Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was October 12, 1955, that the Chrysler Corporation launched high fidelity record players for their 1956 line-up of cars. The player was about a foot wide and was mounted under the instrument panel. Problem was it didn’t play 45-rpm records. It required special 7-inch discs that spun at a very slow 16 2/3 rpm and required almost three times the number of grooves per inch as an LP. That’s part of the reason they didn’t catch on, maybe that and the fact they would skip when ever you went over a speed bump. So they were discontinued in 1961.
Some of them, though are still around as you’ll see in the video. A pretty cool, retro piece of technology that debuted 62 years ago today.
