this has made me realize how phenomenologically bizarre car cigarette lighters are: "commute sucks? need to do drugs in your car about it?"
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in reply to @vogon's post:
Seconded. I no longer smoke and only rarely drive nowadays, but if there is a best time to smoke, that time is probably while driving.
feels like the same kind of technological artifact as "floppy disk as save icon" except I actually have seen floppy disks, and I've never seen the "cigarette lighter" in a car used except as a mobile power source*
*I think I've seen a video of the intended use once but in like, a youtube video or something.
May I ask how old you are? I remember a cigarette lighter in my mom’s car as a kid, and I’m 32
But yeah they’re def a weird thing. Also when restaurants used to have smoking/nonsmoking sections
oh yeah no I mean, I'm 37, I remember car cigarette lighters -- I just never thought about how weird they are as a concept
35 here, I think my first car (a 93 Honda Accord) had an actual "push pop" cigarette lighter.
yeah like
- it's weird how ubiquitous smoking used to be (and how quickly it disappeared)
- wait, why is an awkward gadget that you only use when smoking in the car better than a disposable lighter that you use all the time?
- has anyone done a study of all the ways of lighting a cigarette while driving to rank various safety factors like distraction and exposure to open flames or other fire risk
- were people trying to light their cigarettes with matches while driving, and doing so often enough that dropped matches were a non-trivial consideration for automotive safety? 😱
god I think 4 here might be part of it, save people from fumbling around with a matchbook with like 30 cents of wire and stamped steel
it's actually pretty clever since people are gonna be Like That anyway but it's so easy to imagine them as the same people in those anti-seatbelt reaction videos from local news or whatever in the 80s (although wikipedia says car lighters were standard in the US as early as 
1925 so it seems more likely they just figured people were going to smoke in their cars and got out ahead of it)
To number 2, I don't think disposable lighters were really a thing back when car cigarette lighters were prominent. Bic came out with their first disposables in 1973, and it presumably took a few years for them to become successful. Before then you might have had a Zippo? But those are high maintenance and if dropped would fuck everything up real quick - a dropped match would go out pretty quickly, car lighters required constant pressure to heat up and no open flame, meanwhile the entire design of a Zippo was about ensuring nothing could blow out the flame.
yeah, I never really thought about how old car lighters were before, they were just "ubiquitous since I've been alive" in the same way bic/disposable lighters still are. surprised to see wikipedia gives 1925 as their adoption in the US, but it kind of makes sense that people who could afford a car in 1925 would want something fancy to light their cigars, and they were probably much more convenient to use than regular lighters at the time too (and then, like you said, once zippo popularized windproof lighters they have the added bonus of not being a persistent open flame)