A few days ago I saw a recent model mini-van with a hood ornament. Obviously the ornament had been added and looked a little our of place on the vehicle. That got me to thinking about hood ornaments and after a bit of my extensive research on the subject, it seems that hood ornaments were most prominent on American cars from about 1930 to the early 1950s. Very few cars today have a hood ornament — the one exception that comes to mind is Mercedes… I think they may still put their distinctive three-point star on some of their models.
Ornaments have pretty much always adorned various modes of transportation — a Lady Luck caving of some sort has been on a lot of ships for years and horses that pulled carriages and chariots often wore ornate spires on their foreheads.
I remember when I was young, some of the cars on the road had external radiator caps, and some had temperature gauges incorporated into the caps. The first hood ornaments came about as car designers, looking for ways dress up the exposed radiator caps, used symbols that embodied the car’s identity.
Probably sometime in the 1920s, the practical need for a hood ornament was gone, because radiator caps were located under the hood and temperature gauges were moved to the dashboard. But by then, the hood ornament had become part of the car’s design and most American cars had some kind of ornament on the hood until the early 1950s.
When I was growing up one of the more popular “pranks” was ripping hood ornaments off cars — if it happened to be one of our teacher’s cars… so much the better. Of course nowadays that would be considered vandalism, but rarely did anyone get into serious trouble for the act of roughly removing a hood ornament.
Probably two things primarily led to the demise of these hood-mounted leaping cats, ram heads, crosshairs, etc. One obviously was the design changes of the cars as they all became more aerodynamic. But another reason was the implementation of the European pedestrian safety regulations concerned that projecting decorative designs on the hood might increase the risk of pedestrians in the case of an accident. I suppose that’s true, but if you get hit by a car you probably have more to worry about than the hood ornament embedded in your forehead. Similar regulations were introduced in the United States in 1968.
So may the great old hood ornaments like the Cadillac wreath, the Dodge ram and the Mercury goddess RIP.
Style comes and goes and the hood ornament fell out of style — kind of a shame, it gave the cars character. Nowadays everything is aerodynamic and boring. Maybe that’s what’s happening to all of us — we’re just getting boring as time marches on….
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