I’m not sure if you’ve heard from one of your many friends who work at the US Mint, but the last penny ever has been minted. That’s right – after a run of over 238 years, they’ve been making pennies since 1793, remember – the penny’s time is finally over, falling victim to increasing irrelevance, a fate that feels looming for so many of us.
There’s also the fact that pennies cost about 4 cents to make, so that’s not really a good return. That can’t be the only reason, though, as a nickel costs 14 cents to make! What the hell? A dime is a steal, with a production cost of only 6 cents, and even the quarter isn’t bad, at 15 cents. Hell, that’s only a penny more than a nickel! Think how much more money we could make if we made quarters instead of nickels! We’ll be rich! I should be King of the Treasury!
The Mint seems to have been hinting at the penny’s demise on their site via that little asterisk by the penny in their Full Family Line of American coins:
This is all fascinating and a big deal, numismatically, but we’re a car website, dammit. How does this affect cars? I mean, you haven’t been able to buy a car for a penny since, what, 1798, and back then a penny would get you a Murdoch Steam Carriage, two hogsheads of mead, and two quarter-hapennies in change, or something. But since then, what do pennies have to do with cars? Well, a few things, actually, which I will list now, so we can all appreciate the car-penny connections.
Penny Fuses
Okay, don’t do this, it’s incredibly stupid and dangerous, but this definitely is something people have been using pennies for with cars for years. The thinking is if you blow a fuse, you can jam a penny in there and the electrical whatever will work again, at least until whatever caused the fuse to pop in the first place happens again, only now instead of popping a fuse, your car catches on fire and you start to wonder why you thought it was so damn important to listen to your dumb podcasts while you drove.
Paying Traffic Tickets And Fines In Pennies
This is kind of a dickhead move, but it’s something that’s been happening for decades. Pissed-off people will choose to get “revenge” on “the system” by paying fines in massive wads of pennies, though usually all that gets accomplished is a really terrible work day for some poor clerk.
Patch Holes In Gas Tanks (at least in my Beetle)
I’m not exactly sure how common this is, really, but my own 1973 Volkswagen Beetle had this very thing: a penny used to patch a hole in the gas tank. The gas tank on a Beetle forms the floor of the trunk, so I can imagine how it happened; someone was loading something heavy and sharp, maybe a Moravian star made out of solid cast iron, dropped it, and punctured the tank. That’s possible?
Anyway, a penny is a good, cheap way to patch a little hole. I suspect this has been used in metal repairs countless times, in all sorts of cars. I can only prove it in one case, but still.
Tire Tread Test
This may be one of the more famous and useful intersections of car and penny. Here’s how it works: you take a penny, turn it upside down so Abraham Lincoln’s head is inverted from how most historians suspect it was usually oriented (scalp up, neck down), and stick it in between your tire’s treads.
If you can still see the top of Lincoln’s head, your tread depth is too low (2/32″ or less) and you should save that penny to get yourself some new tires.
Cars Covered in Pennies
This is another one of those things you see periodically – people covering their cars in pennies to give it a unique, and comparatively cheap-to-execute look.
In this example, the gentleman covered his 2000 Chevy Blazer in 51,000 pennies, for a total value of $510 and a weight penalty of about 281 pounds if most of the pennies were minted post-1982, which is when they went to zinc covered in a delicious copper shell, and weighed 2.5 grams, as opposed to pre-’82 pennies, which were all copper alloy and weighed 3.11 grams. Let’s assume a mix and say these all add, oh, 450 pounds or so.
Still, much cheaper than painting the car with paint, and I bet there’s a little bit of dent/scratch protection as well.
Penny Racers
Okay, finally, who remembers Penny Racers? I sure do – I wrote about them here a good while ago, and as far as I know, they’re the only toy car ever to feature a penny as a crucial component of the toy. Here’s the one I have, a little Baja Beetle version. I must have had this thing since I was, like, ten? Eleven?
The penny would slot in the back there, and let the little car do wheelies, which is, of course, cool.
There’s still billions of pennies out there in circulation, so I suspect this is hardly the last time you’ll encounter them. In fact, I’m just about positive every American reading this now can look in drawers or their dryer lint trap and pull out at least a nice handful of pennies. I bet your car has a pretty good amount of pennies already in it, too.
Things will be a little weird for a bit, but it likely won’t take that long to get past not using pennies, if we’re honest. But anything that has been part of daily life for nearly 240 years I think deserves some sort of send-off.
Am I missing any other good car-penny connections? If so, tell us in the comments! In detail! Painful detail!
I used pennies as a backer to weld the 3,000 dent puller holes the Earl Scheib artists left the sheet metal of my Fairlane. You gotta use pre-1982 copper pennies if you want them to come off, though. I have about 20 cents welded to the inside of my quarter panels to prove that point!
For one winter, when my driver door window mechanism failed I used pennies wedged between the window and the door frame to keep the window from dropping down into the door.
Any car in Bulgaria that has been repaired between 1995 and 1997 has drilled coins for shims all over, as hyperinflation had made coins many orders of magnitude less expensive than buying shims.
For scale – it was 100 pennies to one Lev, with denominations of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 pennies as well as 1 Lev and 2 Lev coins (those were nice, heavy coins, similar to the dollar coins).
The ones and twos were quite small about half-inch diameter, as well as the 10 (about the sice of a 1 cent, or smaller), the 20 were larger but quite thin, the 50 were ok, and the 1 and 2 Lev were solid shims.
At the height of the inflation, the Lev had dropped to about 6000 for one dollar, which made for a bag of 6000 shims for one dollar, if you wanted big ones (the one Lev coin was 0.25oz and about an inch in diameter, which would make for an 80lb bag of shims), and up to 60000 for a buck if you needed really small ones. That would still have been a bag of 120-ish lb.
Of course, the energy spent to drill them cost money too. But still.
Car related, he didn’t mention if pennies were used. Dad told of being in a friends car, they got a flat, lug wrench was too large, a coin in the socket sidewall got it.
This is the great, file-it-away-mentally kinda thing I come here for!
More importantly, will gas stations stop doing the 9/10th of a cent now and switch to 4/5 of a nickel?
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the old VW commercial where the guy drives around in a beetle shouting “2 pennies a mile!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=684937sSN1E
I remember that. My 2 cents worth.
It’s official, America no longer makes cents.
Bravo!
David Byrne: STOP MAKING CENTS
There’s something so wonderfully everyday Macgyver about the tire tread measure trick; I have one of those odd looking stick gauges (that elicits questions of WTF is that thing? People are always underwhelmed when I tell them) but it’s much more satisfying using a penny for a good enough? check.
I don’t need any fancy gage to check my tread depth. I go with the tried and true axiom of “Drive until you see the cords, then you have 10,000 miles left.”
I do love your avatar. “Jimmy! Jimmy! This can’t miss I swear!”
GREATEST. SHOW. EVER.
I live on a street named after Eva Adams, the second woman director of the US Mint (she was appointed by JFK and fired by Nixon for being a Democrat). A numismatically significant address which I occasionally ponder when driving home. She would not have been pleased at this development.
I’m pretty sure the 14 pounds of pennies that have gone under my floor mats or are wedged in the seat cracks are hurting my gas mileage.
I paid a parking ticket at my Junior College in pennies.
And a friend with a Land Cruiser used pennies to fill screw holes in body panels with a MIG welder.
Floor in the stairwell of my bus is Pennies. And the holes from the seats being removed are covered and sealed with Pennies.