In 1986 I wrote a story called “Cars and Compact Discs” for Automobile magazine. That technology had just become available, and the story discussed the options available to leading-edge mobile audiophiles. As with any story about contemporary electronics, the meat spoiled almost immediately. The introduction, however, shows signs of life.

16-2/3 RPM at 65 MPH

When I was a car-crazed kid, back in 1960, my dad bought me a plastic model of one of Ford's dream cars, and it had no wheels. It was meant to float on a cushion of air, a fraction of an inch above the ground (never mind that the slightest bump in the road would stop it dead), and the model had a tube coming out the back that you could blow through, simulating the real thing.

Well, I thought that Ford was serious about this; that they were planning to do away with the automobile as we knew it. Concerned, I asked my father if there would still be “regular” cars to drive when I got my license, some half a dozen years hence. By the age of eleven I had already done enough laptop “driving” to know that four tires and a steering wheel were the real thing, and that if there was a Ford in my future it had damned well better have them, along with a record player.

That's right: a record player. And why shouldn't my car of the future have a record player? After all, our car of the present — the one that I was afraid would be banished from the road in Ford's wheel-less vision of the future — had one. It was a 1956 Chrysler convertible, a wonderful white leviathan that played a significant role in establishing my taste for automotive excess.

The record player in question was no J.C. Whitney special: the Hiway Hifi (as they called it) was a factory option in ‘56. It hung underneath the dashboard and played special seven-inch 16-2/3 RPM discs, which were available, I think, only at your local Chrysler dealer. You could get the Hiway Hifi in any Chrysler product, but I imagine that it worked even less well in a bouncy Plymouth than it did in our more softly sprung Chrysler, with all of its road-hugging weight. The gentle motions of the Chrysler were sufficient to turn sing-alongs into guessing games.

Now I'm a car-crazed adult, and every time I get into my car I'm comforted by the knowledge that even though we're in the midst of celebrating the gala centenary of its invention, nothing much has changed. Ford's dream — and my nightmare — has yet to come to pass, and it probably won't. The basic underpinnings of the automobile remain, in concept if not in detail, much as they were envisioned by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz.

And what of the record player? Well, it celebrated its centenary in 1977, less changed after a hundred years than the automobile. You put a needle in a squiggly groove in 1877, and you put a needle in a squiggly groove in 1977. By 1977 vinyl had replaced wax and tinfoil, but the concept was still the same: A needle in a groove, following a tortuous path that led, in the end, to music. The problem, from an automotive point of view, was keeping the needle in the groove. This task proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Chrysler abandoned the Hiway Hifi after the 1957 model year, and the notion of a record player for the car was dead.