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2014 Mazda CX-5 Grand Touring AWD Long-Term Road Test
Edmunds.com
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We still buy CDs. I'm not sure if it's because we're luddites or just because we don't trust the permanency of digital media. One hard drive crash and poof.
Donna, your sentences are ususally well crafted, but that one makes my head hurt.
General Motors, for example, left the CD player out of its MyLink system in the new Chevy Sonic and Spark.
There, that's better.
I can definitely see some time down the road when just like the 8-track and tape decks before it that the CD player becomes obsolete but we're far from that day. A couple lower end cars that are pinching pennies to be able to provide a fancy nav screen aren't a trend in my book. To me it's more of cost-cutting to provide perceived features the automakers thinks will help sell to a market whose generation isn't really interested in cars and aren't buying anyways.
Like others I still buy CDs when they're priced about the same as a digital download but I would use digital media more were it not for some hindrances like trying to manage and navigate a large media libraries with Ford's MyFord Touch (buggy and difficult to easily browse large numbers of artists and albums without first making playlists on your computer). That and the iPods really haven’t grown in storage capacity the last couple generations and mine has been maxed out for quite a while now (phones as worse in this regard and I don’t want to rely solely on streaming). As such I'll shuffle some physical discs and continue to enjoy better sound quality until ease of use and capacity grow a little more on the digital players.
To add one other comment about the Dart, it's not that they're trying to make the disc drive less prominent but there isn't room to easily integrate it in the same space as a large touch screen. Quite a few vehicles have done this and I recall some late '80s, early '90s Pontiacs and GM products locating the tape deck in a different location for the same reasons. If anything I’d look at it as good for the consumers in being able to replace one or the other years after the warranty expires without having to find a complete, integrated touch screen/CD/DVD combo if the physical drive dies.