When your alone driving in your car do you sometimes have the stereo sound system cranked when a favorite song comes on? Sometimes my wife can hear me coming from 300ft away. Why do you play it so loud, she asks? Because I’m alone and I can, I reply.
High tech tunes are standard in todays cars. It wasn’t that long ago when an AM radio and one piss-ant speaker was what you got. Now your car can be one big boom box.
Oh I can remember those under dash mounted 8-track or cassette players. Dolby was a must to stop the tape hiss. Two speakers mounted in the back window. A little later came in dash models. Remove the P.O.S. radio and replace it with am AM-FM cassette with power boost. Which made the units a little harder to steal. On night in the late seventies in the city of Burlington coming back from a blind date to a parking garage on a cold winter night I saw the drivers side window of my Rabbit GTI smashed in, broken glass all over the seat, my stereo ripped out of the dash, about half dozen cassette tapes taken from the glove compartment along with a miscellaneous item. Calling the cops, they making a report, too bad, tsk, tsk. Then driving back Worcester during a raging snowstorm. Fun.
Another time I lost a bunch of tapes went I forgot to lock the car, It was less then 10 minuets.
Then those cassettes would always jam up in the machine. Cassettes tossed out the window was a common sight along the highway, their tapes sparkling in the sun.
A/C is of course standard now. I once own an RX-7 that didn’t have A/C . I have story to tell about that some day. It also had standard shift, which is an option now because automatic is now standard.
Oh, those were the days.