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In-car Entertainment

By Keith Kellett

When I started to drive in the 1960s, very few cars had radios. In those that had, the system wasn’t very good. A friend of my father’s said that he could only play his radio by day, because, when it was switched on, the lights wouldn’t work.

My first radio didn’t come from the radio shop, but the breaker’s yard, out of a Jaguar that someone had totalled. The installation was a bit McGyver-ish, but it worked. And, some of my friends said my radio was worth more than my car was.

Several years on, and I passed a radio shop, and questioned: Why is there still a market for car radios, when most cars come fitted with them?

Shortly afterwards, I got the answer, when I bought a new Fiat, and found the radio supplied with it to be a cheap and cheery model of a type I’d never heard of … and, it had no VHF.

So, I bought a vastly superior one, with a built-in cassette player, and someone said I had a better system in my car than in my sitting room. And, I had! Where could you buy a table-top radio on which you could change channels at the touch of a button? Short answer … in those days, you couldn’t.

The cassette player did have its disadvantages. The tape was known to occasionally wrap itself around the works … sometimes, I think you could entirely wrap the Earth in the magnetic tape in the verges, thrown out of the window in frustration.

And, I have a confession to make. All my tapes … and later, my CDs … in the car are copies. Strictly speaking, that’s illegal, but these are for my own use. One night, my car was broken into, and my radio-cassette stolen. The insurance company paid for a replacement, and to have the window fixed, but they couldn’t replace the Carole King tape that was in the machine.

Only a few months ago, I thought I had the ultimate set-up … a radio/cassette/CD player with finger-tip controls on the steering column. And, it’s virtually thief-proof. It would take a major engineering feat to get it out of the car, and, even if successful, you couldn’t use it in another car unless you know the code.

But, having seen people driving along listening to an iPod … is this maybe a sight of the future? An in-car iPod?

Another recent innovation is the in-car DVD player. Not that this entertains the driver; here in Britain, any video device must be positioned so the driver can’t see it. I’m just waiting for some neddy to declare my SATNAV illegal on these grounds.

But, they’re indispensable if you’ve got children. Whines of ‘Aren’t we there yet?’ have often been replaced by requests to drive around the block a few times on reaching the destination, to let the film finish.

You can have a system built into the car, with a drop-down screen from the roof, or built into the back of the front seats, airliner fashion. But a portable one, which plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter or power socket would seem to be a better deal. That way, if you have another car, you can easily transfer it from one to another. Or, use it in camp, in your trailer or on your boat.

There’s a good selection of car DVD players to suit most pockets at http://www.mindlogic.com/Prod_CARVID.shtml. A big advantage is that all of these are region-free, which means you can use it anywhere, and buy your DVDs wherever you like.