Can Old Car Phones Still Make Calls? Sure, If You're Willing To Put In The Elbow Grease

If you're an '80s or '90s kid, lusting after cars from the Radwood era, you probably have nostalgic memories of car phones. Whether a parent had one or you saw someone use a car phone on TV, the novelty of making a call while on the go seemed like genuine sci-fi stuff that had become reality. If you yearn for those good old days, you can always buy an old car that has a car phone — if you can find one. The main problem, though, is that they typically don't work anymore, as car phones use outdated cell service technology.

However, in the immortal words of James May: Good news! You can still get old car phones to work, it just takes a bit of electrical knowhow, a bluetooth adapter, and some elbow grease (please don't use actual grease on your car's phone). Then, you'll be on your way to looking like a '90s businessman faster than you can say "totally radical" or whatever we used to say back then.

Car phones don't work anymore because the networks that supported them have been shut down. We'll get to that in a bit, but before we do, let's talk about how you can get your car phone working again. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy plug-and-play way to get it to work, but if you're handy, have some electrical knowhow, and have some free time on your hands, you can potentially get the car phone in your classic car functioning on modern networks.

While processes and results may vary based on the actual car phone's make and model, one very generous Mitsubishi 3000GT owner (known on the internet as Useless Pickles) has done a detailed breakdown of the steps. Not only did he get his '90s car phone working, but it works exactly like it would when it was new, and he documented the entire process. He started by swapping the guts of the phone's original transceiver with a custom Bluetooth adapter. That Bluetooth adapter then pairs to his personal iPhone (but Mr. Pickles claims it would work with an Android phone, too) and acts as the middleman, converting all of the car phone's inputs into the correct iPhone inputs. So he can just pick the car phone up, dial it like he would have 30 years ago, and make or receive calls. Even Siri works with the car's original hands-free system.

Eventually, Useless Pickles upgraded his device to work even outside of the car. Since the original car phone was designed to be taken out and used as a mobile cell phone, he made his own lithium-ion battery pack and Bluetooth adapter inside the original transceiver's plastic housing. So the car phone still functions perfectly in the car, but he can also bring it on the go and look like a proper old-fashioned businessman.

Now for the fancy, technical phone-network stuff. Car phones are older than you might think. On-board electrical communications systems date back as far as the Civil War. And in-car telephones shockingly date back to as early the 1940s, with models that weighed up to 80 pounds, were as expensive as the car itself, and only originally had a small number of frequencies, limiting their usefulness. While it did eventually get better, and car phones became less bulky, they were still seldom used. The car phone didn't become a common option until the 1980s, when the first widely used mobile phone network launched in America in 1983.

You know how your cell phone runs on a 5G network? Well, car phones from the '80s used what is now called 1G. The "1G" name was retroactively given to the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), since it was the first-generation of true mobile phone technology. Eventually, AMPS got a digital upgrade, called D-AMPS or Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), but is often referred to as 2G.

Both 1G and 2G were mostly replaced by a vastly different 3G digital network in the early 2000s, but some parts of America still had 1G and 2G networks. However, in 2008, no cellular network carriers were required to hold onto those old services. Since then, all AMPS and D-AMPS services have switched over to more modern digital systems. And that's why you can't use old car phones anymore, because the networks they were designed for no longer exist. So, buy yourself some tools and get to soldering.