This iPod Holder In The 2007 Dodge Caliber Represents The Peak Of Car Infotainment

It’s almost impossible to realize you’re in the good times when you’re in the good times. Back in 2007, oh so many years ago, I reviewed the 2007 Dodge Caliber SRT4. It’s the only version of the pseudo-crossover econobox people have any respect for, and even that respect is heavily caveated. There are few car enthusiasts in existence who wouldn’t rather have the Neon SRT4 or ACR that preceded it.

I had a few crabby, negative things to say about the car. The vibes at Chrysler were not great, and the vehicles were all designed under the shadow of an impending bankruptcy. History has been kinder to many of these cars in a way I wasn’t at the time.  There were some obvious issues I couldn’t overlook, which probably colored me against the car’s glorious iPod dock.

If you weren’t of driving age in and around 2007, then there’s a little bit of scene-setting I need to do in order to place you solidly in pre-Obama, post-9/11 America. It was quite a time. Hayden Panettiere was a person. Johnny Depp wasn’t sus. Dick Cheney almost waxed a guy with a shotgun. If you loved cars and had an iPod, you probably got much of your car news from places like The Car Lounge or NASIOC, or maybe even FerrariChat if you were (or desired to be considered) in a different tax bracket.

What was 2007 like? Look at this photo from the reveal of the Caliber. It was like that.

[Editor’s Note: What the hell am I looking at? Are those clowns in something that looks like a cross between protective rain gear and the Handmaid’s getup from Gilead? This is terrifying. I’m not okay with whatever this was. – JT]

Living in Chicago in 2007, I listened to music via what I remember was a 4th-generation iPod (the 3rd generation with the four little buttons was the best, don’t @ me). This music would have been a strange mix of relatively high-quality AAC files I cherry-picked from artists I liked for $0.99 a piece from Apple’s iTunes Music Store and hilariously low-quality MP3s ripped from, like, LimeWire or something.

If you didn’t have a fully developed cerebral cortex at the time, then you missed the strange situation where many of these questionably downloaded albums would sometimes lack key songs. Imagine owning “Exile On Main St.” by The Rolling Stones without “Ventilator Blues” or Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” without “Never Said.”

People owned music in a way almost no one does anymore. When I download an album from Apple Music, I’m basically “renting” it from them, and if I kill my Apple account, I’ll no longer be able to access that music. In the early 2000s, you could still regularly “buy” music in the more traditional sense of owning a copy of a song or a record. As people amassed larger and larger libraries of music, it became necessary to build devices like the iPod, which was basically a portable hard drive. By 2007, I think my iPod had 40 GB of storage, which equates to roughly 10-12,000 songs depending on the encoding.

While CDs and terrestrial radio were still the primary way of listening to music in cars, automakers were starting to realize there was more support needed to get young people to buy their cars. The easiest and cheapest solution was an AUX-in port that would allow users to hook up any player they wanted, although power to the device would have to be supplied by the 12-volt cigarette lighter. More ambitious companies installed hard drives in the car, which was both expensive and impractical, given that to update your music you’d have to frequently connect to a bulky laptop or desktop.

The smartest solution? Some kind of magical cord that would both power a portable device and transmit the data necessary to play songs. Chrysler, which had become defined by the words cheapest and easiest, surprisingly came up with a solution that’s better than what you can get now.

I Would Honestly Use This Today

The 2007 Caliber was the successor to the Dodge Neon, a popular and attractive car that was premised on the belief that America could engineer a reliable competitor to Japanese alternatives like the Toyota Corolla. Rather than build on that success, Chrysler anticipated a “Merchants of Cool” future with a fearful, cowed population that wanted tough vehicles to protect them from… well, they never quite said.

The efficient and friendly Neon was replaced by the Caliber, which was under attack by bugs in the sales material. Efficiency no longer seemed as important as a beefy, more SUV-like facade. Given that gas prices were quickly climbing and America’s GDP was about to crash to the ground, this was exactly the wrong message.

When I reviewed the car for Jalopnik, I enjoyed the speed but was underwhelmed by the build quality, writing:

The SRT4 carries over a reasonable amount of storage from the base Caliber, including the Chill Zone storage above the glove compartment. This feature can keep water bottles cool—perfect for 14-degree Chicago weather. The interior contains the cheapest cut plastics I’ve seen in a long time, but at least it has a built-in iPod dock for when the kids want to play their spiffy tunes.

Did I really write “Spiffy tunes”? Yeesh.

I took for granted that the iPod dock would be, for me, about as good as a car interface would get for music.

Here’s how Chrysler described it at the time:

The Dodge Caliber features a standard auxiliary input jack for playing music from a portable MP3 music player, which allows the owner to play the music through the Caliber’s speakers. Optional radios feature CD players capable of playing all types of audio CDs, including MP3 and Windows Media Audio (WMA) formats. To make listening to music from an MP3 player easily accessible, Caliber’s armrest lid includes a unique flip pocket for storing a cell phone or an MP3 player.

That’s great. I drive all sorts of cars now, and the goal, understandably, is to get the music device (a phone, now) as far away from the driver as possible. In an Escalade, you push your phone into a charging cavern. Most vehicles have some sort of charging pad that barely works and causes the phone to slide around with the lightest of turns.

Look how useful this is. It perfectly fits an iPod, it has a little slot to put your docking cord (here a Monster cord) so it connects with the optional radio with MP3/WMA capability. I could see myself dialing up the first Handsome Boy Modeling School album and just cruising forever.

Even better, the Caliber came with the “MusicGate Power Liftgate” to blast, I don’t know, Black Eyed Peas out of the back of your Caliber.

For me, it doesn’t get a lot better than this.

Chrysler understood the “Bring Your Own Device” concept early and created a solution that would be at home in many new cars today. When I drive my early 2000s BMW I have a clunky magnetic clip that blocks one of my air vents, causing my phone to overheat in the winter. Because I have a manual transmission, I have to run a long USB-C cord around the shifter.

Wireless CarPlay is a delight in many ways, but I’m skeptical of most wireless charging pads, which means I most often just plug in my phone anyway. Could this work today? Maybe. The iPhone isn’t as ubiquitous as the iPod, meaning that the dock would have to be adjustable to phone size, but with the mass acceptance of USB-C, the cord situation should be fairly straightforward.

It’ll never happen, though, as automakers are investing heavily in screens of their own. There is one automaker working on this, however, which is Slate.

Maybe we’re living in the good times again…