Save the DVD Player

From the January 2022 issue of Car and Driver.

Ever since the advent of the iPad, I’ve questioned the value of factory in-car video entertainment systems. You’re going to pay extra for a pair of screens in your car? An iPad is now $329, and it isn’t glued to your headrest. But I’ve experienced a change of heart, a glorious enlightenment revealing that the path to seatback entertainment nirvana is not through a tablet. We need to save the DVD players.

My 2020 Chrysler Pacifica has all manner of rear-seat video options, including HDMI ports. But the DVD player is our road-trip default. If you want to watch a movie in a car, the digital versatile disc is the ideal option. It doesn’t require batteries or broadband. You don’t have to pair it with anything. DVDs are cheap and won’t burn through your cellular data plan. Pop one in, wait through the FBI warning, and you’ve got a mobile cinema experience. Hope you brought some popcorn.

Therefore, I was righteously psyched when my 11-year-old climbed into the back of a loaner 2022 Infiniti QX80 and reported that it had DVD players. We had a three-hour drive ahead of us, so I went to Walmart and stocked up. Perhaps you’re not a connoisseur of the chain’s huge DVD bins, but they’re filled with random movies at varying prices. The $7.50 bin included a four-disc Batman set (two Michael Keatons, a Val Kilmer, and a George Clooney) that went in the cart. I also grabbed the Hobbit trilogy and both original Bill & Ted flicks, Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. Now we were road-trip ready.

But when we piled into the QX80, I realized the most bogus journey was the one we were about to take, for there were no DVD players. The screen on the headrests flipped forward, away from the seat, leading my kid to infer that there was a DVD slot at the top. But no—flipping the screen revealed only an SD-card slot. An SD slot! Is that progress? Because it seems like downloading a movie and copying it onto an SD card treads mighty close to burning-your-own-DVD levels of inconvenience and illegality.

Like many modern vehicles, the Infiniti has plenty of non-DVD media options, but all of them depend on either a robust internet connection or someone having the foresight to download their chosen media in advance. I tried the streaming gambit, wherein you grab a Roku from your house and plug it into the car’s HDMI port, but the QX80’s Wi-Fi required an AT&T subscription, and I couldn’t get the Roku to recognize my phone as a hotspot. Nor had I downloaded any movies that I could mirror to the screens. That requires planning. You know what doesn’t require much planning? Stashing a Bill & Ted DVD in your car in case you need it one day.

With DVD players increasingly getting the ax, I apprehensively asked Stellantis whether it kept the Pacifica’s for the 2021 refresh. The answer was yes for most trims. But the Pacifica is the holdout. Stellantis killed off most of its DVD players in 2018. To address the issue of offline entertainment, the Jeep Grand Wagoneer is available with Amazon Fire TV for Auto, which can download movies straight to the car, but the fine print reads: “Vehicle must be in active and usable cellular range. Requires a Wi-Fi data plan and linked Amazon account. Streaming service subscriptions are not included.” I stared at my Batman DVD, and it didn’t say any of that.

The in-car DVD player is a victim of unjustified techno-snobbery—it’s perfectly suited to its mission, but physical media just seems so archaic. To which I say, let’s own the throwback image. Play it up. Give me a QX80 Denon home-theater system, and let’s cue up the lobby scene in The Matrix. Just because a technology has been around for a while doesn’t make it automatically obsolete. You know, like magazines.

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