Most cars had cassette players, many still had 8-tracks; vinyl or or tape at home.

Not that they were great options, but there was alot of existing media available, and hardware was common, so an expensive bulky device to play fragile media at lower quality than vinyl, was how it was viewed by many initially.

Edit: just checking, the Sony Walkman came out in 1979, CDs in 1982, but the Walkman dominated the 80s & 90s, so its easy to see why CDs were dismissed