We take a look back at who killed the car phone

It’s happened: peak ’90s nostalgia has ticked over into the not-so-new millennium with the relaunch of Nokia’s famous brick, the 3310. But whatever happened to that other relic of outdated cellular technology: the car phone?

The ultimate symbol of ’80s excess, the car phone was a standard fixture in the luxury vehicles of the rich and famous – and those who wanted to appear that way. The image of a cashed-up go-getter cruising along in sweet wheels and sealing deals was etched into the collective consciousness through the popular culture of ’80s America, from Don Johnson cruising along in a Ferrari in Miami Vice to Donald Trump conducting business from the back of his Manhattan town car.

Here are some milestones, both technological and notorious, in the simultaneous rise of the mobile phone and demise of its vehicular counterpart.

Swedish engineer Lars Magnus Ericsson (founder of telecommunications manufacturer Ericsson) fitted his car with a telephone. To function, the phone had to be connected to static phone lines by long wires – so it was technically the first car phone, albeit completely immobile.

This photo from the New South Wales‘ police force purports to show a constable using tech ahead of his time. The officer is in fact communicating on his two-way radio – these often came with handsets identical to domestic telephones.[/caption]

Motorola had been producing car phone units for years, but the company’s head of research and development, Dr Martin Cooper, envisioned the future as fully mobile. In the race to beat Bell Laboratories, Cooper took Motorola’s prototype handset to the streets of New York and trolled his competitor in the best way possible – by making the world’s first mobile call to Bell’s head of R&D. Having proved the technology could work, Cooper spent the next decade refining it.

Pitched squarely at upper-middle business men as a means of increasing productivity and profits, car phone advertisements associated ownership with wealth, power and upward mobility. Fetishised as a status symbol within popular culture, the mobile car phone was represented as belonging to the domain of the elite and became a signifier of the rich. The part of the ad that reads “wasted travelling time becomes profitable time” was probably targeted at rich white dudes with a driver.

Although car phones had been around for decades, it wasn’t until 1981 that Australia’s first fully automated mobile service was launched and our national telco, Telecom, put their first car phone on the market. Weighing in at 15 kilograms, it cost $5,000 (equivalent to about $17,000 today). Not exactly practical or affordable!

Mobile phones became commercially available in the US with the launch of Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000x. At a weight of almost one kilogram, the DynaTAC came with an equally hefty price tag of $4,000 US dollars – equivalent to US$9,500 today, or $12,500 Australian dollars. Slightly behind the times, Australia wasn’t ready for this technology yet. In 1983, Telecom was preparing to expand its car phone network in Melbourne and Sydney – up until this point, only pockets of Melbourne and Sydney had a working network – and extend the service to include Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

Alongside the launch of MobileNet, its 1G AMPS (advanced mobile phone service) cellular network, Telecom introduced portable mobile phones to the Australian market. A range of different models were on offer, including a mounted car phone, a briefcase-sized mount-or-carry model and a huge walkie-talkie-style portable handset.

Because AMPS relied on radio technology, 1G devices were non-secure. Anyone with a radio scanner could intercept the signal and listen in on conversations – a lesson Victorian opposition leader Jeff Kennett learnt the hard way. Driving home after a by-election in 1987, Kennett made a call to federal opposition frontbencher Andrew Peacock. Intercepted and recorded by a man with a radio scanner, their expletive-ridden take-down of federal opposition leader John Howard made headlines the next day – leading to Howard sacking Peacock from the shadow front bench and ensuring the conversation would be remembered for its colourful language, if not its contents.

Here’s a choice excerpt of the conversation. Jeff Kennett said (about John Howard):

Well, he went off his brain and in the end I said to him, I said, “Howard. You’re a ****. You haven’t got my support, you never will have, and I’m not going to rubbish you or the party tomorrow but I feel a lot better having told you you’re a ****.”

By the mid-’90s the car phone’s popularity was already beginning to wane, even though prices had dropped below $500 per unit. This was largely due to the 1993 introduction of Australia’s 2G digital cellular GSM network, which made mass-ownership of mobile phones possible. Mobile cellular phones overtook their car-mounted counterparts as they became ever more affordable and compact. New carriers Optus and Vodafone increased competition and brought about an explosion in mobile phone sales – Australia’s per-capita uptake was second only to Sweden’s.

In 1996, there were 1.7 million 2G mobiles in service in Australia – a figure that went up to 15.9 million by 2004. Australia’s 2G network was finally switched off at the beginning of 2017, to the consternation of mobile users still attached to the simplicity of their non-smart phones. This also rendered any remaining 2G car phones obsolete, and sealed their fate as a momentary blip in Australia’s automotive history. Today, vintage-car enthusiasts modify their car’s old-school car phones – sometimes using bluetooth – to keep the car-phone dream alive.

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