A car phone is a mobile radio telephone specifically designed for and fitted into a motor car. Car phones were the ancestors of the mobile phone. How do I mean? The very first attempts to make telephones mobile resulted in the emergence of the first car phone in 1946, developed by Motorola. It weighed a whopping 80 pounds (about 36 kilos).
Motorola, the company that eventually developed the first truly mobile handheld phone, was originally called Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. It later changed its name to Motorola, a word coined from the fusion of two words – motor from “motorcar” and olla from “Victrola”, a popular brand of phonographs). Why this name change? Because the company was reknown for making car phones. That’s why. They wanted a brand name that reflected their persona.
It wasn’t only Motorola that caught the car phone bug. For example, Ericsson which was one of the pioneers of mobile and cellular technologies, designed what was their very first mobile phone in 1956. It weighed 40 kilos and was about the size of a suitcase. How do you drag that around? In order for it to be mobile, the logical place to put it was in a car. And so, they did too.
The first car phones were, understandably, expensive. Almost all new technologies are initially expensive and when the economies of scale kicks in, the prices start to drop. Before phones that an individual could carry around became a thing, car phones were the cutting edge telecommunications tools.
If you have ever wondered why a retailer called Carphone Warehouse (in the United Kingdom) sells mobile phones, hopefully, you get the picture now. The journey to mobile phones started with putting those hefty early telephones inside of cars. And the miniaturisation continued till finally in 1973, a properly mobile handheld was demonstrated to the world using a prototype Dyna TAC phone. And so, the handheld mobile phone was born. An exciting new era of mobile telecommunications had arrived.
In the 1980s, cell phone manners continued to work to make their products handier and more portable, and more user friendlier. By the 1990s, mobile phones were fully portable and more advanced networks and technologies began to appear in those devices.
But that wasn’t the end of the journey. As modern smartphones developed, connectivity systems that paired cell phones with cars began to be developed and implemented. And soon enough, car brands began to integrate some of those smart features found in mobile phones in their vehicles.
It started with mobile entertainment systems, then extended to navigation systems. The integration keeps getting deeper and deeper. Today, most modern cars are effectively mobile computers on wheels, with advanced chips, sensors, display, and all sorts of capabilities built into them out of the factory. Today’s motor cars even get software updates and security patches, just like smartphones do.
The arrival of autonomous driving systems in cars was made possible by using many of the technologies that already existed inside smartphones. And so, we have come full circle from car phones to mobile phones and back to cars.
And for the first time, we even have a mobile phone company, Xiaomi, investing in developing a car from the ground up. This is happening right now in 2024.
What does the future hold for these two industries that are constantly mixing and interacting? Predicting the future is not always a straightforward thing. All it takes is for a new, unprecedented technology to show up, and things can go in an entirely unseen direction. However it goes, it promises to be exhilarating.