection and automatic
rollback and the job of developing these features was handed off to a supplier. This outside company
Julie completed the task and gave its homework to Land Rover who installed a new system on some
actual Range Rovers. Very quickly the supplier received a call complaining that the one touch system
was no good since every time the button was pressed to raise the window the glass would scamper
most of the way up its travel, only to encounter some invisible obstruction which would falsely
trigger the rollback function sending the window charging back into the door. We don't understand
this wailed the supplier, we had it working perfectly on our test rigs and we've designed
everything to an industry standard 4mm tolerance. Oh, came the reply from Solihull,
that's where you're going wrong then because you see we build Range Rover doors to a 9mm tolerance.
As I said electric windows can tell you a lot about a car, they can tell you that first
generation Range Rovers were assembled in a hilariously approximate way, but I suppose we knew that.
One touch windows however can also give you a sense of how much a manufacturer has invested in a car
or how much it's trying to get away with saving money. If the feature only works in the
downward direction that's penny pinching to the max saving cash by doing without the extra features
to stop someone trapping a finger. Single press for up but only on the driver's door,
bit more money spent but no more than necessary. There's a solid argument that only the driver needs
a one shot window so they can keep their hands on the more important controls but it's also a nice
way to keep the bottom line in check by not adding complexity where strictly speaking it's not needed.
It's not just the location of electric window switches or the features they trigger that can say
a lot about a car mind you. There are also the switches themselves.
The big rectangular controls fitted to Merck's in the 1980s for example were a textbook case
of switch as avatar for the whole car. They were big, they were boldly but simply labeled,
they seemed to be made from a solid block of plastic and they had an action so reassuringly
waiting that you might break a finger if you jabbed at them too eagerly. They projected a deep
level of quality which is what Benzes had back then. Likewise when Audi fully committed to an
Aero styled future with the B3 Shape 80 of 1986 it brought in an amazing rocker switch, cleverly
sculpted and textured so you could instantly tell up from down by touch alone and blessed with a
fabulous micro-click action less like the clacky switches in most cars and more like something
from a fancy high-fi. The car itself made the starchy upright E33 series and Merck 190E look
a decade out of date and the gorgeously engineered window switches just sealed the deal.
A special mention here to the Alpha 75 because not only did its electric window rockers sit horizontally
click right to go down left to go up but also for no explicable reason whatsoever they were mounted
in the roof. If you can tell a lot about a car by its window switches this instantly told you
that the 75 had been designed by Lunatics. Sadly most window controls today are of a generic flipper
style where you push down for down and pull up for up. It's a style that became popular because
it's easy to operate without looking and eliminates the slim chance of tragedy if a child stands on
the switch while leaning out of the window since downward pressure can only make the window go down.
There are however little variations and I'll always award extra points to manufacturers that
include a precisely calibrated detente within the switch beyond which the one-touch function is triggered.
There's one carmaker however that goes above and beyond in the action of the window itself.
For more than ten years the glass in Lexus cars has motored upwards at a brisk pace only to slow
gracefully at the top of its travel so it slots smoothly and quietly into the seals at the top of
the frame. It's supposedly inspired by the way hosts are trained to close the traditional sliding
doors on a Japanese tea ceremony room, quickly and efficiently at first but going carefully as door
near frame so as not to slam wine to the other and disturb the guests. It's a delightful gimmick
and since its goal is not disturbing the car's occupants more than necessary one that feels very Lexus.
It also demonstrates that not everything about electric windows is an exercise in saving cost
and complexity. Most of all it's a perfect example of my belief that you really can tell a lot
about a car by its electric windows. Written and read out for the intercooler by Richard Porter.
About this episode
Richard Porter dives deep into the fascinating world of electric window switches, revealing how much they can tell you about a car's design and cost-saving measures. From the placement of switches to their functionality, Porter shares anecdotes from his time on Top Gear, discussing how manufacturers balance quality and expense. He highlights various car models, illustrating how their window controls reflect engineering choices and brand identity. This episode is packed with quirky insights and automotive trivia that will intrigue any car enthusiast.
How much can you learn about a car from its electric window switches? Much more than you might think, explains Richard Porter.
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