A Tale Of Two Car Voices, Datsun And Chrysler: Cold Start

Pretty much everything around us now is capable of speech. This is just one of those things we take for granted today, but it wasn’t always the way. Understandable speech was once an elusive dream for inanimate objects; the famous golem of Jewish legend, for example, was identified as not having a soul precisely because of its lack of speech. Then, in more recent centuries, like the last quarter of the last one, we finally managed to grant the gift of speech to our most important inanimate object, cars.

Yes, pretty much every car today is capable of speech, but back in the early 1980s, making things talk was a trickier proposition. Humans are pretty remarkably creative, though, and so two very interesting and very different solutions came around to solve the problem of your car not being chatty enough, one analog and one digital.

Really, these two solutions couldn’t be more different; one was an application of tried-and-true older analog technology, one leveraged some cutting-edge electronic digital hardware. Each had advantages and disadvantages, and while one was a dead end, it’s still fascinating.

Let’s look at that one – Nissan/Datsun’s Voice Warning System, which was installed on Maximas, 200SX, and Z-cars from 1981 to 1984. Here’s a video of the system in a 1981 Maxima diesel:

Now, you may notice that the quality of the voice is way better than the synthesized voices of that era; that’s because it’s a real voice recording, not synthesized. It’s not digital, because computer memory was far too expensive for that in this era, and it’s not even recorded on magnetic tape. It’s so much better: it’s a phonograph record.

I’m not kidding! It’s a tiny, six-track analog, plastic record, with some electronics to select which of the six messages get played, as you can see here in this great little video recorded by the legendary Murilee Martin, who collects these things:

What I reall like about this system, other than everything, is the sort of drama this woman brings to her simple messages. The way open is emphasized in “right door is open” is so evocative and strange. She sounds like she’s genuinely affected by the openness of that door, and she needs you to, I don’t know, help, somehow? Close the door?

Then there’s the incredible Rube Goldbergian mechanism of this thing; looking at the patent drawings, you can see that this is really a tiny record player in a box:

It’s an incredibly clever and charming machine, pleasingly ridiculous.

I suppose you could argue the system Chrysler used was equally ridiculous, just in a different way. Chrysler called their version the Electronic Voice Alert. You can hear it here:

This was where I, and I think nearly all Gen X Americans, learned the word “ajar.” No one said things were “ajar” before these Chryslers hit the scene; openable things were just open, like doors, which various moms would yell at you to close, wondering if, perhaps, you were raised in a barn.

The Chrysler system, you may notice, has much poorer voice fidelity than the Datsun system, but there’s a reason for that: it’s a synthesized voice, not a recorded one. This does mean that this machine is technically capable of speaking pretty much anything instead of being limited to a pre-recorded set of phrases. The tradeoff is that it sounds like a big, clunky robot.

The heart of this system, or maybe the vocal cords, is the TMS5110A, the evocative name given to the Texas Instruments-designed integrated circuit that was also used in the famous talking toy, the Speak & Spell:

That moment in history – the early 1980s – is likely the only point in time these two methods of having a car say something based on some sort of triggers could have co-existed. It was that blurry bit of time as one era – the analog era – began to evolve into the the digital. Analog may have had some advantage in sound quality, but its days were clearly numbered.

I bet some audio geeks will also say it has a “warmer” sound or some bullshit, too.

Anyway, I love both of these absurd mechanisms, and I love them more when they’re taken together, as a little reminder of an era long gone.