Hatchfront

North Americans, please substitute your terms where required.

I find that on average, for every time I need to get under my car's bonnet, I need to get under the dash twice, and I don't have a car that has a lot going on under the dash. The dash nevertheless seems to be designed to make access to its insides as difficult as possible, and moreover features a fastener regime that ensures that repeated opening and closing results in rapid deterioration of the whole assembly. It is obviously a whole lot worse if one adds air conditioning, a sound system, 37 electric motors, and anything else they might dream up to that limited, inaccessible space.

Now, I know there is this new idea that fixing things is chronologically impossible, and that service access went out with such obsolete ideas as accountable democracy and climates that support human life. Consequently we have a new generation of semi-one-box cars with their engines tucked away under the base of the windscreen, a sufficient mass of microchips assuring the engineering contingent that Nothing Can Go Wrong. Despite their failure to understand that there is no such thing as a non-moving part, only parts that are supposed to move and parts that aren't, experience indeed shows that such an engine can last a lifetime without any attention whatsoever, albeit its lifetime, not yours. But I digress.

The idea is this: the bonnet and windscreen are combined into a single component that is either hinged at the top of the screen or, preferably, at the front bumper as on a Jaguar E-type or Triumph Herald. Opening this gives unrestricted access to both the engine bay and the back of the dash. Depending on the geometries involved, the dash top can be attached to this assembly or, by the introduction of a second pane of glass affixed to the upper edge of the dash, eliminated entirely. In the latter case, the engine might even be made visible through the windscreen, if the latter is heavily sloped in the modern manner. This last arrangement might even allow defrosting of the glass without baking the occupants.

Of course this would be heavier and more complex, if aerodynamically better, than the preferred sort of automotive architecture, called "thin-fendered" in America and "Vintage" elsewhere, in which the same convenience may be established simply by positioning the bonnet-to-cowl cut line some distance aft of the firewall, so that opening the bonnet affords access not only to the engine compartment but also to the footwell and the back of the dash. But we cannot have everything.