Times are really changing, and if you wanted another proof of this, here it is: the LA Times is reporting that the new Hyundai cars will not come with a CD player! I am so out of the loop when it comes to cars, I have a very old one and I don’t want to buy a new one till this one is dead, so I hope this will not affect my life soon!
But in the forever-evolving-technology-oriented world, CDs players may become a thing of the past very soon. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Hyundai featured a new Display Audio System with a touchscreen interface and a Bluetooth-driven display that can be synced to iPhones or Android phones and no CD player anymore! Instead, everything you have on your cell phone can be listened through the car system.
Ford also said it will have the first CD-player-free models by this year, and there was already an article about this in the Telegraph in 2011! Sheryl Connelly, global trends and futuring manager at Ford, said at the time: ‘In-car entertainment technology is moving digital more rapidly than almost any other element of the vehicle experience. The in-car CD player – much like pay telephones – is destined to fade away in the face of exciting new technology.’ The cars will have a sync ‘infotainment hub’, and will turn the car into a wi-fi hotspot, able to access digital libraries stored in your iCloud for example. I am certain this is gonna be the new trend, soon we will not able to find a car with a CD player, as this follows the general disappearance of the CD on the global market.
My car is so old that it doesn’t even have a CD player but a cassette player! I kid you not! But I may be a winner at this level because cassettes are making a come back in hipsters’ world – I see more and more cassettes at the merchandize table of local bands in Silver Lake. But I am not really living in the real world and when I finally have to buy a new car, I will make a big jump in the future… But you know what? I often listen to plain FM radio stations in my car, and I am totally fine with that. I also remember about a long car trip I made a few years ago and we were listening to the same cassette over and over… I am obsessive like that and I really don’t need a Bluetooth display to listen to the same album for hundreds of miles.