Here's an interesting video idea - the history of car door handles! Specifically the difference between the "pull-up" style flush handles commonly used in the '80s - mid '00s and the "pull-out" handles used almost exclusively today. Interestingly enough, the former is making a comeback...
The thumb button type was the "norm" in the 50s and 60s. Chrysler began using the "pull up" type in 1957, By the 70s it was THE standard almost across all US car makes, EXCEPT for some GM luxury and near luxury models (Even the 1985 and up FWD Olds 98, Buick Electra, Cadillac DeVille and Fleetwood) where the old "thumb button" was used! (In the case of Buick and Olds, it was brought BACK in '85, as those were "pull up" type from 1977-1984!) Caddy kept the thumb button type all the way; (Not really changed since 1963!) I guess that the idea was "old style" = "old money"? 🤷♂️
@@jamesslick4790 my Uncle Frank used to own a 1990 Cadillac Brougham with the optional 5.7L V8, and it had the thumb button style door handles. One feature that I really liked, and as a kid thought was really unique unlike anything I've seen before, was you flipped the license plate down to put gas in the car, it didn't matter what side you pulled up to, that was nice if there was a long line at the gas station. Anyway I was 14 when he sold the Cadillac and brought a new 2004 GMC 2500 HD.
@@Sparky-ww5re Yes, the rear center gas cap hidden by the license plate was another cool thing on the full-sized GM luxury cars. My 1977 Buick Electra Limited had it too! In the 1950s GM also hid the gas filler behind taillights!
In the late 80's, at least where I lived, we were still calling cellphones car phones even they were still those cellphones that you had to walk around with a huge battery pack. I remember when my mom got her first "car phone" when I was 16 or 17 & she called me asking me to guess where she was at. I said her best friends name & she was like just come outside. She was so excited that she waisted money to call the house from right outside. I don't think younger people realize how big of a deal mobile phones were back then.
no because your generation is a bunch of spoiled rotten brats that have had everything handed to you and never did a day of real work in your miserable lives 😠
Here's a funny story, in the early days of mobile when phones had shrunk from the size of a brick to the size & thickness of a clay paver I was on a bus & a yuppie was on his phone talking animatedly, in those days it was kinda uncool to use phones in such settings, many of us other passengers were looking at each other with that, 'isn't he a tosser' expression, some raising eyebrows others smirking when all of a sudden his phone rang! Well the look on his face was priceless the combination of shock & embarrassment mixed with stupidity, my God I'll never forget it, many of us lol myself included as we watched him fumble for the controls to answer it. He quickly gained control spoke to the person on the other end as he jumped up and signalled the bus to stop getting off & stumbling as he exited, probably not at the stop he was going to either all to the chorus of us all laughing at him. What a great day 🤣
Yep, bag phones. If you were walking around with one of those you were someone important. When I was an apprentice the master electrician I was working under, when he was a senior in high school in 1989 or '90, his father had a bag phone since he was a real estate agent, anyway over the course of a few days he ran up a $400 phone bill talking to this girl who went to the same school, and when the bill came his dad came unglued, thought he was going to get much worse than a paddling and privileges taken away-) as it was like 5 or 10 dollars a minute or something crazy like that.
Fun fact those car phones used 800 mhz analog radio systems, those frequencies have been taken over by public safety. And many of them have had a kill switch activated when powered up. They disable most old car phones when it tries to connect to a tower so it won't interfere with police and fire
Slotted in between the car phone and what we now know as a cell phone, came the "bag phone". It consisted of a car phone style handset (with a cord), a base (sometimes with a folding antenna) and a battery the size and weight of a small construction brick, usually contained in a vinyl case (or bag). I bring it up because it was generally only suitable for use in a car as it was too bulky and power hungry for much use on its own. Thought that was worth a mention in this subject.
I had one made by Alpine, bought at the time for $400 CDN in a pawn shop. You could unscrew the small antenna and attach a magnetic roof-mounted antenna. Even with the brick hanging off your shoulder it sure looked cool at conventions!
That was the first cell phone my family had. The bag had a 12V lead-acid battery. They took off once they hit $500. Radio Shack sold them out of its catalog. One big selling point was “Only Weighs 20 Pounds!” 😄
There were also bag phones where the battery pack was optional. It was essentially a car phone for those that didn't want a permanent installation or wanted one that could be moved between cars. We had one in the early 90s that was actually that Uniden handset shown near the end of the video but in a bag and it only worked when plugged into the car's 12 volt socket.
When I was a teenager, I drove my dad's jetta which had a car phone. This was around 2000. Although cell phones were a thing back then, he traveled a lot and found the car phone had much better reception. It was great for me when I had the car as a cellphone was too expensive.
In the 70's we had our own private radio relay system at home. It was a patch system to our rotary car phones. We could go up to 75 miles away and call anywhere. Best of all we owned the service and only paid for the power to run the base.
My uncle's boss at the time was a professional engineer that specialized in HVAC, Plumbing, Mechanical, and Electrical for commercial buildings and he had a built-in car phone in his Range Rover. My mom, while not having a permanent car phone, did have a bag phone, which was essentially the exact same phone, but with a battery pack and a removable antenna that could be taken off and then the antenna that was stuck to the roof of the car with a magnet could be plugged in its place. Those were the days. When my mom got hers, with her monthly bill, she got FIFTEEN FREE MINUTES! and only $.75 a minute after that! What a deal!
One of my cars (that I do not daily drive) 1995 BMW M5 has a car phone, the phone is actually a GSM phone and it continues to work on a pay as you go plan until Roger’s finally shuts the 2G GSM network down (likely very soon). It’s amazing. It works and has a max power output of 2W. Much better signal strength then any modern smart phone
so cool! I was just thinking there must be a 4g or 5g module designed to save the functionality of these car phones. A sim card conversion if you will.
Once drove in a ~2006 Mercedes that had a type of cellphone attached to a chord. A regular SIM card could fit in the phone. I tried it out by putting my SIM card in it and called a relative we were traveling to. Pretty cool experience for the time.
@@jessihawkins9116 Not everywhere, the car phone in my 03 S-Class still works flawlessly. In my country LTE coverage is only available in densely populated areas and 5G is almost nonexistent out of city centers so we rely on 2G and 3G a lot still.
@@jessihawkins9116 I think depends on the area. Here, Europe, I still testing and using car phones from 1992-1995 with no problem. But yes, with some carrier, also 5g sim, they still work. With other carriers don't... but I can say like 80% work.
I remember the car phone my dad had in his company vehicles back in the 90’s. It was a Motorola model, but was mounted alongside a highband Motorola Spectra. The guest interviewee mentioned Johnson equipment. I know what he’s taking about as I work for Johnson (EF Johnson) and we have a few on display around the office. Don’t do phones much any more but still heavy in two way radios.
1975: While attending college I worked for an alarm/security patrol company, graveyard shift, 73 Plymouth Satellite with Motorola Micor UHF 2-way and a eleven channel Motorola rotary dial VHF phone control head on the transmission hump, the actual phone (radio) was in the trunk. Used only to direct call alarm customers or direct call police briefly as charges were every 15 seconds (only mobile carrier around so they could charge as they pleased).
The first car my family owned is a 2000 Nissan Bluebird. The car is still being driven by my uncle up till now. We never made any mods to it over the years, so it still has some cool retro features, including a huge car phone in the glove box, a CD player in the trunk (which is kind of weird, because you need to walk around the car and open the trunk to access the CD tray, but the controls are located in the front center console; the CD tray can hold and read 5 - 6 CD discs simultaneously), a cassette player in the front center console (can hold up to 2 cassettes at the same time, if I recall correctly), and all sorts of mechanical buttons and switches. Every time I stepped into it, I felt as if I just travelled back in time lol
@@Apocalypse_Cow It's in China. The Nissan Bluebird was one of the only foreign car models available in China back then, and my dad bought it for an equivalent of around 28k USD (2001 value), which was quite expensive. My dad drove the car until 2008, when he bought a BMW 325i, and the Nissan Bluebird has been driven by my uncle since then.
@@peter_hhm thank you for the information. I remember using the Bluebird in the video game Gran Turismo. I always liked where the side view mirrors are mounted among other things. I hope I can see one in RL somewhere someday. ✌️😎
I love how much of what we think of as pretty new, turns out to be far older than most realize. My personal favorite is how you can trace the fax machine all the way back to before telephones and some devices for copying signatures across telegraph lines.
AT&T had offered car phone service in major cities since the 1940s. It was a duplex radio service with a handful of frequencies, not cellular, (many towers, more frequencies..) so there were VERY limited connections (sometimes one would wait a half hour to get a "line"!). The later car phones of the 1980s WERE cellular phones, (the first HAND HELD cellular phone was demonstrated in 1973). but it took a while for cellular phones to become smaller AND "cheap", After cellular car phones became sort of normal, the "bag phone" became a thing. True handhelds at the consumer level followed. Then PDAs became hot in the 1990s (Most importantly, the Palm "Pilot") Marrying the Palm "Pilot" PDA concept to the cellular phone was the start of the "smartphone".
The earliest mobile phones used AT&T's MTS (Mobile Telephone Service). A human operator would set up each call. It was crazy expensive and only a handful of channels were available in each city. AT&T replaced MTS with IMTS. It eliminated human operators for most calls.
In 1986, my dad had a Mitsubishi Diamond Tel car phone installed in his Toyota Camry. Very expensive at the time, but I noticed more and more cars had them in the late 80s living in Southern California. Honda offered a optional dealer installed car phone with a 1DIN keypad on the 1994-97 Accord.
Great video Zack! I still carry a pager. Paging technology was out decades before car phones (even RCC Mobilephones) and outlasted the car phone. Pager still has coverage where cellphones don't in my area.
I used to install these in the late 1990s. It was a horror story because some cars were prone to automatically triggering their airbags if you touched the wrong wires. I never set off one but I was waiting for it to happen! Certain GM models were also prone to deploying the airbag if you disconnected the car's positive battery lead while the negative was still connected. What a minefield.
You might be onto something there. As a teenager I was walking home from a job late at night & was a set of legs sticking out of a parked car. As it was Kingshighway & Natural Bridge avenue, North St Louis at night I swore he was dead. I was able to wake him up & he told me something was wrong with his ignition switch 12V hot to turn on his aftermarket amp. He had fiddled with the 12 volt hot while his face was less than 1 inch from the airbag & it deployed! He tried giving me a ride home but he was legally drunk so I said no! I was like dude no wayy! Sure enough airbag WAS deployed when I looked!
@@w.e.s. there was one particular model of car that was an exception to that rule, and it was also one where you had to make sure that you always disconnected the battery's negative terminal before starting. That's WHY I never set one off. If you don't like my comment or input, either ignore it or go and peddle your poison pen somewhere else!
I not only had a mobile phone in the seventies but worked on them and installed them. I loved phones the first car phones had " mobile operators" they would dial the number for you then connect the phone line to the radio for you to talk on.... i still work on radios since i have a commertial FCC license as well as being an radio amateur Extra (ham)
My grandma had a carphone in her Lincoln Town Car, they finally got rid of it I think in 96 or 97. I used to talk on that thing as a kid and thought it was so cool. I called my friend at his house and said I'm talking to you from a MOVING CAR. That was so exciting I still vividly remember that 25 years later.
Back in 1975 as a 12 year old boy I had a portable radio that could tune into a radio band, I think it was called WB-PSB. That was used in Orange County, California by “Santa Ana Mobile”, and sometimes I would hear neighboring “Riverside Mobile” on the same frequency. That radio frequency was used by the few wealthy people who had car phones to place calls with those mobile phone networks. Someone in a car would call an operator to connect them to a landline telephone number. The connection was made and the conversation began with the two people on the phone speaking freely about just about anything probably thinking that nobody was listening in. As a 12 year old boy I was entertained for hours listening to phone sex, drug deals or just mundane phone calls. Thanks for the memories!
I just discovered this channel and holy crap it’s awesome! I’ve binged all your documentary videos and they’re all great. I have a pair of BMWs (a 1998 740iL and 2001 750iL M Sport) and both were optioned with car phones when new. The phone in the 1998, while it does power on and beep, doesn’t work to call anyone anymore and you can’t get service at all. The 2001 however, does work fully! And I still have service on the phone, at least until Verizon turns off the CDMA network at the end of 2022.
My parents had a "bag phone" for a short period. That thing was so awkward, they didn't keep it for long and had a phone installed in an '85 Chevy caprice classic, two tone tan, which eventually became my car. The antenna mounted on the trunk lid left a mark in the paint. Lol
I am SO glad you did this video. I vividly remembered my uncle having one of these in his Lincoln Town Car in the early-mid 90s but nobody else in the family remembered it. I was starting to wonder if I was going crazy!
It is certainly interesting how technology has evolved. In Highscool I had an installed carphone/bag phone so I could transfer it to the houseboat. Back then in 1995 I never would have imagined one day I could send emails and access the internet or even text message on my phone. It is pretty crazy how tech has evolved.
Here I am sitting in my 95 W140 S class while fiddling with my car phone in the center compartment, which amazingly still works. It got the mercedes Logo on it right by the mic. Can only imagine how the 1st owner of this tank felt when his mighty machine got specd out with a car phone. How times have changed, I wish I was an adult in the 90s. Seems like a calm and cool era to live in. Sadly I was just a lil kid back then born in Nov 94. But very thankful for being born in the 90s.
My uncle Frank purchased a 1990 Cadillac Brougham sometime around 1997 when I was in 3rd grade, and it had a car phone, however it was no longer functional, but it still had the antenna on the roof near the back window if I remember correctly. Not sure who the previous owner was, but the fact it had the button tufted leather seating, and had the sunroof option, White wall tires, said a lot about the previous owner. Of course my favorite thing about the car was you flipped the license plate over to put gas in the car, and to open the trunk you rotated the Cadillac logo out of the way to insert the key, making a big deal out of it. That was dope.
My mom had a bag phone in the late 80s, and it was a predecessor to the cell phone, it was a phone that looked like a big purse with the handset part of a phone connected to it, and she had some setup that allowed her to plug the bag into the car, through a couple plugs in the trunk, and make phone calls from a handset in the front.
My step mother had a Car Phone back in the 80s - she was a successful life insurance agent, and the car phone let her confirm appointments, check in with the office, etc while driving from client to client
My dad has a 2007 Chevrolet Silverado that had the satellite phone through OnStar. It didn't have buttons for dialing but you'd instead speak out the number, which was often hit or miss. With that in mind coupled with the price of having the phone service on top of owning a cell phone, as a result he hasn't used it since the first couple years of owning the truck.
During the late 80s, here in Italy, a friend of my dad had this beautiful full optional Fiat Croma Turbo (the luxury full size Fiat at the time) with the car phone. A real status symbol at the time, but, if you lived outside big cities, was pretty useless and very VERY expensive, also because, at the time, there was only one provider for phone communications, called SIP, a state owned company, so no competitor at all.
I loved this video. I grew up with my father having a 'bag phone' he was a truck driver, he used it to coordinate his stops...and I racked up a huge bill once calling my friends, lol.
I bought a brand new 1985 Corvette and the first thing i did was have a car phone installed. Yes, expensive, about $1,200. for the installation and the phone itself, but the real costs were crazy, like $1. per minute for local calling, plus an additional $1. per minute roaming outside of your LOCAL area. then long distance charges were about $4. per minute on top of the base charges. And the topper of all things was, if someone called you on your car phone, you paid for it regardless that you didn't call the person. The phone companies got you coming and going for real back then. It was easy to rack up $300 or $400 dollars a month for a car phone back in the day.
I had a bag phone then a flip phone. When I worked for what became ATT Cellular they gave us a car mount kit. You could pop the phone in the cradle and it was hands free after dialing.
I traveled a lot and my first "Bag Phone" was bolted into my 1992 Honda. It had a separate handset with cord bolted to the dash. The AT&T rate was $.60/min Same car but two years later was a Nokia phone that added a hand free mike/speaker. This phone could be removed and put in your pocket Where we lived the bigger the mounted antenna the better. Signals would come and go on most back roads where travel on the interstate has better coverage. This technology enabled me to return calls the same day and without having to pull off the highway and find a phone booth. My monthly cell bill ran between $600-$900/month but saved hours since I was driving typically 5 hr/day between customer calls. The car phone increased my productivity at least 30% when combined with a pager My last "installed" phone (with car mounted antenna and hands free kit) was in my 2005 car
Yep, I had one. In the early/mid 2000s, I drove triaxle dump truck for a company and there was a company car phone in it. We used it just like any telephone. Except we mainly used our to call back to the dispatcher for info on a load.
Nice video. Back in early 90s, we had a Motorola bag phone that could be moved from car to car. It was a heavy bag at about 10 pounds or so. Amazing how technology evolves for better or worse.
The handset is gone, but we just got a 96 bmw 740 with the holder where you would rest your arm. I am 37 and growing up we even had a 80's voyager with a carphone. My dad is a mechanic and we used to sell cell phones for years. So, he would install the complete car kit in all our cars back then. We didn't have money, but it didn't cost all that much when you paid wholesale and installed yourself and lastly the phone companies gave you heavily discounted demo lines.
the classic sound the old motorola bag phones made when they turned on ... my 90s childhood - that was the sound of getting on the road. *car start* then *blurrrrrrp* from the phone mounted in the glove box signified movement and communication. So good!
My dad's 1993 Mercury Cougar had a car phone installed, and I got the car handed down to me when I got my license in '97. You could program numbers into a speed dial, too. Today, when I think about car phones I only ever think of Miami Vice. Sonny Crockett had one in his Ferrari Daytona & Testarossa throughout the series.
Yes to both of your questions at the end. In the early to mid 1990s both my wife and I had the ‘car’ phones installed in the car. That ended about 1999 or so when we got our first hand held cell phones. Also I bought (in 2013) a 1998 Mercedes E300 that had the built in Motorola handset style phone in the armrest. In the mid 2000s Mercedes had ditched the Motorola phone and instead provided a cradle that would accept certain hand held cell phones. You would purchase the phone through the dealer when you bought the car, but this setup let you take the phone with you when you left the car. As these early model cell phones went obsolete, Mercedes offered a solution with a module that plugged into the cradle that could be paired with any Bluetooth phone. However these could only do Handsfree profile, not A2DP. By 2010 they had integrated Bluetooth into the car stereo and this supported calling and A2DP. CarPlay started being offered in 2015, at first you had to pay extra for the dealer to unlock it but they quickly dropped that a few years later.
Some expensive GM cars still come with a car phone of sorts. It is part of the OnStar system and is mainly used to summon assistance in case of a crash or breakdown but you can buy minutes for and make other calls from it. The cell phone is actually in the rear view mirror. My sister has one in her truck (if you knew her you would get why she drives a truck -- she actually owns two of them) but since she carries a regular cell phone around anyway I don't think she has it activated.
While my family never had one, my aunt did! She had a station wagon (wood paneling and all), and had a car phone in it. I remember being in awe of it (I was a kiddo then). Later she gave the wagon to my family. We didn't keep the phone, but the car still at the phone antenna on the roof.
My parents had a car phone in their old 89 Buick.. you should do a video on why car’s don’t use drum brakes any more or rather a history of brakes and different brakes over the years.
Some cars still use rear drums. The Toyota Tacoma is the most notable example. They're cheaper than discs and provide adequate braking power on the back.
When I was a kid my moms Celica (92) had a car phone, but she didn’t have a plan for it because it was already the late 90s and she had a Nokia brick she carried around.
Missed a lot of the details. In the 90s, I had the entire series in car system with a fixed, wired handset; bag phone with in-car connection to the antenna and speakers; huge flip phone mounted in the car with a charger, antenna, and connection through the speakers. They all had better reception than later phones. My wife had a portable cell phone in 1993. The antenna on the back window was the status symbol.
1st car phone in our family: 1990 Audi V8 - which itself was very expensive (50k, not S class money but 7 series match) and may have come standard in that model, can't see Dad having paid more for the phone. It was all but forbidden to call him on that ("very expensive") and rarely used even for business - so what really was the point. [Point was, Dad dropped serious money on the car, but was still a poor kid - and watched pennies]
In ‘99, I bought my first nice car that was a 1993 Honda Accord EX sedan that had a Motorola car phone installed in it. It didn’t have service, but it could still call the state police the few times we needed it. If you tried to dial any other number than 911, it would prompt you for a credit card number to use and charge the call to. It had a cool beep sound that let you know. It was working when you turned on the car and a swanky little antenna on the back window. I knew a couple other people that had the cords like mine, but they weren’t stick shift and they didn’t have a Motorola car phone melted on the passenger side of the gearshift console.
My Dad got his first car phone in 1984, 2 years before I was born. It was a Mitsubishi and we had all the phones, bag phones and flip phones. All the phones. I don’t remember a world without a phone on deck at all times
My first cell (analog) was a Mitsubishi. $25 per hour, 7 segment display, no texting, battery lasted 15 mins (which was fine, my calls were timed to the second - my gf knew this and when she was mad, she'd extend the call just past a minute and hang up - I got billed for the whole 2nd minute, thanks love) - It looked more like a cordless phone met a remote control for a TV. Still, at 15-16, it was a pretty cool thing to have. Only one other guy in my class had a cell, it was a StarTAC - some of us had pagers.
My grandmother had a car phone, she and her husband were the town doctors in their small town in Ireland. My mom told me about how much she could brag to her friends about the car phone but that she and her siblings were prohibited from even touching it.
I remember my dad, working as a traveling salesman in the 70's had a car phone 📱 that he would bring inside along with his briefcase 💼 at the end of the day. He had to plug it in to charge overnight. It was HUGE but it was the coolest thing ever and all the other dads in the neighborhood were amazed that it even existed. (I had the coolest 😎 dad in the neighborhood)
Great video. Anyway you could do a video on the digital gauges that some manufacturers started using in the 80s and 90s? Feel like many younger drivers have no idea how awesome some of those gauges looked and how they went away. Thank you!!
We didn't have a car phone, but we did have a "bag phone". I remember my mom getting it for Christmas and we were all so excited for it! It was about 95-96, if I remember correctly.
my mom had a GMC Safari conversion van back in the 90's that had a car phone, she used to make calls after she picked me up from school and tell dad we were heading home and discuss what was for dinner. ahhh good times...
The 92 explorer my family has had for like 20 years came with some sort of phone kit thing. There's a holder that looks like it's for a brick phone mounted to the floor along with a rectangular speaker in front of the center console, and a mic at the top of the a pillar trim. The antenna is still on the roof as well
My dad had one in his Nissan Skyline in the late 80's, pretty sure it was a Motorola. I remember the headset was giant compared to today's cellphones, and there was also a large antenna installed on the trunk. Calling from a car was quite the novelty back then.
Brought a brand new 91 first year Ford Explorer with a factory phone mounted on the floor in the middle of the hump. Used it sparingly at from what I can remember about $2bucks a minute, but it so was cool and looked quite impressive. Broke off at least two antennas in the drive thru car wash before I remembered to fold it down. Had never bought a first year anything, furthermore a car AND a car phone. However, both worked out well. Lol! Nice vid!
my dad was an exec for texaco and had a car phone in as early as 87. he would call my mom to tell her he was on his way from the 45 minute commute home so she could start making dinner. it was dope
A couple years ago my friend got a call from a random number and when he answered a woman yelled “Where ARE you!” so loud that I could hear it, then after finding out she had the wrong number apologized and said she was trying to call her mom’s carphone. I had only heard a little about carphones at that point because I was probably 15 or so and didn’t really have an interest in things like that yet. Now every time I hear even the slightest whisper of carphone I think of that call.
I still remember my dad's old five watt phone he carried in his truck back in the 90s. The antenna would shock you if you accidentally touched it while the phone was in use.
It was a long time ago and I was still very young so I don't remember exactly who had it. But I do remember writing semi regularly in a car that had a car phone. I remember someone telling me they charged them an arm and a leg per call. I learned years later that you could actually have a car phone without a specific plan but they would charge you per call if you needed to use it for roadside assistance. I hadn't thought about that in many years. This video definitely brought back some memories.👍
A friend of our family had a phone in his Rolls but with his , you had to be connected by a lady who would then put your call through , just like making a long-distance call back in the day but from your car , this was all very expensive but still very cool , in our house we were still using a rotary phone . I remember seeing the transmitter and receiver in the trunk , that thing was a beast .This was back in the 1970s
Around 1990, my grandpa had a phone installed into his truck. He owned a large concrete company and felt the need to be available at any time. But the phone was a large, push-button desk phone. The kind with the coiled cord and regular handset. It was so cool back then, but seems so ridiculous now.
This video is supposed to be the "The History Of Phones Installed In Cars" but only goes back to the beginning of the cellular age. Mobile vehicular FM communications began in the 1930's but by the 1940's the industry figured out a way to cross the two-way radio with the cash register, and it's been downhill ever since.
I sold BAM (Bell Atlantic mobile), and later installed car phones while in college. never could afford one though. I got my first cell phone when I worked for IBM in the mid 90s. We had a separate unit called a PT, which was a brick used for sending and receiving service call information.
My uncle had this land rover defender with not a phone but a radio thingy. My mom bought the car from him and still has the radio unit even though it never gets used.
Back when I was in elementary school, the school van had a car phone, they need it so they can re-direct or use it for other task I think. I remembered the driver using it when the van broke down.
Yep, Early 90's - tech got to Australia a bit later back then. My Dad used to have a carphone (that looked like the motorola ones you showed) in his company car.
I had a car phone installed in my 1989 Honda Civic in the early 1990s. I remember I had to make an appointment to have the phone installed and took about 4 hours to install. It was a corded handset (removable) and the base was non-removable. The monthly fee was astronomical and the per minute fee to make a phone call was worse. I would have monthly phone bills over $200 dollars/month. They also had ridiculous contracts. But when your in your in your early twenties sometimes you do some crazy things. Needless to say when the gigantic bagged mobile phones came around I ditched the car phone. They had cheaper plans and were more versatile. You could use them outside your car.
I never run up a $200 cell phone bill but when I was teaching sometimes my home phone bill would approach that amount (this was in the 70's and 80's). I lived about 75 miles from campus and I both had students calling me and called students back. The phone company didn't have a problem with me running that kind of balance, especially after I did it for years on end and paid the bill on time every month. We didn't have e-mail or cell phones back then (I think the first cell phone towers went up in my residence area in the late 1980's but I didn't have one until 2004 -- well after I retired from teaching).
My dad had one in his car from around 1986. Supplied by the company he worked for. Obviously replaced by a mobile when it could. I drive a 2002 745, that still has a mobile phone option. Kinda the last to really have them, before bluetooth saw you just link in your mobile.
I had a car phone from the early to mid 90's. An obnoxious thing that wasn't mentioned was when the key wasn't in the ignition, instead of the phone ringing, the horn would honk. Also you had to manually connect to each mobile phone tower. There was no automated transfer as with cell phones.
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www.zackpradel.com/product-page/cars-were-better-in-the-80-s-sticker
Here's an interesting video idea - the history of car door handles! Specifically the difference between the "pull-up" style flush handles commonly used in the '80s - mid '00s and the "pull-out" handles used almost exclusively today. Interestingly enough, the former is making a comeback...
The thumb button type was the "norm" in the 50s and 60s. Chrysler began using the "pull up" type in 1957, By the 70s it was THE standard almost across all US car makes, EXCEPT for some GM luxury and near luxury models (Even the 1985 and up FWD Olds 98, Buick Electra, Cadillac DeVille and Fleetwood) where the old "thumb button" was used! (In the case of Buick and Olds, it was brought BACK in '85, as those were "pull up" type from 1977-1984!) Caddy kept the thumb button type all the way; (Not really changed since 1963!) I guess that the idea was "old style" = "old money"? 🤷♂️
@@jamesslick4790 my Uncle Frank used to own a 1990 Cadillac Brougham with the optional 5.7L V8, and it had the thumb button style door handles. One feature that I really liked, and as a kid thought was really unique unlike anything I've seen before, was you flipped the license plate down to put gas in the car, it didn't matter what side you pulled up to, that was nice if there was a long line at the gas station. Anyway I was 14 when he sold the Cadillac and brought a new 2004 GMC 2500 HD.
@@Sparky-ww5re Yes, the rear center gas cap hidden by the license plate was another cool thing on the full-sized GM luxury cars. My 1977 Buick Electra Limited had it too! In the 1950s GM also hid the gas filler behind taillights!
Lets through different head lights as well if he hadnt made one thad be nice too
My dads 1980 Dodge Rancharger has thumb button style handles too
In the late 80's, at least where I lived, we were still calling cellphones car phones even they were still those cellphones that you had to walk around with a huge battery pack. I remember when my mom got her first "car phone" when I was 16 or 17 & she called me asking me to guess where she was at. I said her best friends name & she was like just come outside. She was so excited that she waisted money to call the house from right outside. I don't think younger people realize how big of a deal mobile phones were back then.
no because your generation is a bunch of spoiled rotten brats that have had everything handed to you and never did a day of real work in your miserable lives 😠
My dad wouldn’t even spring for air conditioning! I can’t imagine having a car phone.
I was so jealous of a friend who had a car phone. My dad was still clinging on to pagers.
Here's a funny story, in the early days of mobile when phones had shrunk from the size of a brick to the size & thickness of a clay paver I was on a bus & a yuppie was on his phone talking animatedly, in those days it was kinda uncool to use phones in such settings, many of us other passengers were looking at each other with that, 'isn't he a tosser' expression, some raising eyebrows others smirking when all of a sudden his phone rang! Well the look on his face was priceless the combination of shock & embarrassment mixed with stupidity, my God I'll never forget it, many of us lol myself included as we watched him fumble for the controls to answer it. He quickly gained control spoke to the person on the other end as he jumped up and signalled the bus to stop getting off & stumbling as he exited, probably not at the stop he was going to either all to the chorus of us all laughing at him. What a great day 🤣
Yep, bag phones. If you were walking around with one of those you were someone important. When I was an apprentice the master electrician I was working under, when he was a senior in high school in 1989 or '90, his father had a bag phone since he was a real estate agent, anyway over the course of a few days he ran up a $400 phone bill talking to this girl who went to the same school, and when the bill came his dad came unglued, thought he was going to get much worse than a paddling and privileges taken away-) as it was like 5 or 10 dollars a minute or something crazy like that.
Fun fact those car phones used 800 mhz analog radio systems, those frequencies have been taken over by public safety. And many of them have had a kill switch activated when powered up. They disable most old car phones when it tries to connect to a tower so it won't interfere with police and fire
Slotted in between the car phone and what we now know as a cell phone, came the "bag phone". It consisted of a car phone style handset (with a cord), a base (sometimes with a folding antenna) and a battery the size and weight of a small construction brick, usually contained in a vinyl case (or bag). I bring it up because it was generally only suitable for use in a car as it was too bulky and power hungry for much use on its own. Thought that was worth a mention in this subject.
and in prison theres something called a suitcase phone
I had one made by Alpine, bought at the time for $400 CDN in a pawn shop. You could unscrew the small antenna and attach a magnetic roof-mounted antenna. Even with the brick hanging off your shoulder it sure looked cool at conventions!
My grand dad had one to bring on his boat.
That was the first cell phone my family had. The bag had a 12V lead-acid battery. They took off once they hit $500. Radio Shack sold them out of its catalog. One big selling point was “Only Weighs 20 Pounds!” 😄
There were also bag phones where the battery pack was optional. It was essentially a car phone for those that didn't want a permanent installation or wanted one that could be moved between cars. We had one in the early 90s that was actually that Uniden handset shown near the end of the video but in a bag and it only worked when plugged into the car's 12 volt socket.
When I was a teenager, I drove my dad's jetta which had a car phone. This was around 2000. Although cell phones were a thing back then, he traveled a lot and found the car phone had much better reception. It was great for me when I had the car as a cellphone was too expensive.
In the 70's we had our own private radio relay system at home. It was a patch system to our rotary car phones. We could go up to 75 miles away and call anywhere. Best of all we owned the service and only paid for the power to run the base.
Cool😀
Unless u want using am on a cloudy night u could only get 60 miles at best. Mhz don't work that way bc curvature of the earth
My uncle's boss at the time was a professional engineer that specialized in HVAC, Plumbing, Mechanical, and Electrical for commercial buildings and he had a built-in car phone in his Range Rover. My mom, while not having a permanent car phone, did have a bag phone, which was essentially the exact same phone, but with a battery pack and a removable antenna that could be taken off and then the antenna that was stuck to the roof of the car with a magnet could be plugged in its place.
Those were the days. When my mom got hers, with her monthly bill, she got FIFTEEN FREE MINUTES! and only $.75 a minute after that! What a deal!
One of my cars (that I do not daily drive) 1995 BMW M5 has a car phone, the phone is actually a GSM phone and it continues to work on a pay as you go plan until Roger’s finally shuts the 2G GSM network down (likely very soon). It’s amazing. It works and has a max power output of 2W. Much better signal strength then any modern smart phone
so cool! I was just thinking there must be a 4g or 5g module designed to save the functionality of these car phones. A sim card conversion if you will.
@Pistachio Bandanos It would require an entire GSM base station, and equipment to work. Thats why they cant be used
Once drove in a ~2006 Mercedes that had a type of cellphone attached to a chord. A regular SIM card could fit in the phone. I tried it out by putting my SIM card in it and called a relative we were traveling to. Pretty cool experience for the time.
even if what you are saying was true it would not work now because they phased out 2G and 3G networks 🤨
@@jessihawkins9116 Not everywhere, the car phone in my 03 S-Class still works flawlessly. In my country LTE coverage is only available in densely populated areas and 5G is almost nonexistent out of city centers so we rely on 2G and 3G a lot still.
@@jessihawkins9116 depends on where you live. I had a Mercedes from this generation and had a car phone as well!
@@jessihawkins9116 untrue, at least where I live, the phone in my car from 97 still works
@@jessihawkins9116 I think depends on the area. Here, Europe, I still testing and using car phones from 1992-1995 with no problem. But yes, with some carrier, also 5g sim, they still work. With other carriers don't... but I can say like 80% work.
Was looking forward to this! My dad said he felt like a pimp using the car phone in his old 3 Series
July 20th - The History Of T-Tops!
Music at 3:00 please??
Yass!
@@VZLAV you guys are still here for a while while i i i and her boyfriend is going out for dinner 🍽 lol 😝 just told him to call ☎️ if she needs a
@@BatCaveOz you
@@VZLAV you
My father had one in his 88 Bonneville sse. It was around 1.75 a minute to use. Side note he ran that car to 418k miles and sold it. Owned since new.
Hah, my analog cell phone from 1995 cost $25 for an hour of use - 41 cents a minute, but $25 was a lot for 16 year old me.
I remember the car phone my dad had in his company vehicles back in the 90’s. It was a Motorola model, but was mounted alongside a highband Motorola Spectra. The guest interviewee mentioned Johnson equipment. I know what he’s taking about as I work for Johnson (EF Johnson) and we have a few on display around the office. Don’t do phones much any more but still heavy in two way radios.
I remember watching the movie twins and seeing the car phone with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I remember seeing some Harrison Ford action thriller from the early 90s with him using one in a Porsche 911 as he speeds down a busy highway.
1975: While attending college I worked for an alarm/security patrol company, graveyard shift, 73 Plymouth Satellite with Motorola Micor UHF 2-way and a eleven channel Motorola rotary dial VHF phone control head on the transmission hump, the actual phone (radio) was in the trunk. Used only to direct call alarm customers or direct call police briefly as charges were every 15 seconds (only mobile carrier around so they could charge as they pleased).
I have to admit, I really love this video essay on car phones so much!
Keep up the great work, Zack.
The first car my family owned is a 2000 Nissan Bluebird. The car is still being driven by my uncle up till now. We never made any mods to it over the years, so it still has some cool retro features, including a huge car phone in the glove box, a CD player in the trunk (which is kind of weird, because you need to walk around the car and open the trunk to access the CD tray, but the controls are located in the front center console; the CD tray can hold and read 5 - 6 CD discs simultaneously), a cassette player in the front center console (can hold up to 2 cassettes at the same time, if I recall correctly), and all sorts of mechanical buttons and switches. Every time I stepped into it, I felt as if I just travelled back in time lol
Very cool! Where in the world is your Uncle driving 🚘 the Bluebird?
@@Apocalypse_Cow It's in China. The Nissan Bluebird was one of the only foreign car models available in China back then, and my dad bought it for an equivalent of around 28k USD (2001 value), which was quite expensive. My dad drove the car until 2008, when he bought a BMW 325i, and the Nissan Bluebird has been driven by my uncle since then.
@@peter_hhm thank you for the information. I remember using the Bluebird in the video game Gran Turismo. I always liked where the side view mirrors are mounted among other things. I hope I can see one in RL somewhere someday. ✌️😎
I love how much of what we think of as pretty new, turns out to be far older than most realize. My personal favorite is how you can trace the fax machine all the way back to before telephones and some devices for copying signatures across telegraph lines.
AT&T had offered car phone service in major cities since the 1940s. It was a duplex radio service with a handful of frequencies, not cellular, (many towers, more frequencies..) so there were VERY limited connections (sometimes one would wait a half hour to get a "line"!). The later car phones of the 1980s WERE cellular phones, (the first HAND HELD cellular phone was demonstrated in 1973). but it took a while for cellular phones to become smaller AND "cheap", After cellular car phones became sort of normal, the "bag phone" became a thing. True handhelds at the consumer level followed. Then PDAs became hot in the 1990s (Most importantly, the Palm "Pilot") Marrying the Palm "Pilot" PDA concept to the cellular phone was the start of the "smartphone".
The earliest mobile phones used AT&T's MTS (Mobile Telephone Service). A human operator would set up each call. It was crazy expensive and only a handful of channels were available in each city.
AT&T replaced MTS with IMTS. It eliminated human operators for most calls.
In 1986, my dad had a Mitsubishi Diamond Tel car phone installed in his Toyota Camry. Very expensive at the time, but I noticed more and more cars had them in the late 80s living in Southern California.
Honda offered a optional dealer installed car phone with a 1DIN keypad on the 1994-97 Accord.
ooh I want that Honda car phone installed in my 1998 Accord.
Great video Zack! I still carry a pager. Paging technology was out decades before car phones (even RCC Mobilephones) and outlasted the car phone. Pager still has coverage where cellphones don't in my area.
Dang pagers still exist??? You mean to tell me you use it and you can get service for a pager 😳 … now that’s a blast from the past
please do more car history I love these videos! I've been binging them all. fantastic work
I used to install these in the late 1990s. It was a horror story because some cars were prone to automatically triggering their airbags if you touched the wrong wires. I never set off one but I was waiting for it to happen! Certain GM models were also prone to deploying the airbag if you disconnected the car's positive battery lead while the negative was still connected. What a minefield.
Imagine if you had today's cell phone back then. You would have some Awesome videos of "installations gone awry". Perhaps even a channel!?! 🤣
You might be onto something there. As a teenager I was walking home from a job late at night & was a set of legs sticking out of a parked car. As it was Kingshighway & Natural Bridge avenue, North St Louis at night I swore he was dead. I was able to wake him up & he told me something was wrong with his ignition switch 12V hot to turn on his aftermarket amp. He had fiddled with the 12 volt hot while his face was less than 1 inch from the airbag & it deployed!
He tried giving me a ride home but he was legally drunk so I said no! I was like dude no wayy! Sure enough airbag WAS deployed when I looked!
Airbag wires have ALWAYS BEEN YELLOW!!! if u didn't know that u shouldn't of been working on them
@@w.e.s. there was one particular model of car that was an exception to that rule, and it was also one where you had to make sure that you always disconnected the battery's negative terminal before starting. That's WHY I never set one off. If you don't like my comment or input, either ignore it or go and peddle your poison pen somewhere else!
Loving these mini documentaries you're doing!
I not only had a mobile phone in the seventies but worked on them and installed them. I loved phones the first car phones had " mobile operators" they would dial the number for you then connect the phone line to the radio for you to talk on.... i still work on radios since i have a commertial FCC license as well as being an radio amateur Extra (ham)
My grandma had a carphone in her Lincoln Town Car, they finally got rid of it I think in 96 or 97. I used to talk on that thing as a kid and thought it was so cool. I called my friend at his house and said I'm talking to you from a MOVING CAR. That was so exciting I still vividly remember that 25 years later.
There are people out there that are trying to make prototypes to where are your existing hard mounted 80s car phone could work as a Bluetooth unit.
Back in 1975 as a 12 year old boy I had a portable radio that could tune into a radio band, I think it was called WB-PSB. That was used in Orange County, California by “Santa Ana Mobile”, and sometimes I would hear neighboring “Riverside Mobile” on the same frequency. That radio frequency was used by the few wealthy people who had car phones to place calls with those mobile phone networks. Someone in a car would call an operator to connect them to a landline telephone number. The connection was made and the conversation began with the two people on the phone speaking freely about just about anything probably thinking that nobody was listening in. As a 12 year old boy I was entertained for hours listening to phone sex, drug deals or just mundane phone calls. Thanks for the memories!
ngl this is the series that will pump your way to 100k subs , loooove these videos keep them going please.
I just discovered this channel and holy crap it’s awesome! I’ve binged all your documentary videos and they’re all great.
I have a pair of BMWs (a 1998 740iL and 2001 750iL M Sport) and both were optioned with car phones when new. The phone in the 1998, while it does power on and beep, doesn’t work to call anyone anymore and you can’t get service at all. The 2001 however, does work fully! And I still have service on the phone, at least until Verizon turns off the CDMA network at the end of 2022.
My parents had a "bag phone" for a short period. That thing was so awkward, they didn't keep it for long and had a phone installed in an '85 Chevy caprice classic, two tone tan, which eventually became my car. The antenna mounted on the trunk lid left a mark in the paint. Lol
I am SO glad you did this video. I vividly remembered my uncle having one of these in his Lincoln Town Car in the early-mid 90s but nobody else in the family remembered it. I was starting to wonder if I was going crazy!
I'm glad I bumped into your channel and this video.. it's cozy.
I love your channel and the effort you put in the videos.
It is certainly interesting how technology has evolved. In Highscool I had an installed carphone/bag phone so I could transfer it to the houseboat. Back then in 1995 I never would have imagined one day I could send emails and access the internet or even text message on my phone. It is pretty crazy how tech has evolved.
I loved the sound of a car phone turning on while you started the car. Also the sounds of the ringer and sounds of the dial button.
These mini documentaries are amazing keep it up 👍
These are so good. You are a great story teller.
Here I am sitting in my 95 W140 S class while fiddling with my car phone in the center compartment, which amazingly still works. It got the mercedes Logo on it right by the mic. Can only imagine how the 1st owner of this tank felt when his mighty machine got specd out with a car phone. How times have changed, I wish I was an adult in the 90s. Seems like a calm and cool era to live in. Sadly I was just a lil kid back then born in Nov 94. But very thankful for being born in the 90s.
The beginning of the video totally had me thinking I would see Julian Smith's "Car phone" song start playing haha.
My uncle Frank purchased a 1990 Cadillac Brougham sometime around 1997 when I was in 3rd grade, and it had a car phone, however it was no longer functional, but it still had the antenna on the roof near the back window if I remember correctly. Not sure who the previous owner was, but the fact it had the button tufted leather seating, and had the sunroof option, White wall tires, said a lot about the previous owner. Of course my favorite thing about the car was you flipped the license plate over to put gas in the car, and to open the trunk you rotated the Cadillac logo out of the way to insert the key, making a big deal out of it. That was dope.
I really love this video.
My mom had a bag phone in the late 80s, and it was a predecessor to the cell phone, it was a phone that looked like a big purse with the handset part of a phone connected to it, and she had some setup that allowed her to plug the bag into the car, through a couple plugs in the trunk, and make phone calls from a handset in the front.
i love these videos
My step mother had a Car Phone back in the 80s - she was a successful life insurance agent, and the car phone let her confirm appointments, check in with the office, etc while driving from client to client
My dad has a 2007 Chevrolet Silverado that had the satellite phone through OnStar. It didn't have buttons for dialing but you'd instead speak out the number, which was often hit or miss. With that in mind coupled with the price of having the phone service on top of owning a cell phone, as a result he hasn't used it since the first couple years of owning the truck.
During the late 80s, here in Italy, a friend of my dad had this beautiful full optional Fiat Croma Turbo (the luxury full size Fiat at the time) with the car phone. A real status symbol at the time, but, if you lived outside big cities, was pretty useless and very VERY expensive, also because, at the time, there was only one provider for phone communications, called SIP, a state owned company, so no competitor at all.
I still have one in my 1987 Motorhome, it obviously doesn't get signal, but it powers up and lights up. I keep in in there for the vintage look
I loved this video. I grew up with my father having a 'bag phone' he was a truck driver, he used it to coordinate his stops...and I racked up a huge bill once calling my friends, lol.
I immediately remembered the song Car Phone! By Julian Smith when I saw this video pop up. Man does that take me back
I bought a brand new 1985 Corvette and the first thing i did was have a car phone installed. Yes, expensive, about $1,200. for the installation and the phone itself, but the real costs were crazy, like $1. per minute for local calling, plus an additional $1. per minute roaming outside of your LOCAL area. then long distance charges were about $4. per minute on top of the base charges. And the topper of all things was, if someone called you on your car phone, you paid for it regardless that you didn't call the person. The phone companies got you coming and going for real back then. It was easy to rack up $300 or $400 dollars a month for a car phone back in the day.
I had a bag phone then a flip phone. When I worked for what became ATT Cellular they gave us a car mount kit. You could pop the phone in the cradle and it was hands free after dialing.
I traveled a lot and my first "Bag Phone" was bolted into my 1992 Honda. It had a separate handset with cord bolted to the dash. The AT&T rate was $.60/min
Same car but two years later was a Nokia phone that added a hand free mike/speaker. This phone could be removed and put in your pocket
Where we lived the bigger the mounted antenna the better. Signals would come and go on most back roads where travel on the interstate has better coverage.
This technology enabled me to return calls the same day and without having to pull off the highway and find a phone booth. My monthly cell bill ran between $600-$900/month but saved hours since I was driving typically 5 hr/day between customer calls.
The car phone increased my productivity at least 30% when combined with a pager
My last "installed" phone (with car mounted antenna and hands free kit) was in my 2005 car
Yep, I had one. In the early/mid 2000s, I drove triaxle dump truck for a company and there was a company car phone in it. We used it just like any telephone. Except we mainly used our to call back to the dispatcher for info on a load.
Nice video. Back in early 90s, we had a Motorola bag phone that could be moved from car to car. It was a heavy bag at about 10 pounds or so. Amazing how technology evolves for better or worse.
The handset is gone, but we just got a 96 bmw 740 with the holder where you would rest your arm. I am 37 and growing up we even had a 80's voyager with a carphone. My dad is a mechanic and we used to sell cell phones for years. So, he would install the complete car kit in all our cars back then. We didn't have money, but it didn't cost all that much when you paid wholesale and installed yourself and lastly the phone companies gave you heavily discounted demo lines.
It's always interesting to see the past old car features was considered luxury compared to now It's standard feature
Love it!
the classic sound the old motorola bag phones made when they turned on ... my 90s childhood - that was the sound of getting on the road. *car start* then *blurrrrrrp* from the phone mounted in the glove box signified movement and communication. So good!
My dad's 1993 Mercury Cougar had a car phone installed, and I got the car handed down to me when I got my license in '97. You could program numbers into a speed dial, too. Today, when I think about car phones I only ever think of Miami Vice. Sonny Crockett had one in his Ferrari Daytona & Testarossa throughout the series.
Yes to both of your questions at the end. In the early to mid 1990s both my wife and I had the ‘car’ phones installed in the car. That ended about 1999 or so when we got our first hand held cell phones. Also I bought (in 2013) a 1998 Mercedes E300 that had the built in Motorola handset style phone in the armrest. In the mid 2000s Mercedes had ditched the Motorola phone and instead provided a cradle that would accept certain hand held cell phones. You would purchase the phone through the dealer when you bought the car, but this setup let you take the phone with you when you left the car. As these early model cell phones went obsolete, Mercedes offered a solution with a module that plugged into the cradle that could be paired with any Bluetooth phone. However these could only do Handsfree profile, not A2DP. By 2010 they had integrated Bluetooth into the car stereo and this supported calling and A2DP. CarPlay started being offered in 2015, at first you had to pay extra for the dealer to unlock it but they quickly dropped that a few years later.
Some expensive GM cars still come with a car phone of sorts. It is part of the OnStar system and is mainly used to summon assistance in case of a crash or breakdown but you can buy minutes for and make other calls from it. The cell phone is actually in the rear view mirror. My sister has one in her truck (if you knew her you would get why she drives a truck -- she actually owns two of them) but since she carries a regular cell phone around anyway I don't think she has it activated.
Great video. Yes my 86 Fiero has a car phone. I have picked it up and acted like I was having a conversation at stop lights. Just for the looks. 🤣🤣
While my family never had one, my aunt did! She had a station wagon (wood paneling and all), and had a car phone in it. I remember being in awe of it (I was a kiddo then). Later she gave the wagon to my family. We didn't keep the phone, but the car still at the phone antenna on the roof.
My parents had a car phone in their old 89 Buick.. you should do a video on why car’s don’t use drum brakes any more or rather a history of brakes and different brakes over the years.
Long story short: They suck because they lack the stopping power disc brakes offer. Also, they're kinda harder to mantain.
@@r0b3rt_959 still would be a great waist of time of automotive history.
Some cars still use rear drums. The Toyota Tacoma is the most notable example. They're cheaper than discs and provide adequate braking power on the back.
@@bwofficial1776 as do the Dacia (or Renault) Duster
When I was a kid my moms Celica (92) had a car phone, but she didn’t have a plan for it because it was already the late 90s and she had a Nokia brick she carried around.
Missed a lot of the details. In the 90s, I had the entire series in car system with a fixed, wired handset; bag phone with in-car connection to the antenna and speakers; huge flip phone mounted in the car with a charger, antenna, and connection through the speakers. They all had better reception than later phones. My wife had a portable cell phone in 1993.
The antenna on the back window was the status symbol.
1st car phone in our family: 1990 Audi V8 - which itself was very expensive (50k, not S class money but 7 series match) and may have come standard in that model, can't see Dad having paid more for the phone. It was all but forbidden to call him on that ("very expensive") and rarely used even for business - so what really was the point. [Point was, Dad dropped serious money on the car, but was still a poor kid - and watched pennies]
In ‘99, I bought my first nice car that was a 1993 Honda Accord EX sedan that had a Motorola car phone installed in it. It didn’t have service, but it could still call the state police the few times we needed it.
If you tried to dial any other number than 911, it would prompt you for a credit card number to use and charge the call to.
It had a cool beep sound that let you know. It was working when you turned on the car and a swanky little antenna on the back window. I knew a couple other people that had the cords like mine, but they weren’t stick shift and they didn’t have a Motorola car phone melted on the passenger side of the gearshift console.
Around 2001ish my Dad got rid of the hard mount phone in his truck because you couldn’t get it to work anymore
My Dad got his first car phone in 1984, 2 years before I was born. It was a Mitsubishi and we had all the phones, bag phones and flip phones. All the phones. I don’t remember a world without a phone on deck at all times
My first cell (analog) was a Mitsubishi. $25 per hour, 7 segment display, no texting, battery lasted 15 mins (which was fine, my calls were timed to the second - my gf knew this and when she was mad, she'd extend the call just past a minute and hang up - I got billed for the whole 2nd minute, thanks love) - It looked more like a cordless phone met a remote control for a TV. Still, at 15-16, it was a pretty cool thing to have. Only one other guy in my class had a cell, it was a StarTAC - some of us had pagers.
My grandmother had a car phone, she and her husband were the town doctors in their small town in Ireland. My mom told me about how much she could brag to her friends about the car phone but that she and her siblings were prohibited from even touching it.
I remember my dad, working as a traveling salesman in the 70's had a car phone 📱 that he would bring inside along with his briefcase 💼 at the end of the day. He had to plug it in to charge overnight. It was HUGE but it was the coolest thing ever and all the other dads in the neighborhood were amazed that it even existed. (I had the coolest 😎 dad in the neighborhood)
My mom and dad had these phones installed in their cars in the ‘80s!!
Great video. Anyway you could do a video on the digital gauges that some manufacturers started using in the 80s and 90s? Feel like many younger drivers have no idea how awesome some of those gauges looked and how they went away. Thank you!!
We didn't have a car phone, but we did have a "bag phone". I remember my mom getting it for Christmas and we were all so excited for it! It was about 95-96, if I remember correctly.
my mom had a GMC Safari conversion van back in the 90's that had a car phone, she used to make calls after she picked me up from school and tell dad we were heading home and discuss what was for dinner. ahhh good times...
The 92 explorer my family has had for like 20 years came with some sort of phone kit thing.
There's a holder that looks like it's for a brick phone mounted to the floor along with a rectangular speaker in front of the center console, and a mic at the top of the a pillar trim. The antenna is still on the roof as well
My dad had one in his Nissan Skyline in the late 80's, pretty sure it was a Motorola.
I remember the headset was giant compared to today's cellphones, and there was also a large antenna installed on the trunk.
Calling from a car was quite the novelty back then.
Brought a brand new 91 first year Ford Explorer with a factory phone mounted on the floor in the middle of the hump. Used it sparingly at from what I can remember about $2bucks a minute, but it so was cool and looked quite impressive. Broke off at least two antennas in the drive thru car wash before I remembered to fold it down.
Had never bought a first year anything, furthermore a car AND a car phone. However, both worked out well. Lol!
Nice vid!
my dad was an exec for texaco and had a car phone in as early as 87. he would call my mom to tell her he was on his way from the 45 minute commute home so she could start making dinner. it was dope
A couple years ago my friend got a call from a random number and when he answered a woman yelled “Where ARE you!” so loud that I could hear it, then after finding out she had the wrong number apologized and said she was trying to call her mom’s carphone. I had only heard a little about carphones at that point because I was probably 15 or so and didn’t really have an interest in things like that yet. Now every time I hear even the slightest whisper of carphone I think of that call.
I still remember my dad's old five watt phone he carried in his truck back in the 90s. The antenna would shock you if you accidentally touched it while the phone was in use.
Excellent! I remember the EH237 from Ericsson - not a car phone but a great mobile phone
Great vid. You definitely need to follow up with history of factory installed cb radios!!!
It was a long time ago and I was still very young so I don't remember exactly who had it. But I do remember writing semi regularly in a car that had a car phone. I remember someone telling me they charged them an arm and a leg per call. I learned years later that you could actually have a car phone without a specific plan but they would charge you per call if you needed to use it for roadside assistance.
I hadn't thought about that in many years. This video definitely brought back some memories.👍
A friend of our family had a phone in his Rolls but with his , you had to be connected by a lady who would then put your call through , just like making a long-distance call back in the day but from your car , this was all very expensive but still very cool , in our house we were still using a rotary phone . I remember seeing the transmitter and receiver in the trunk , that thing was a beast .This was back in the 1970s
We had a bag phone in the 90's that served as a car phone.
My dad's Dodge Aries had one, in one of those big zip nylon cases. I found it one day in the trunk, when the Motorola Crickets first came out.
Around 1990, my grandpa had a phone installed into his truck. He owned a large concrete company and felt the need to be available at any time. But the phone was a large, push-button desk phone. The kind with the coiled cord and regular handset. It was so cool back then, but seems so ridiculous now.
This video is supposed to be the "The History Of Phones Installed In Cars" but only goes back to the beginning of the cellular age. Mobile vehicular FM communications began in the 1930's but by the 1940's the industry figured out a way to cross the two-way radio with the cash register, and it's been downhill ever since.
Could you do a video about automotive lighting? From early tungsten bulbs to halogen to HID to modern LED?
I sold BAM (Bell Atlantic mobile), and later installed car phones while in college. never could afford one though. I got my first cell phone when I worked for IBM in the mid 90s. We had a separate unit called a PT, which was a brick used for sending and receiving service call information.
My uncle had this land rover defender with not a phone but a radio thingy. My mom bought the car from him and still has the radio unit even though it never gets used.
Back when I was in elementary school, the school van had a car phone, they need it so they can re-direct or use it for other task I think. I remembered the driver using it when the van broke down.
Yep, Early 90's - tech got to Australia a bit later back then. My Dad used to have a carphone (that looked like the motorola ones you showed) in his company car.
I had a car phone installed in my 1989 Honda Civic in the early 1990s. I remember I had to make an appointment to have the phone installed and took about 4 hours to install. It was a corded handset (removable) and the base was non-removable. The monthly fee was astronomical and the per minute fee to make a phone call was worse. I would have monthly phone bills over $200 dollars/month. They also had ridiculous contracts. But when your in your in your early twenties sometimes you do some crazy things. Needless to say when the gigantic bagged mobile phones came around I ditched the car phone. They had cheaper plans and were more versatile. You could use them outside your car.
I never run up a $200 cell phone bill but when I was teaching sometimes my home phone bill would approach that amount (this was in the 70's and 80's). I lived about 75 miles from campus and I both had students calling me and called students back. The phone company didn't have a problem with me running that kind of balance, especially after I did it for years on end and paid the bill on time every month. We didn't have e-mail or cell phones back then (I think the first cell phone towers went up in my residence area in the late 1980's but I didn't have one until 2004 -- well after I retired from teaching).
Same here. My first plan in 1992 was 60 minutes for $60, but the roaming fees would easily double or triple that.
I got a good laugh out of the Cadillac Cavalier. When I was young I thought they were just knock off Cavaliers that someone put Cadillac badges on.
My dad had one in his car from around 1986. Supplied by the company he worked for. Obviously replaced by a mobile when it could. I drive a 2002 745, that still has a mobile phone option. Kinda the last to really have them, before bluetooth saw you just link in your mobile.
I had a car phone from the early to mid 90's. An obnoxious thing that wasn't mentioned was when the key wasn't in the ignition, instead of the phone ringing, the horn would honk. Also you had to manually connect to each mobile phone tower. There was no automated transfer as with cell phones.