Remember your first car stereo? Was it crackly FM radio, a shoebox full of tapes, or maybe – if you were really posh – a CD player that lived in the boot?
Fast forward to today and our cars are more like giant smartphones on wheels. Touchscreens, streaming apps, sat-navs that talk back to you – it’s a long way from rewinding a chewed-up tape with a pencil.
Let’s take a spin through the last three decades of in-car entertainment.
The 1990s – Radio Roulette and Tape Nightmares
Back in the 90s, radio ruled. You had your choice of AM, LW or FM – basically, would you like fuzzy, fuzzier or crackly-but-just-about-listenable?
Then there were cassette tapes. Early players needed you to take the tape out, flip it over and put it back in when one side finished. Later, auto-reverse decks blew our minds by doing the flipping for us.
But nothing could ruin your day faster than the dreaded tape chew. Your carefully curated mixtape (probably made off the radio) suddenly wrapped itself around the rollers. Cue the emergency pencil rewind.
CDs started creeping in too – first with single slots in the dash, then the ultimate brag: a multi-disc changer in the boot. That was proper luxury.
Sat-nav? Forget it. You had an A–Z map in the glovebox and a passenger trying (and failing) to fold it back up properly.
The 2000s – CDs, TomTom and the Magic of Bluetooth
By the 2000s, cassette players were mostly gone. Dashboards came with CD slots as standard, and some cars even boasted a 6-disc changer in the dash. No more swapping discs mid-journey – you could preload your whole week’s playlist.
Then came the real game-changer: sat-nav gadgets like TomTom and Garmin. They suction-cupped to your windscreen, mispronounced road names, and occasionally sent you down a farm track, but they beat arguing over road signs.
Towards the end of the decade, we got our first taste of Bluetooth. At first, it was just for hands-free calls, but soon you could stream music wirelessly. No more aux cables dangling everywhere – pure wizardry.
The 2010s – Touchscreens, Apps and Waze to the Rescue
The 2010s were when cars got properly clever. Out went rows of chunky buttons, in came sleek touchscreens that made dashboards look like spaceships.
