It caused males to develop female secondary sex characteristics, because many of the standard pthalate compounds used as vinyl plasticizers tended to act like estrogens in the body. Very weird.
They should have just stuck with nice reliable wood steering wheels like the British did.
--scott
My guess is that the stuff reacted badly to UV as most plastics will. OTOH, I used to have a piano that had plastic (styrene?) connectors that someone told me, would continue to cure and harden and become brittle and spontaneously shatter. I had a baggie of the pieces and replace them as they broke - all 88 keys.
Probably Fiat 128 clones - they're just like the real thing except not as high quality. :-)
You're right I think but there's probably not a lot of plastics that could stand up to long exposure to the sun. That would be great - plastic unaffected by UV.
There are no market valued plastics that I know of that can withstand long exposure to UV and heat. You can go to special polymers and they will do a lot better than the crap that is commonly used.
We used to make, sell, and analyze a "plastic" that is used in the heat shield resins for spacecraft. To make some analyses, we had to saw off a chunk, put it in a muffle furnace at a couple thousand degrees in a stream of OXYGEN (not air) for a couple of days until it was totally oxidized.
In science, a lot of things are possible if you are willing to pay the price.
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