If you are, like me, a car nerd of a certain age, you may remember some ’70s-era General Motors products with little wires embedded in the windshield. Two thin wires running parallel up the middle of the windshield from the bottom to a few inches from the top, where they each took a hard 90-degree turn. From there, the wires ran across the top of the windshield through the tinted shade band, and terminated a few inches from where the glass met the A pillar making a sort of T-shape. I remember my dad had a ’70s Chevy van and a late-’70s Chevy Suburban, both of which had those wires in the windshield. I’m pretty sure my mom’s ’80 Buick Regal, an American family car that is now dead, had an in-glass antenna, too, but my ’79 Sedan DeVille, one of the first cars you might have truly hated, didn’t.
What were they, though? I remember as a kid coming up with all kinds of weird, wild explanations for them (I had an overactive imagination, as any of my exhausted teachers could tell you) but the actual answer is pretty simple.
What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
Those little wires pressed into the windshield were, in fact, the radio antenna! As far as I can tell — I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that there’s scant info regarding these antennas on Al Gore’s internet outside of circular arguments on enthusiast forums — GM started embedding radio antennas in the windshields of some of its vehicles sometime in the early-’70s. I found a Chevelle forum where a handful of owners say their MY1970 cars have them, so GM was doing it at least that early. It wasn’t a Chevelle-only feature, either. In thumbing through some contemporary parts catalogs, I saw that GM used that in-glass antenna in most of its cars and a bunch of its trucks during the ’70s.
Opinions regarding why GM would go to all the trouble of embedding antennas in the windshield vary — aerodynamics, to keep the antenna from being damaged, for looks, etc. — but almost everyone agrees that it was a really bad idea. The embedded, two-wire antennas were apparently pretty weak and had a bad habit of dropping signal. I remember the radio in my dad’s Suburban going out every time he drove under an overpass. Thankfully for vehicular audiophiles everywhere, it seems that carmakers gave up on the whole in-glass antenna thing in the early ’80s, and by the ’90s they were completely gone.