Seat Heaters
If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to own a vehicle with heated seats, you know how great this technology is. It often works much faster than the heater, which is wonderful when you climb into a frigid car on a winter morning.
Saab actually invented seat heaters as a way to shed weight from its race cars. The tech also helped soothe drivers’ backs, something that boosted safety and made it a good thing to include on production vehicles. The rest is history.
Rearview Mirrors
Nobody can imagine using a car without a rearview mirror, but before the feature was used in motorsports it just plain didn’t even exist. Back in 1911 Ray Harroun, who was an engineer for Marmon Motor Car Company, had a brilliant idea. Instead of having two people in the company’s car for the Indianapolis 500 like all of the competition, the driver could sit alone and use a high-mounted mirror to look out for other vehicles coming up from behind.
The weight-saving idea allowed the Marmon Wasp to win the race handily. Three years later rearview mirrors started to pop up in all kinds of production cars, forever altering how vehicles are designed.
