While the technology we have in vehicles now is helpful, a lot of it is distracting. In addition to ever increasing screen sizes, cell phone use while driving continues to be a problem. Cell phone usage while driving spiked during the pandemic and has only gotten worse unfortunately. While bluetooth technology for hands free usage hasn’t always been around, some automakers were thinking about hands free cell phone use decades before it became mainstream.
In-vehicle cell phones were big in the early 1990s, especially on vehicles that were bought by business types. Most manufacturers that offered them placed them in or around the armrest. Chrysler was thinking differently. The automaker partnered with Japanese telecommunications company OKI Telecom of Atlanta to develop an in-car cell phone that was concealed in the driver’s visor.
Flip the visor down and you were met with a phone that looked like a calculator, both in size and appearance. It had a dial pad, small, radio-like LCD screen and had buttons for other controls, like muting and dimming of the screen and a sliding volume control. Chrysler said the phone was capable of storing 100-phone numbers.
Initially the Visorphone was only available on the New Yorker, Fifth Avenue, Imperial and Dodge Dynasty models. It debuted in 1990 and was available as an option later in the year for other Chrysler models. While I couldn’t find exactly how much this thing cost as an option, it was dealer installed and could be financed with the price of the car.
The Visorphone stayed around long enough to be available as an option on the cab forward LH cars in the mid 1990s and was presumably dropped not long after that. It’s strange to think about just how far and fast we’ve come from having quirky, obscure options like a cell phone built into a visor to hands free and voice control in such a short time. I’d kill to own a New Yorker with this option though.