An insightful blog entry over at Autosavant.net asks, “What makes a car ‘Loaded?’”

I was just thinking the other day that only a small minority of cars had power windows back when I was growing up in the 1970s, and many cars lacked air conditioning. These days it’s hard to find a car without power windows, power locks, cruise control, air conditioning, and more. On the safety front, ABS, stability control, and a minimum of six airbags will soon be standard on nearly every car. Leather upholstery, once largely reserved to luxury cars–Honda didn’t even offer the stuff except on the rare “special edition” model–is increasingly common.

At the same time, many new features are becoming available. Bluetooth, hard-drive-based nav and entertainment systems, DVD-based rear-seat entertainment systems, keyless access and ignition, and so forth.

Driving my Mazda Protege5 earlier today, I noted how easy it was to operate the audio and climate control systems, for the simple reason that my Mazda is a very simple car by current standards. Get in just about any luxury car these days, and the controls are bewildering because of the number of features they must operate.

And yet even my simple Mazda has power windows, locks, sunroof, cruise, CD-changer, leather upholstery, and alloy wheels.

Venture into any used car classifieds, and such a feature list easily qualifies my car as “loaded.” Which, as Protege5s go, it is. But compared to the average car sold today, not so much. In fact, in dealer-speak anything with power windows, power locks, and cruise still qualifies as “loaded,” even though this definition probably encompasses 90 percent of the cars sold today.

So, have dealers failed to keep pace with the times, or are they the only ones who have managed to maintain a reasonable perspective?