What Car GPS Looked Like in 1994

The '95 Oldsmobile Eighty Eight had an optional in-car GPS system—the first of its kind, and way ahead of its time. Priced at $2,000 for the base system (with extremely limited map coverage) and hampered by the low-precision civilian access to the GPS network of the time, it was a flop, selling only 2,000 units by July 1996. Half of those units were installed in AVIS rental cars.

But the burning question is—what did it look like? Oh, it was amazing:

Here's how AVIS advertised it:

But wait, there's more. In an article from Jesda, the prototype hard-drive-based "TravTek" system from 1992 is shown—that system would evolve into Guidestar, the system shown in the first two videos above. Dig that Stephen Hawking-style speech synthesizer!