After a Lexus GX470 showed up in the Leftlane virtual garage earlier this week for evaluation, we were thrilled to discover that it was equipped with a factory-installed cassette player. We rushed home to our dual-cassette boom box to spend hours creating “Booty Mix #9,” the latest mix tape made from a combination of live radio recordings and previous mix tapes.
Maybe we weren’t quite that excited about this antiquated device highlighting the roster of standard features on a 2009 vehicle, but it sure did get those rusty gears spinning in our heads.
The disappearance of cassette players in new cars should come as a surprise to few. Now relegated to truck stop country mixes and sappy children’s music designed to improve listening skills (our mothers apparently didn’t buy those for us), cassettes went the way of the eight track and velour seating surfaces about a decade ago.
Few convenience features were as ubiquitous as the cassette tape just 10 or 15 years back; nary a single model on the market didn’t at least offer as an option the ability to play those hunks of plastic that liked to melt when left on the dash of dad’s car on a hot day in July. Unlike many convenience features introduced to cars, the cassette tape merely faded into obscurity thanks to a changing market.
CDs quickly made cassette decks outdated, though they experienced a short revival in the early days of iPods and other MP3 devices when users bought cassette adapters in order to hear Britney Spears hit them one more time over and over. Today, however, nearly every car on the market offers an auxiliary input jack that not only simplifies things, but provides better sound quality to enjoy a mature, mellow Britney belt out “Fakin’ like a good one.” [Really... I mean, really? - Ed.]
We put the Leftlane research staff to work to come up with a list of 2009 models that still offer cassette players. Unfortunately, we were pretty disappointed with the results. Just two brands offer cars that we know of that can be optioned with these blast-from-the-past devices [Thanks to mhaw2001 for the tip!]:
As if to add insult to injury, Mercury makes buyers and cab drivers fork over extra money to play their classic Beach Boys tapes in order to relive the glory days. An AM/FM/CD-only unit is standard on the ol’ Merc.
Can you, our readers, come up with any other 2009-model cars sold in the United States that are available with cassette decks?
Perhaps next in this series of “Features Leftlane Misses,” we’ll focus on cars still equipped with lighters, weatherband radios, roll-up windows and power antennas.
Words by Andrew Ganz.
