Perhaps my interpretation of this is wrong, but it seems like car phones were much more widespread and easily accessible to most members of the public as opposed to Cellular Phones which were almost exclusively for the very wealthy/businesspeople etc. Is there a difference in the tech that made this so? How does a car phone work, if its different than how a cell phone works? TIA
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Size, antenna, cost, and battery are import. Early mobile phones were big, lunking, expensive devices. The earliest mobile phones you had to carry around this giant thing that looked like the size of a small car battery with a phone connected to it via a wire. These were really inconvenient and expensive, which means who wanted them was a small audience, business, government, etc, not regular folks. They looked more like a big military radio
We then get to stuff like the [Zach Morris phone](https://imgur.com/4mzCKg2), its big but not huge, but it was still rare and expensive, but hey its not awful, it sucks to carry around, its not fitting in a pocket, but it would fit in a briefcase. Its still not great for everyone, but its way better than the huge radio ones! So its much more convienent for everyone, even though its still expensive and the audience for it is mostly the same as before, but general consumers are really really creeping in
Phones needed a lot of space, power, and a big antenna. The mobile phone networks were not built out too well and couldn’t even handle that many phones. So not only were phones inconvenient, the mobile providers needed to make sure they didn’t sell too many and overload their system (this is a real thing)
A lot of these problems, not all, but a lot of the physical ones, can be solved if you make the phone… less mobile.
That is put it in car, where you have plenty of space, plenty of power, you have lots of room for antennas and more.
Eventually mobile phones got small enough, that the need for space wasn’t a big deal, so car phones died out in favor of new small portable phones
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