I have a 1970 Oldsmobile land yacht.

It feels weird when people say cars from that era “drive like a modern car” because they really don’t, they’re way more plush and soft riding, they feel like you’re piloting a piece of machinery, and of course handling doesn’t exist at all. But like a modern car I can hop in it, start the engine, and go, it is very stable and well mannered as long as I don’t try to push it (no ABS or traction control), it is predictable and intuitive and it goes where I want without any thought. And of course the reason I bought one from this particular era, it has basic safety features like shoulder belts, headrests, collapsible steering column, side impact beams, and power front disc brakes with a dual circuit master cylinder. The kind of stuff that makes me feel comfortable driving it in modern traffic, it’s not a safe car but at least a neighborhood fender bender won’t be fatal.

Looking forward the driving experience never really changed after that. I have a 1984 version of the same car and it’s honestly almost indistinguishable apart from styling and the overall build quality of the car (the ‘80s were a big step down from the ‘60s). Under the surface it has an engine computer, but it still controls a carburetor so the driving experience is the same. And apart from having to step on the gas pedal to prime it before starting, and of course the nuisance of needing to keep it in tune, there’s really very little difference in the driving feel compared to fuel injection. Later cars got more technically advanced and safer but they apart from more stable handling you don’t really feel that much difference between a car from half a century ago and now.

But go in the opposite direction and every decade feels more noticeably primitive. Cars have been relatively easy to drive since maybe the ‘50s, especially with the popularity of automatic transmissions and power brakes and steering, but before maybe the ‘40s you still had to control things like spark timing and choke manually and transmissions often lacked synchromesh, so the cars were much more of a pain to drive. In the ‘20s a lot of cars were open cars like phaetons and roadsters, not even roll up windows, just a canvas top and if you were lucky plastic side curtains to keep the rain out. They commonly had two spare tires mounted on the sides of the car because you probably needed to change the tire at least once on a long trip. Coupes often only had two seats, with a second set of seats in the trunk outside the car. And in the ‘10s even electric starters and electric lights were cutting edge luxury features, and engine blocks as we know them weren’t universal yet, as some engines still had separate cylinders that could be removed from the block, or individual heads for each cylinder, because they needed to be repaired and rebuilt so often.

That 1970 car is 56 years old now, but basically anyone familiar with a modern car could get in it and drive it without missing a beat, it’s just a normal everyday car. But 56 years before that was 1914. Basically nobody in 1970 would be able to get into a 1914 car and drive it. For starters, the Model T’s pedals were a totally different layout and didn’t do what you expect them to, but even if you put the person in a car with a normal pedal arrangement and gearshift and brake lever they’d have to know how to set the steering wheel levers to make the engine run properly, they’d have to crank start the car, they’d have to shift a non-synchromesh gearbox, and once they were moving they’d probably have a heart attack at the practically nonexistent cable-driven mechanical manual brakes.

It’s crazy how fast and how dramatically cars changed for the first half century, only to basically settle into a status quo and be the same for the rest of time.