I don't mind hand cranked windows, they're kinda fun.
Better than car doors you can't open if the battery is dead. Or, the car is on fire.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Hand-cranked windows would be fine if the crank wasn’t always where my knee needs to go.
I like them for the driver's window but it's a pain having to pull over to adjust the others
I've had more issues with cranked windows failing than any issue with powered windows. The amount of times the window falls off the track....
Or if any wires/motors burned out in the fire.
What's the second crank for?
Wing window. Little triangle in front of the main door window that opens separately. They're generally hinged at the top (middle of the hypotenuse) and bottom, so they rotate on a vertical axis. Usually, they'd just be opened by hand with a latch to hold them shut, but luxury cars would have them on a little crank like that. Often, they would open so far that they'd be angled past 90 degrees, and act as an air scoop to bring massive wind into the car as you drove. Also handy for ashing cigarettes in the winter.
I loved the wing window on my first car, a VW Beetle. It really did great air movement, both for hot days and for helping defog the windshield (the blower for that was terribly underpowered).
I always called it a vent window, maybe it's a regional thing like tyre/tire.
Might not have been the blower fan that was the problem.
Heat for an air cooled Beetle came by way of square tubes that drew air across the exhaust manifolds. Said tubes were the edges of the floor pan, right behind the running boards. These were famous for rotting out, so you wouldn't get optimal airflow, and a bunch of it was just outside air anyway. The heat exchanger bits on the exhaust manifolds would also rust away, making for the same problem.
Then, when you have to drive to work in an ice storm in your Beetle with no heat, and the windshield is completely obscured, you have to just stick your head out the window. When oncoming traffic passes you, you jerk your head inside again, blinded and surprised, and quickly wipe the slush out of your eyes. You still can't see, and realize it's because of the aforementioned windshield thing, so you stick your head out again.
Here comes a bus. "Welp, I'm just gonna have to take it."
Ahhh, 1992.
And, as my friend who was restoring a vw bus laughed about, if there were any problems with the engine and your air tubes weren't perfectly sealed... wonderful exhaust fumes straight into your face.
Heat alone is also pretty shitty at defogging windows, it works a lot faster when you have the heater and AC running simultaneously. Which you cant do in a Beetle, since most of them didn't have AC.
In modern cars the air first goes past the AC, where it cools down and loses most of its humidity due to condensation. The it passes the heater where it heats up again, further reducing the relative humidity. That way you are blasting hot and dry air on your windshield, which defogs it much faster than blasting it with hot but still moist air
No, the heat exchangers were fine, the design just sucked. I had seen aftermarket electric fan boosters to try and push more air through the vent pipes and help things. I mean, it had a long way to go! But even the squirrel cage fan in the blower assembly in the truck wasn't all that big or strong, so the air it pushed up onto the window was far too little to do much. I loved my Beetle though, despite all its issues.
TIL another difference in the language, I’ve never heard of wing window, and these were always called ‘quarter-lights’ on the old cars in the UK.
They used to have small, additional triangle windows in the older cars. Some would rotate and some could be rolled down with the second crank.
Makes the car go
Oooo, they had the little triangle window crank! Fancy...
My life just flashed before me.
That's a GM car - both the color of the panel and design of the cranks are GM.
That door opening lever looks sexy though
Those are there to store spare pairs of underwear. If something happens suddenly that startles the driver into shitting themselves they can switch into a clean pair at the next red light.
That explains it. I was sure that they opened little compartments in the door
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