We all know about blank panels (also known as knockout plugs, or blanking plugs): Those placeholder trim pieces and caps that serve as a constant reminder of all options that you were too cheap to get.
I recently took the SLK into the local Mercedes dealership for service (don’t ask), and received a loaner 2017 C300 for my efforts. I was genuinely surprised when I got in and found myself surrounded by a sea of blank panels. There was one on each door, indicating the absence of the ventilated seat option, and a bunch more on the center console.
Maybe it is just because I always buy my cars fully loaded, but I haven’t seen these on a new car for years. With flexible manufacturing and the virtually unlimited number of variations afforded by injection molding, I had assumed that blank panels were a thing of the past, especially on premium makes like Mercedes Benz.
The one on the door seemed to be particularly bothersome: How hard would it have been to make the heated seat button wide enough to fill the entire opening for vehicles without the ventilated seats? Probably not too much more than the cost of the blank panel, I would guess.
So what are the worst poverty-spec blank panels you have seen? As always, I’ll start things off with one from one my recent posts: The blank panels you got on the Chevy Corvair if you opted not to spend the $15 for backup lights, like the one above.
One of the strangest I’ve seen was in an 80’s F250. The XLT model has a digital clock as an option. The clock was housed in a plastic surround that extended down over the radio. We had the clock, but the surround was cracked. The dash squeaked, and squeaked. After trying hot glue, epoxy, model glue, and electrical tape, our family broke down. Off to the pick a part for a piece of plastic. Lo and behold we find a minty F150 with no clock. My dad figures you just pop off the blank off plates and you’re good to go right? Ummm, no. Ford molded those blank off plates in there. If you want a clock, you gotta fire up the Dremel and cut the plates out. The other quirk was manual windows and power door locks. Ford made some crummy cars in the 80’s, but they were on point with those trucks. It ran like a top for 170,000 miles. Eventually the upstate NY winters caught up with it.
In the ’70s and early ’80s most General Motors cars began being equipped with factory A/C. These cars got some extra vents in the dashboard, including inboard and outboard sides of the dash that weren’t fitted to non-A/C cars. Earlier on, GM would make two version of the dash cover, with and without holes, to suit cars whether they were equipped with A/C or not. Later a trim piece would cover the whole area, with extra vents in A/C equipped cars – an easier solution. But by around 1980 with most cars being airconditioned, GM got lazy about non-A/C cars. Color-keyed (if necessary) shaped panels just filled in for where the missing vents would go, like at the far right in the ’80 Chevy Malibu shown here. I recall the Citation being the same way.
If you bought a Pontiac Phoenix, or LeMans from this period, you would get two big round nacelles in front of you, one with a speedometer and odometer, and on that unless you order either the analog clock or the tachometer, would just get a blank illuminated faceplate that read “PONTIAC” and had the proper hashmarks for the clock that wasn’t there.
The Malibu went to the same sort of dash layout for ’82, jettisoning the strip speedometer for a round one, and putting the clock in the right-hand binnacle. Unless you were too cheap to order the clock, in which case you get a big dial o’ nothing. My ’82 was graced with a nice big blank dial there, with hashmarks that did not correspond to anything in particular.
(Not my car, but the best shot I could find…)
The molded ‘stitching’ in the blue plastic of the steering wheel of my folks’ last Volvo, an 88/89 740 wagon. Possibly around the instrument binnacle too, I don’t remember.
Particularly egregious in that a) everything else on the car was so solid, functional and sensible, and b) no-one buying that model (the ‘strippedest’ one, I’d guess) would’ve been under the impression there would be stitchable materials in there in the first place and c) hard blue plastic never comes with stitches wherever it is and whatever it is doing (though some corners of the internet may dispute that I’m happy to be ignorant)
I think early Austin Allegros gave you a speedo-sized set of cross hairs in place of a tacho or clock
A lot of contemporary entry-level luxury cars have molded stitching. The current Lexus ES is one example, as is its Toyota Avalon platform sister.
My ’14 MKS has real stitching on the dash, and I know that only because it’s quite crooked and shoddily-implemented; a mold would have looked better.
The 1953 Studebaker radio delete plate was always a winner for us losers — a bright chrome plate in the middle of the dash, in the outline of a radio, with the letters r a d i o embossed in the locations of the non-existent buttons.
What a beautiful piece of kit! It looks like something from a very expensive child’s toy.
1992-1996 F-150s not equipped with four-wheel-drive got this lovely blankout (look toward the passenger side of the dash and you’ll see it). Not only was it a blankout, but it had where each button and the display would be, so you couldn’t help but know you didn’t get four-wheel-drive.
Porsche’s implementation is particularly heinous, because the cars are so expensive. Nobody *ever* gets all the button blanks filled. There’ll be some unobtainium option for a different market, and in its place will be one of these blanks. And woe be unto you if—as in this instance— you have an odd number of active buttons.
Buddy of mine has a Focus ST. There appears to be a plate on the steering column where the traditional rotary ignition switch was deleted for the Push Button Start. You can see the push button on to the right of the column in the photo. I guess it saved money on tooling costs and assembly time and complexity with multiple part numbers (read: time)
My 2015 Golf SportWagen had that, too, since it had the proximity key, but they used the blank as the induction sensor to start the car, in case the key battery were to die and the car couldn’t detect it elsewhere in the cabin.
I have a ’15 Nissan Versa SV, which has key starting. But it’s obvious where on the dash a pushbutton would go, because there’s a faint (but noticeable) bit of molding flash in a circle to the right of the gauge cluster.
Pushbutton start-equipped cars don’t escape poor plastics … the flash is just on the column instead of the dash.
I am amused that so many cars come with “push button starting” and that it is considered to be a big deal. I’m old enough to remember when cars were switching over to being started with only the ignition key, and that was considered to be progress. The first car of my parents’ that I can really remember was a 1950 Ford that was purchased late in 1956, which would make me around five years old at the time. At some point in the Ford’s relatively brief stay at our house I was practicing “driving” while it was in the garage. I mastered shifting the three on the tree and decided to see what happened if you pushed the starter button. If the car was in gear what happened was the car jumped forward a few feet at which point it was stopped by the garage wall. Fortunately no real damage to the car or the wall.
I just got a $137,000 Porsche Carerra S. Loaded to the gills with options.
And I’ve still got a good half-dozen blank buttons. I’m not sure Porsche can even fill them up – room for options list expansion, no doubt.
’87 – ’93 Mustang switches.
The four “wings” flanking the dash panel. On a fully-equipped GT convertible, you had on the left side, headlights on top, fog lights on the bottom, and on the right side, hazards on top and top open/close on the bottom.
My ’88 LX coupe, having neither a convertible top nor special fog lights, has the two bottom switches there, unmarked and non-functional.
I’ve always wanted to label them in a 007 kind of way and make them flippable, so I could send out an imaginary oil slick to the cars behind me, or threaten to eject an unruly passenger…
The best ‘worst’ blank panel imho is the one found in the 1982-1986 Citroen BX. The BX has a very Star Trek-esque 80’s dash (known over here as the ‘Lego-dash’) with 4 switches on the sides next to the instrument panel.
The two switches on the right side were used on all models and a 3rd one on the left side was intended for optional fog lights – the car in the picture has these. But the 4th switch is just blank and non-functional. An option for it didn’t even exist.
I guess they started designing the dashboard before thinking about what it was intended to do – not unusual being Citroen 🙂
Thanks for the great information. You can also find other images like wiring diagram, sensor location, fuel pump location, starter location, control module location, parts diagram, replacement parts.