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When Henry Leland declared in 1908, following the death of his friend Byron Carter of complications related to a crank-starting injury, that no more men would die of such injuries if he could help it, Charles Kettering got right on it and by 1911 patented the electric self-starter for automobile engines. Job done, right? Except the ability to crank a car's engine over by hand remained an option for many decades after.
So when did they stop putting hand-cranks on cars?
By the Fifties most Americans thought it funny that British sports cars still had crankholes in their grilles because American sedans had largely abandoned the feature a decade or so before, to the point where pretty much everybody had forgotten how to even hand-crank a car. This was the rocket age, after all, and something as primitive as a crankhole would mortify a mid-century stylist.
But truck designers, on the other hand, had to consider the utility of their products, and a manual engine engagement feature was still rather useful to, say, a logger with a balky starter far from civilization or an adamantly self-reliant farmer.
So while we're not apt to find this feature on a car beyond - I'm guessing - the MGA or some Citroens in the Sixties, trucks and SUVs carried that option far longer. Some light googling revealed a number of candidates for the four-wheel-drive vehicle that last featured hand-crankability. The dawn of the Eighties seemed the cutoff for a few of them, with the Nissan Patrol and the Land Rover Series III supposedly featuring crankholes until 1980. Toyota reportedly made its Land Cruisers able to accept armstrong starting through 1988, which we've yet to confirm.
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