Now that we’re into 2026, it appears the era of CD players in new cars may be truly over, though it has certainly been effectively over for much longer. According to AutoBlog, Lexus and Subaru were the CD player holdouts in 2025, and even if some models hold on into 2026 with CD slots in the dash, it’s safe to assume no manufacturers are adding CD players to their cars moving forward.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of cars still out there rocking CD players, of course, even if it’s been a good long while since any CDs were actually rocked therein. Or maybe you’re slipping discs in and out of your dash on the regular. Heck, maybe you’re still burning your own mix CDs, of which our pal Kristen Lee over at MotorTrend will surely approve. That’s why we’re Autopian Asking.
And while this is certainly an opportunity to brag about the highly tasteful tunes you’re blasting via a laser bouncing off pits in a piece of aluminized plastic, the question may provoke some of you to ask it of yourselves with more emphasis on the is: “What IS in my CD player?” Dark Side Of The Moon? Sebadoh’s Harmacy? A slice of ham? A Kraft Single?Â
Back in the day, you probably had a zippered case bulging with CDs freed from their fragile and space-eating jewel cases. If you think scrolling a Spotify screen is distracting while driving, try clumsily flipping through a fat tome of plastic pages balanced on your knee, then extracting the disc you want and swapping it with whatever you’re ejecting to be replaced. Much whirring and clicking later, music at last.
So we ask you: what’s in your CD player right now, if you have one? What used to be in there when you had one?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.comÂ
My 06 Wrangler has the navigation DVD inserted, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually played a CD since swapping the factory 6 disc changer for a Grand Cherokee’s nav unit almost 20 years ago. On the other hand, my 17 Mazda 6 has maybe played a cd once, ever, since new. I’d still absolutely spring for a factory CD player if offered, though. You just never know, and trying to coax Spotify to play a single album with voice controls through Android Auto is an exercise in futility.
Ha, yesterday I was surprised to learn a CD was even in the CD player for my car when I replaced the car battery and the CD ejected itself. It was a mix CD of some sort, probably burned 15+ years ago.
07 Tundra, family bought it used back in 2011, and Dad burned a half dozen CD’s, all of which remain in the truck. Some are great, classic rock, 90’s/00’s dad rock, and a couple are pure chaos. One has a hard turn from Goo Goo dolls to airhorns and JASON DERULOOOOO. Pretty sure Baby by Justin Bieber is in there somewhere.
To add to the spicy nature of it, the truck has decided to intermittently spit out a random CD unprompted, so every couple months, the order of discs changes so Disc 1-3 is no longer a safe place. I call it Tundra Roulette.
I miss the in-dash 6 CD changer of my Gencoupe.
The Mars Volta’s De-Loused in the Comatorium is one that regularly sees road trip duty in any CD player equipped rig.
Otherwise, I’ve also recently played a few Wordburglar albums. If you’ve never heard of him, here’s Croque Monsieur for your listening pleasure. Sneaky Neighbours is also a favourite.
That TMV record is incredible.
I’ve been into them since the At the Drive-In days, but De-Loused remains as one of my favourite albums of all time. I always do my best to listen to it start to finish.
Yelle’s Pop Up album. I still listen to CDs on the regular.
MkIV Jetta with an aftermarket Pioneer double DIN touchscreen that I spent entirely too long modifying and adjusting the brackets so that it sat flush, and then twice as long sanding down the rough trim surround to match the rest of the smooth interior. As such, when the face pivots and moves out of the way for the CD slot, it sticks. It was always on my to do list to address that, but life gets in the way. Pretty sure You’re Awful, I Love You by Ludo is still in there.CD case is still in the trunk with a lot of burned CDs.
Since the CD player in my first WRX supported MP3 and WMA files, it was a mix CD. Probably Weird Al.
My current WRX has a Zune HD plugged into the AUX port since the head unit Bluetooth hates iPhone 16 / iOS 18
I recently traded in my old Volvo but realized about a week later that I left a few CD’s in the changer.
Social D “Live at the Roxy”, and the Bostones “Jackknife to a swan”.
My CD book with most of my favorite CD’s is still in my ’00 Firebird.
I’ve had a couple of Delta Rae discs in my changer on the Corvette for years now. I’m not sure what, if anything, is in my Prius player right now, but mostly it gets used for books on tape that I’ve checked out of the library, which has made me reconsider whether CD players are as useless as I used to think. I guess you can probably “borrow” digital books on tape too, but I’ve never had much luck with library software.
Nothing in the JKU cd player. In my office I have a burned mix CD of Grunge and in my garage work area I have the best of Pink Floyd disk 2. both in old cd players laying around.
My current car doesn’t have one, since the OEM nearly swallowed six of them when dying. Replaced with an iPod-readable head (meaning the iPod could be searched by the head).
Might have to go back to CDs, since
a) I still have my collection.
b) They’re cheap at garage sales.
c) I don’t want to pay some subscription to hear songs that some program/AI thinks I want to hear based on past choices.
d) New heads (I had to replace #2) are not iPod readable. Current one I have requires me to search the iPod manually.
Wife’s car has a single CD player. It has Dirty Cello’s 60’s album that I bought at the Mammoth Blues and Brews festival a couple years ago.
have a CD player in the daily,
and have Blink-182 One more Time in there now.
surpisingly wife’s 2023 WRX still has a CD player (a single slot in under the centre arm rest) but it’s never been tested!
I replaced the dying CD player in my Jeep with one of those cheap single-DIN Android Auto/Carplay head units from Amazon. The CD that was in it was Robot Hive/Exodus by the band Clutch.
I have a CD player in my Tundra, the CD that is currently in it is a mix cd of love songs received as a wedding favor.
I so want to ask, is a “wedding favor” like a “marital aid”? sorry had to make the comment.
I almost spit coffee all over my monitor.
Peter, Peter, Peter…I can only tell you what’s in my cassette player, which is currently empty but most recently contained “Bella Donna” by Stevie Nicks. My car did originally have a CD changer, behind a panel in the cargo area, but that got jettisoned by a previous owner so that its plug could be repurposed for an aftermarket Bluetooth.
When I bought my engine donor 530i a couple years ago, I discovered a few weeks after bringing it home that the previous owner had left the (again, trunk-mounted) CD changer fully loaded. The PO had already died (!) by that point, so I decided to let the CDs play, without looking to see what they were, to honor Randy’s memory. Turned out he was a big Peter Gabriel guy, though there was also some King Crimson, Eloy, and Genesis in there. Then I, too, forgot the CDs were in there, and they went to Pick-N-Pull with the rest of the carcass after I took out the engine and transmission. Oops.
The last time I had a working CD player in my car, I was burning CDs for it. I never had a car broken into, but I certainly didn’t want someone stealing my CDs. Once in awhile, I’d just copy an album (I think Blink’s Buddha and Cheshire Cat were the first full albums I copied for the car), but it was usually a mix.
These days, it’s Apple Music, though I have listened to The Mountain Goats’ Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan straight through a couple times now. I do like an album that plays like a complete album instead of a collection of singles.
I’m pretty sure the Mondial has a CD player, but I haven’t spent enough time fiddling with it to know if it works, much less if I inherited a CD from the prior owner.
But after seeing them play again Saturday night, if I had a CD player in the 2020funtodrivehondacrv, it would be High on Fire’s Snakes for the Divine for those bad-reception moments or the times when the planets align and all of my go-to stations are playing crap or commercials.
I haven’t had a CD player in my last 3 cars but when I did, I had the 6-disk changer full of Faith No More CDs and CD case behind the front seat for the in dash slot. I learned my lesson the hard way once after leaving my CD case in a rental car…after that I only put copies in the car.
We care a lot!
About disasters, fires, flood, and killer bees!
Yeah, and all that Jizzlobber will ruin the upholstery.
…and now I’m listening to Angel Dust on Spotify again
I think this is the first repeat in 5 pages of comments. And it’s faith no more!
I think I got an Elvis CD out right before the CD player in my Pioneer unit decided to take a crap. Kept it in there for when I did any driving with my Grandma, so she could enjoy the music she loved.
If it still worked, it’d probably have Magic 2 by Nas by now. Or Lost Americana by MGK…… or even Best Of Hiroshima….. I’ve got a backlog of CD’s I need to listen to, and it sucks the main place for me to listen to it is currently broken.
“what’s in your CD player right now, if you have one?”
I don’t. I have a phone with a massive SD card and a 32bit DAC for that.
“What used to be in there when you had one?”
CDR mix discs. I learned a long time ago to never keep the originals in the car.
I was SO STOKED when I learned my Sync3 would accept FLAC files.
I tested it out listening to Pink Floyd’s “Division Bell” album, coming home from selling my RX7. It was the perfect experience to eat up miles on the 401 at night, empty trailer and full pocket in tow.
Oooh, great choice!
I keep mine in WAV files though. Yes yes I know FLAC is supposed to be lossless but *they* also used to claim 128 kbps MP3s were “near CD quality”.
Unless someone can explain to me how a FLAC can cut the file size in half yet keep it lossess I’ll keep my music files archived in their original uncompressed format. HD/SD space is no longer a limiting factor.
Take a bunch of text files. Put them in a zip file. The zip file is much smaller than the original files. This is because there are repeated patterns in the source data, which can be replaced with one copy of the pattern and pointers to it.
E.g. if you compiled David Tracy’s complete oeuvre, you’d see the string “Jeep” 2,000 times, or 8,000 characters. But if you make a little index that maps “Jeep” to e.g. the number 1, and replace all the instances of “Jeep” with “1”, you’re now using 2,000 characters + a few bytes to store the “Jeep=1” information. You’ve saved 75% of the space with zero loss of information, because you can expand the data back to the original 8,000 characters with no errors. That’s lossless compression. I’m pretty sure you don’t wonder if all your data is in a zip file when you open it–you assume it’s there because zip is lossless.
Flac is the same. Convert a wav to flac, then convert that flac to a new wav file. The new wav file will be exactly the same as the original. Not almost the same. exactly the same.
If you’re really anal about it, wav is also a compression method, since it converts continuously variable signal into discrete samples, and *that* is lossy! 😀
Tl;Dr convert the wav to flac with foobar2000, save money on storage.
I understand what you are saying about lossless compression and I get that the technology of the late 1970s wasn’t yet capable of decompressing anything like a FLAC file in real time. That’s why 16 bit WAV became the standard format instead of a more compressed format like FLAC which would have allowed a lot more music on a CD.
Even still I see compression and decompression as more steps in the process which might introduce error. If storage space were limited I’d probably accept that teansy, tiny risk but IMO with storage space running in some cases < $8/TB and drive sizes <<<<<<<< my entire WAV collection even that miniscule risk to me isn't worth my peace of mind.
Irrational and somewhat hypocritical I know especially from someone who takes photos in JPG rather than RAW format.
“If you’re really anal about it, wav is also a compression method, since it converts continuously variable signal into discrete samples, and *that* is lossy!”
Yes but only for frequencies outside my hearing. I don’t mind losing those any more than I mind my digital camera not recording the X-rays and microwaves of my family snapshots.
Also since a lot of my music is from 1970-1990 I’m pretty sure 16 bit WAV is capable of storing whatever the studio captured, certainly whatever my 1965-1980 era stereo setup is capable of reproducing.
Are you me?
Maybe!
BMW 530i and I have SQUEEZE “A Round and A Bout” (live album) in my cd player. It has the best version of “Tempted”, which featured in GTA Vice City, you will hear anywhere!
To be honest, I spent quite a few Sundays’ playing through Vice City Definitive Edition recently and never knew that song was in the game.
Granted, when I’m on Emotion 98.3, it’s because Africa is playing, so I never had the chance to hear it. Very interesting!
I recently bought a 2006 Saab 9-3 Aero. It has a six disc changer! Most of my CD collection is missing, as I haven’t had physical media in a while. But right now, it has some period-appropriate Swedish electronic music: The Knife’s Silent Shout, and Covenant’s Northern Lights.
Man, I have come dangerously close to buying a 9-3 SportCombi.
Do it!
I prefer to sleep on the bed rather than being banished to the sofa. That’s why I don’t have a 9-3 SportCombi. Or a pair of Klipsch La Scalas in my living room.
I keep forgetting my ND Miata has a CD player. I wonder if there’s a CD in it from the previous owner.
’95 Miata has an aftermarket Kenwood Excelon unit with a CD player and Bluetooth. I almost always stream on Bluetooth, but Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” lives in the CD player for when I don’t have signal or connectivity. It’s an album that I will gladly listen to any time.
Not only do I have a CD player in my car, I just bought a CD changer at an estate sale a few weeks ago. Sure, it’s old enough to walk into a bar and order a drink, but it’s working well and I found a remote control for it on ebay.
Currently loaded in the car CD player is a Bob Dylan compilation/greatest hits.