Many of our prestigious luxury limousines are equipped with various forms of in-car electronics for communication and entertainment.
This isn’t just a showy ‘nice to have’ but in the 21st century, an absolute necessity for many of our clients. Corporate customers in particular find such equipment invaluable.
However, we sometimes hear customers commenting upon how new all this technology is. In fact though, it’s perhaps not quite so radically new in terms of approach as you might think.
For example, you might be surprised to know that as far back as 1910, a car in the USA was equipped with a telephone! Interestingly, the driver had a relatively conventional phone installed and two long wires, which he then used to connect up to conventional telephone cables as he came across them when driving along.
It might be interesting to see how the police in Sydney or any other Australian city might react to drivers stopping and shimmying up poles to connect up their phones by wire!
The first true radio phones in cars, as far as anyone knows, were used by the German police in the British-occupied sector of Berlin immediately after the end of WW2. They grabbed some disused tank wireless equipment and suddenly could make calls from their cars.
Certainly by the later 1940s and 1950s, those that had enough money could make phone calls from their various luxury limousine models via a radio link.
Now purists will argue that this wasn’t true mobile telephony because radio and relaying was involved but how many people accessing the internet or making phone calls today from a car really understand the difference between radio and digital microwave communications? Way back then, people could communicate with each other from cars.
So, those pioneers shouldn’t be laughed or scoffed at. They helped build the foundation of today’s mobile communications society.
