Las screens are today’s watchword of the cars. There are those who rely on these enormous displays for almost all functions, even changing gears: hello, new Tesla Model 3. Previously, radios had at most a small LCD screen, either with a CD player or cassette decks.
But in the transition to multimedia systems with a screen, there was a system that combined a touch screen with a cassetteIt was Toyota and more specifically, the Toyota Prius.
An odd couple in the first mass-market hybrid car
The Prius has gone down in history as the first high volume hybrid carat the dawn of electrification. The first generation of the Toyota Prius was launched in 1997 in Japan, arriving around the year 2000 to other markets such as Europe and the United States.
Inside we found this multimedia system, with an LCD screen and below it the slot with the cassette tape deckThis player was electronic and not mechanical (Logic Control Deck), so it allowed automatic playback or rewinding, something that was already quite advanced in those years.
But it is also that This screenquite generous for those years, touch and multifunction era. That is to say, the deck was controlled from it, among other functions, since it also included a browser. This is demonstrated by This post on a Prius owners forum in which a user talks about a touch screen in his 2001 model. What’s more, the Prius had two screens, as it also had digital instrumentation.
In the first generation Prius, the power flow of the electrical system was already shown on the display.
So, The Toyota Prius was also one of the pioneers in touch screens, because at that time they were not exactly abundant, especially in a mass-market car. And on the other hand, it kept the cassette when technologies such as Bluetooth were already present, since they began to be launched in 1999. They quickly became popular for using the hands-free system of mobile phones.
The truth is that Toyota, and therefore Lexus, equipped cassettes well into the 21st century, although it depended on the market and model. In the US, the Toyota Avalon, a sedan sold there as well as in China and the Middle East, kept the tape until 2007. Lexus models also continued to have cassettes well into the 2000s.
So, The Prius was not the only one with a screen and cassette at the same time: For example el Toyota Land Cruiser de 2002 also resorted to this combination. Also el Lexus LXas we can see in these videos promoting a gadget to integrate Android Auto and Apple CarPlay into your multimedia system. Which also has its own trick: integration of mobile and tape at the same time.
Be that as it may, it is almost romantic to see this strange couple dominating the central tunnel of the first-generation Toyota Prius, the 72 hp hybrid that popularized electrification.
Source: www.motorpasion.com
