There’s a ton of money in what appears, at first glance, to be junk. Just ask Mr. Ginsu, the Abs man, and George Foreman. Grillmaker Salton paid Foreman $137.5 million for the use of his name in perpetuity on its grill, basically a low-dollar, plug-in frying pan with ridges to drain off fat. The King Tut of hucksters, Veg-O-Matic’s Ron Popeil, sold his business five years ago—ever see his tool that scrambles an egg in its shell?—for $55 million. That got us thinking of automotive cockamamie like gas savers and smokeless ashtrays. What’s out there? We logged on to AsSeenOnTV.com and filled our virtual cart with $144 of the finest and flimsiest items that late-night TV—or, in this case, midafternoon internet—has to offer.
The tinted plastic panel clips to your sun visor. It’s like sunglasses but without all that strain on your ears. The “Sliding Sun Terminator” provides extra protection.
It’s supposed to shield you from reflective surfaces but is itself a reflective surface. If you try to stare right through it, you’ll be confused by reflections of the cars behind you, of the rear of your car, and even of your own face. Also, the Sliding Sun Terminator is a small panel so dark it might terminate the driver—or others he crashes into. Flipped up so that the driver isn’t looking directly through it, the Sun Zapper works okay, but the constant play of reflections across its surface and the two-tone view out the windshield are unsettling.
*Not actually recommended. Just buy sunglasses.
A small, solar-powered fan clips to the top of your window and blows hot air out of the vehicle while it is parked.
We placed thermometers in two Mazda 3s parked side-by-side in the summer sun. The car with the AutoVent clipped to the window heated up less quickly, but after just a couple of hours, both cars were the same temperature inside. The solar-powered fan has no switch, so, amusingly, it is always on when pointed at the sun—inside the car, tied to your dog, it doesn’t matter. It also has no battery, so the power quits as soon as the unit is out of direct sunlight. Which is good, because it’s not like the sun moves in the sky or anything.
Roll down the windows for a minute when you first get into the car.
Add-on device is placed on a seat, and it swivels, kind of.
It consists of two plate-sized disks of one-eighth-inch-thick plywood (severely warped, in our case), covered in “plush faux sheepskin.” The disks are connected by a bearing that sounded like it was filled with sand. Just place the unit on a seat, sit down, and rotate, though we found that there tended to be less resistance between our pants and the car seat itself. Also, one of the wood pieces broke. The weight limit for the device is just 250 pounds, rendering it useless for a potentially very profitable market segment.
Simply slide the Wiper Wizard along your blades, and—voilà!—the edge is restored. Your wiper is as good as new.
Sort of. We tested it on an intern’s Honda Accord and saw debatable improvement. So we followed up with another treatment, and now he needs new wipers.
Rain-X a pair of goggles and drive with your head out the window.
Plug it into the cigarette lighter (which presents a problem, seeing as you’re going to need it to fire up your cancer stick in a moment), and a fan pulls smoke into the can. There it is filtered and exhausted out the back of the device.
It doesn’t. Smoking in press cars is expressly forbidden, so we lit up a Camel in the author’s cube. The neighbors instantly complained. Not having the ashtray buried in a cup holder gave us a great view of the “filtered” smoke blowing from the unit’s exhaust vent. It runs on batteries, too, so you can have a nonfunctional smokeless ashtray with you wherever you go.
Use that $10 bill to roll a, um, cigarette.
Using a glue gun that’s included, you smear hot glue onto a threaded stem resembling a rigid, flattened suction cup, which you then affix to the middle of the dent. When the glue cools, lay the plastic bridge over the stem and screw a knob onto its base. As you tighten the knob against the bridge, it pulls out the dent; repeat as necessary.
We chose the Pops-a-Dent not just because of its awesome name (although that was a factor), but because the patent-pending, arched design is claimed to eliminate the possibility of causing other dents—apparently a risk with these sort of things. Nevertheless, we could clearly see the metal bowing at the feet of the bridge, and it seems entirely possible that these indentations could become permanent. The pressure the unit applies to the sheetmetal is tremendous: During one application, when the glue finally gave way, the device shot more than 10 feet into the air. But, lo and behold, after four tries, the dent was nearly gone. As a bonus, the glue gun can be used to repair the Swivel Seat.