Although you may not think about it, the dashboard in your vehicle takes a beating. It's continually baking in brutal sunlight and building heat focused through the windshield making for a very harsh condition. The dash pad is expected to survive many years or even decades of continual UV exposure and heat cycles. The sophisticated polymers used in modern cars are pretty resilient, but exact formulations are a much more advanced science now than they were back in the 1960s and 1970s. This combination of harsh conditions and older polymer construction has led to an inevitable and very common problem: dash pad deterioration.