Just the bells and whistles

I've been driving the Saturn for a few weeks now as my regular commuter car. I've put about 400 miles on it so far. Longest round trip without charging was 30 miles, although most of my trips are about 15 miles.

I still have things do such as covering the rear battery box and upgrading the rear springs. In the mean time I decided to do the essential upgrade that all vehicles need...replace the factory radio!

The one problem I noticed with the factory radio was that the electric motor and controller produce electrical noise. Specifically radio stations get static when accelerating. Since we live "out in the country" a lot of the radio stations are weak to begin with. This just exacerbates the problem.

I figured that a newer head unit may be less susceptible to the problem. I also wanted to get a radio that could connect to my Blackberry. That way I could use bluetooth to use the phone hands free. Just as important it would allow me to stream audio to the radio (Pandora, podcasts, mp3, etc). This allows the Blackberry to act as a second tuner, one not a prone to the electrical interference.

Installing the head unit was pretty simple... remove part of the dash, remove the old radio, modify the old radio mounting hardware to fit the new radio, rewire the old harness to match the new radio, route the microphone wire to hide it, and reinstall everything :-) The process actually was not that hard.

One problem was that the car has a US antenna connection and the radio has a European connection. A quick trip to the Best Buy to pick up an adapter solved that problem.

The second problem was that the wiring for the harness didn't match the wiring diagram in the factory manual. A little trial and error and I managed to figure out the wiring.

Here's a picture of it installed. The colors of the LED's fit in with the LED instruments on the dash.


First impression is that it does what I wanted it to do. The bluetooth streaming is a phenomenal feature. I can listen to download sports, music, and other podcasts as well as saved mp3 music. Pandora also works great. Since it streams from the internet it depends on cell phone coverage. I need to test if for my usual commute.

As for the radio the electrical interference is still there, though not nearly as bad. I'll need to look at the antenna wiring in the engine compartment to see if I can shield it somehow.