I saw one of these in a car the other day…

On the one hand its a clever way to mount a phone in your car, using the now-redundant CD slot to hold it. on the other hand it just makes me feel old. It only seems like yesterday that CDs were the future and getting a car that had a CD player instead of a cassette player was cutting edge.

It is a cruel irony that the CD slot is now being used to hold the thing that has largely made them redundant.

I didn’t even know this was a thing because I have never had a need for it. For the last 5 or 6 years I have had cars with built-in phone connectivity and satnav so was never in the market for such a thing, not that I use a phone in the car anyway.

It is a bit of a personal irony for me to find out about this device now, because we just got rid of our car and bought an old second-hand one one. The car we got rid of had a CD player which never had a disc in it for the three years we had it. Music was mostly played through DAB radio or flash drive plugged into the USB socket. Latterly there was some Spotify streaming through a paired phone. The car we have now does not have DAB or a USB socket. It does have built-in Bluetooth but its a bit flaky so I am actually using CDs for the first time in ages, just as I discover that the rest of the world now considers that to be extremely old hat.

I would happily give up satnav and phone-pairing to have DAB in the car. I do miss listening to Radio 6 while driving. Having a choice of Radio 1 or Smooth FM is a pretty grim prospect.