What prompted the demise of the car phone? Perhaps we didn’t really know what we’ve since learned about using handheld devices while driving, or society’s general attitudes toward safety were a bit looser. However, the bigger reason is probably the rise of Bluetooth and mobile phones. After all, if you could already take calls from anywhere, why have a separate phone in your car when you could just link to your personal device?
Today, in-car telephones are often purely nostalgic devices. The analog networks for earlier models have long since been switched off, rendering many handsets useless. In most jurisdictions, you can’t legally use even a digital car phone while driving, but that doesn’t stop them from looking cool. Oh, and some were a little bit cooler than others.
It’s no secret that Porsche’s options sheet caters to just about everyone. It’s entirely possible to add enough options to a base Macan to exceed the starting MSRP in extras alone, and you might think that’s enough to satisfy even the most discerning clients. Well, one rung up from that sits Porsche Exclusive. Call it a secret menu for customers who’ve always wanted to be head of colors, materials and finishes, a gateway to a world of truly wild optional extras.
For Boxster and 911 customers around the turn of the millennium who were going through the Porsche Exclusive program, sometimes a regular car phone wouldn’t do. The Porsche museum has kindly unearthed some rare archival photos showing just what was possible in the car phone era, and they show some next-level stuff.
Let’s start off with the big one, a carbon fiber-faced car phone. This photo was dated from 2001, and keep in mind, carbon fiber was still an extremely exotic material back then. The first ever road car with a carbon tub had launched about a decade prior, the Ferrari F40 with its partial carbon fiber bodywork was only about 14 years old, and we were yet to see eBay vendors selling a variety of carbon fiber cosmetic parts for used BMWs. Did making the back of the car phone out of carbon fiber really make a functional difference? Perhaps not a significant one, but I can’t help but picture this finish making it just a tiny bit faster to pick up an important business call, and can’t help but smile. The most performance-focused car phone in the world? Perhaps.
However, what if you weren’t interested in carbon fiber, but didn’t want your Boxster or 911 car phone to be entirely made of regular plastic? Well, how about woodgrain in either a light or dark maple finish? These days, ordering shiny maple veneers in a new Porsche seems quaint and a bit unfashionable, but that was the style of the time. Speccing a telephone to match is taking the concept to the extreme, a true product of its time in a fascinating way.
Granted, Y2K was about the end of time for glossy wood because the near future was filled with aluminum. Monolithic, modern, silver, neutral, architectural, it’s still a material that works in loads of car cabins today. I could imagine that if you left a Boxster or 911 Cabriolet with the aluminum-faced phone outside on a summer day with the top down could result in some quite literally dropped calls due to thermal transfer, but style isn’t always practical.
Actually, painting the case of the car phone to match the color of the car is heaps more practical than aluminum, and it’s also stood the test of time. You can still order a Porsche with interior trim to match the body color. I know people who have, and their cabins are magnificent. As a bonus, I’d imagine the color-keyed car phone to be easier to refinish if scratched compared to a carbon fiber or woodgrain one, and it’d be quite the thing to have in a paint booth.
Then again, perhaps the best material to surface a car phone in is something soft and pliable. If this car phone seems to be coated in the same Nephrite Green leather as the rest of this 911’s interior, that’s because it is. Until Porsche reached out to let me know that a leather phone was offered roughly 25 years ago, I had no idea it existed. At the same time, I’m not hugely surprised, given how you can even have the air vent slats of your new Porsche wrapped in leather. Not only should a leather-clad car phone feel fantastic, it probably offers better grip than a plastic receiver.
It sure feels like roughly a quarter of a century ago, Porsche was the king of car phones. I can’t think of any other manufacturer that offered this many different finishes for its mobile communication handsets, and while few owners ticked the boxes for these unique options, it’s glorious to simply know they exist.
Top graphic credit: Porsche
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
How A Soda Distributor Beef Led To One Of The Most Photographed Race Cars Ever
-
Help Me Talk My Friend Into (Or Out Of) Buying A First-Gen Cayenne
-
This Tiny Electric City Car Had A Touchscreen Dash 36 Years Before Tesla
-
GM’s Futuristic ’80s Digital Displays Are Dying But This Man Is Fighting To Keep Them Alive
Please send tips about cool car things to tips@theautopian.com. You could even win a prize!
The reason for the handle was to have a more discrete talk even if you were carrying a passenger. Porsche didn’t call it a phone but a “passive handle” as the dials were on the dashboard and not on the handle like in Audis
That reminds of mid 90s Nokia phones with changeable face plates. You could get a,woodgrain that was perfect match for a Lexus
Very cool!
I’m old enough to have gotten a free Motorola bag phone long ago after buying a set of tires at Cassidy Tire. Bell Labs in Naperville IL was in charge of testing cellular telephony even though Martin Cooper at Motorola invented it. Most of my friends’ dads worked there, it was right down the street from where I grew up.
Porsche Owner: Honey! You’ll never guess where I’m calling from!
Porsche Owner’s Wife: The Carbon Fiber phone in your car again?
Porsche Owner: Yes! How did you guess?
Porsche Owner’s Wife: I figured since it’s the tenth time you’ve called on your way home from work in five days.
Porsche Owner: Isn’t this amaz…
Porsche Owner’s Wife: No.
Porsche Owner: (hangs up) She thinks I’m on the carbon fiber phone in my Porsche again.
Porsche Owner’s Secretary: Can you hurry up and finish?
Oh, I just realized there’s another relevant point here — there was a short time, maybe 1994-2003 or so, where it was perfectly socially acceptable to call someone from a car phone, but a true mobile phone was considered a little more uncouth (because people around you could overhear the conversation). If anyone remembers the last season of Seinfeld, Elaine scolds someone for doing “the cell phone walk & talk” because it was universally considered rude and distracted behavior. How far we’ve come!
Today, our solution is using Bluetooth so everyone within 100 feet can hear everything the other person is saying through the 18-speaker Mark Levinson stereo, even with the windows up. 🙂
The corollary is using earbuds to holler at their phones in public places.
My then-girlfriend (now wife) had a car phone in her ’97 Camaro and it was the only phone her parents would let her have until 2001, all the way through the END of college. Their “theory” was that if she was with the car, she had no excuse not to come home. Or she’d have somewhere safe to wait for help. And the other theory was that she should never been too far from the car that she couldn’t step aside to call.
So as you can see, her parents were in complete denial about DUI and how carphones enabled that.
Me in high school? I just grabbed a friend’s home phone, called my parents’ home phone, and when my parents picked up, I would say “Don’t worry mom, I got it. It’s for me.”
Excuse me, I just need to make a quick call.
I know I’d still order my Porsche with wood trim and extra leather inside. Caron fiber is tacky in anything other than something I’m taking to the track, and body color only works with certain exterior colors.
I knew a guy that had one of those Porsches with the car phone back then. He was a JAG that really liked to brag. I couldn’t understand as he had a cell phone ( it may have been gov issued) why he needed the car phone. It seems like after about 95 or 96 cell phones were good enough a car phone didn’t make a lot of sense. It was such a strange feeling when they came out calling from the car on an actual phone.
A JAG as in military lawyer or as in jagoff, a common Chicago insult?
Fun fact about the car phone in the 986/996 generation: regardless of whether the option was selected, Porsche installed a 4 pin connector for the car phone behind the dash. It’s a great place to tap into ignition switched power!
My buddy’s stepdad bought one of the first ’97 ML320’s ever sold in the Seattle area (he was buddies with Phil Smart), and it had a car phone, with….. call waiting. One of the most insane things I had ever experienced, driving it around in high school putting people on call waiting as we took another call.
In college, in the mid-90s, I had a roommate who managed a Subway while going to school. The rest of the household made due working minimum wage jobs and eating out of the discount bin at the grocery store. The Subway manager on the other hand decided to buy his dream car, a Volvo 780, and also a “car phone.” the kind that dame in a bag. Within two semesters, the car was immobile due to a transmission issue he couldn’t afford to fix, and the phone had been used a total of 15 minutes (all calling people to say he was calling from a car phone) because it was far too expensive per minute to consider in anything but an emergency, which he never had because his car didn’t leave the driveway. He was a good guy, but he was just a little too optimistic.
In the late 90s I bought a used truck from auction that came with a car phone. It was an old executive work truck, hence the car phone, and I thought it was awesome…until I looked at how expensive getting it service would be. Then I decided I should remove it, along with the 2-way radio also installed in the truck, as components for both took up literally all the space behind the seat back. For all the massive cost and size those things had when new, not even a pawn shop wanted the phone or radio when I took them out…
There was a very quick transition in the late 90s from “Cell phones are $500 and every call is $0.50/minute” to “Free phones with 2-year contract at $40/mo, and unlimited nights and weekends.” The democratization of cell phones was really fast, but then it was only a few years before we regressed to smartphones. Today feels a lot more like the early days, in terms of cost, but we’ve all collectively accepted it.
I think if you pitched smartphones from scratch today, most people would say “No thanks, my PC/tablet already does that stuff” and we’d be using flip phones for calls. We’re in a strange world of redundancy, or as companies like to call it, “ecosystems”
I got my first cell phone when it was cheaper because took a job just outside of the local calling area so the hard-line phone companies charged me long distance. I got a cell phone from the area code where my friends and family were and didn’t need to pay long-distance fees either. It was also possible because the crappy little town I lived in ended up being a test case for cable-based internet. It felt like the future.
The market got scrambled for a while, and as it settled, the streaming vs cable issue happened. Eventually, the corporations will find a way to limit and package things to get their pound of flesh. Those short windows where they haven’t figured it out yet are nice, however.