Status: Real
Did car manufacturers ever offer the option of an in-car phonograph? I would have thought not. After all, the technological challenge presented by such a product is obvious. How can you get it not to skip? But trusting in the common sense of car manufacturers is never a wise thing to do. So in this respect it's probably obvious that, yes, such a feature was once offered, though for a very brief period of time. Predictably, the in-car phonographs skipped like crazy and were pulled from the market.
Ookworld.com offers
a history of the Highway Hi-Fi. They debuted in 1956 as an option in some Chrysler models. The big catch was that they only played records specially made for in-car phonographs: 7-inch 16⅔-rpm ultra-microgroove format records. There were only six discs in this format to choose from. Those discs contained a selection of "classical recording, the tops in popular music, drama, children's stories" selected by Columbia Records executives.
Chrysler didn't offer this style of in-car phonograph again. But in 1960 it did offer a unit that played regular 45-rpm records. You could stack up 12 of them at a time. It worked well if you were sitting in your car idling. As soon as the car started to move, there were problems.
The
UAW-Daimler-Chrysler site also offers a shorter history of the in-car phonograph, with color pictures.
Comments
http://members.tripod.com/~cool59/elvis.htm
Scroll down to the 1960 Series 75 Fleetwood Limousine. Lots of information about not only the car but the "entertainment console" as well.
I did a brief google but did not turn up anything, so who knows.
There were televisions for cars in the sixties, though. Cars that had them had strange-looking antennas (antennae?) on top.
Of course, none of this was very exotic compared with car phones-- something only the most ultra-ultra elite even dreamed of then.
I guess I just never saw an 8-track player until the 70s.
The most readily available and obvious example is the Auto-Comm flexidisc of Time-Life Music's `The Swing Era' LP box set. Get one and compare it to the much more readily available Eva-Tone version.
Auto-Comm devised a way to allow it's special 16-RPM large-hole flexidiscs to be played in cars of the middle 60's and not skip without wearing out the flexidisc after a couple of dozen plays.
This of course was before the Muntz 4-track music cartridge made big inroads into car stereo, followed by the Lear Jet Stereo 8 cartridge a few years later.
Occasionally Auto-Comm 16 RPM flexidiscs show up on EBAY as does the player on even rarer occasions.
An interesting footnote to car stereo, like the mini-Muntz cartridge-singles of the same period. These were tantamount to cassette singles of the 80's and early 90's carrying one or two songs on program 1 and one or two songs on program 2.
I think if was A Philips Car record player, it was black and white you put in a 7" record, single or EP, it slid in like a CD, Any record would play you just had to cut out the record center (like a old jute box) I still have some off the records and they play well, I don't have the car record player it was stolen in the first year we had the car, it played records very well (No jumps)