Your car's dashboard and boot were named on horse-drawn carriages
A dashboard was once a screen of wood or leather at the front of an open carriage, stopping the mud and snow that horses' hooves flung up. The boot began as a box that jutted out so passengers had somewhere to put their feet. Both words drove straight into the motor age.
The luggage meaning came later, when coachbuilders tucked storage boxes under the seats of the driver or footmen and kept the old name. The dickey seat went through its own shuffle. It meant any seat mounted on an iron frame rather than built into the body, first at the back, though by the early 1900s people were applying the name to the front seat instead. Even the word coach has a place of origin: the lighter, faster carriage of the 15th and 16th centuries is linked with the Hungarian town of Kocs, and by the late 1500s it had spread across Europe.
Engineering improvements came in waves. By the late Middle Ages a front axle that pivoted and a body slung on chains made four-wheeled vehicles easier to turn and gentler on passengers. Between the 17th and 19th centuries came steel springs, glass windows and better steering, including the fifth wheel and the geometry later formalised as Ackermann steering, which cars still use today.
A whole vocabulary grew up around the vehicles. A driver was called a whip, riders who went ahead to clear the road were outriders, and Dalmatians often trotted beside or beneath the wheels guarding parcels. Grand houses had a porte-cochère, a roofed entrance where passengers could step down out of the rain, while a mews was a row of stables and coach houses around a yard, often with rooms for the staff.
The carriage trade once meant the coachbuilders, wheelwrights and blacksmiths who kept these vehicles running. Because only the rich owned private carriages, the phrase shifted in slang to mean wealthy customers. Early automobiles were briefly called horseless carriages, and railways still speak of carriages.
Source: Carriage
