I was driving through Essex, VT and decided to take an important business call while driving. It was one of my clients and during the call I ended up securing additional work. Just as we were closing the conversation and the deal, I see blue police lights in my rear view mirror. "Excuse me sir, I saw you driving through town with your phone up to your ear. Are you aware that is against the law to talk on a cell phone while driving..." The officer hit me with a $162, 0 point fine and afterwards I decided it was the time to get Bluetooth installed in the truck.
My brother-in-law gifted me a Pioneer AVH-P3400BH head unit for helping him sell his car this past year. I went to Best Buy to get an install quote and the labor cost alone was over $400. More if I wanted a back-up camera installed. I decided to order all of the parts online and do the job myself and while it was a bit time consuming, it was actually pretty easy.
All in, it took me about 6 hours. It would have been less had I done more research on the front end and not tried to reuse a universal steering wheel controller set up for a VW GTI, as well as research how to set up the Pioneer parking brake bypass for the DVD player before taking my interior all apart. These two snafus added approximately 2-3 hours to the job.
The final result looks really slick, adds bluetooth, a backup camera, and a dvd player to my rig, in addition to some fun built in apps. The quality of sound from my factory speakers is also a significant improvement because the EQ features are much more advanced than the factory head unit.
Total Cost:
Pioneer Head Unit: Free
Harness, bezel, splices, electrical tape etc.: approximately $50
Rear View Camera: $25
Steering wheel button adapter from Best Buy: $80 (there are cheaper ones online but the programming feature on this product was really slick and offered some additional custom programming of steering wheel buttons. ie. press and hold mode button and activate passenger ejector seat)
Total: $160ish.
Walking into BestBuy and purchasing the same set up with install would run well over $800. #Winning! #Anyonecandothis #electricalsavant