Death of the manual window roller in South Africa

Manual window rollers have all but completely disappeared on cars in 2023.

A little more than a decade ago, it wasn’t uncommon to get into a vehicle and furiously twist a handle to lower the window, you didn’t even have to wait until a key was in the ignition.

Of the 1,500-plus vehicles on sale right now, however, the only cars left with manual window rollers that we could find are:

• Kia Picanto Start – R227,995
• Mahindra Bolero Maxitruck Plus – R204,999
• Nissan NP200 – R234,000
• Renault Kiger Life – R239,999
• Renault Kwid Life – R192,999
• Renault Triber Life – R224,999
• Suzuki Celerio GA – R188,900
• Suzuki S-Presso GL – R174,900
• Toyota Vitz – R189,900
• VW Polo Vivo – R255,600

As this shows, unless you trawl the bottom end of the market, you’d be hard-pressed to find one of these protrusions on a car’s door panel as nearly all of them have been replaced by electric motors that do the hard work for you at the press of a button.

That’s not to say these new technologies are a bad thing, why would you want to sweat it out cranking up a window when you can simply press a button, just that the rapid disappearance of these manual window cranks is signaling a changing of the times.

With electric vehicles fast approaching all equipped with bleeding-edge technologies, it’s only a matter of time until the phrase “roll down the window” becomes an obscure reference whose origin is only remembered by those with grey stripes in their hair.

5 more car features that are going extinct

Like manual windows, there are dozens of other car features that have gone extinct in modern times, with some being more painful than others.

What first comes to mind are pop-up headlights, which gave legendary sports cars such as the Lamborghini Diablo and Ferrari F40, and even the cult classic Mazda MX-5, an iconic and instantly recognisable design.

Cool as they might look, these hiding headlamps are just one of the many inventions that have met their demise as regulations around passenger and pedestrian safety got stricter.

Visible exhaust pipes are another victim of downsizing, electrifying, and safety.

Back in the day, the exhaust outlet was an integral part of the rear-end’s design and had the potential to make or break its desirability.

In 2023, only supercar makers seem to take it seriously anymore, as the AMGs of the world have resorted to using fake “outlets” while the real pipes end centimetres behind the bumper.

On entry-level cars, you need a keen eye to see that they even have an exhaust.

Manual functions have a way of being in manufacturers’ crosshairs, with another quickly vanishing feature being a key-operated ignition.

More and more cars now come with buttons as their starters, and on the high-end ones, you don’t even have to take the fob out of your pocket to unlock the doors.

With smartphones now having the ability to open a car, a physical key may become completely obsolete in the not-so-distant future.

Handbrake levers are steadily becoming a thing of the past, too, once again being replaced by a small button wired to an ECU that sends the command to the momentum stoppers for you.

While the shift to electronic parking brakes has been met with backlash due to “safety concerns” – and the fact that it doesn’t allow you to do a handbrake turn – it is steadily continuing as more and more entry-level autos exit the factory in modern times without levers between the front seats.

Perhaps not exclusively the fault of carmakers, but with the shift away from physical to digital media, many vehicles have lost their ability to play CDs as these mediums for music are simply not that popular anymore, in and out of the automotive sphere.

A never-ending cycle, cassettes were replaced by CDs, which were replaced by an Aux port, which was replaced by Bluetooth, which is steadily being replaced by phone-mirroring apps such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

What did stay around for all these years was the good old AM/FM radio, always being there on the day that your fancy new smartphone has run out of battery and as Murphy’s law would have it, it also slipped your mind that morning to bring your charging cable with you that morning.