We live in weird times. I know there are so many ways to back up this bold statement – cultural, political, environmental, whatever – but I’m saying that specifically about the state of aftermarket car tech. And, even more specifically, aftermarket car audio/infotainment tech. Want to get even more specific? Sure you do, it’s fun! In that case, I’m talking about cheap aftermarket infotainment systems.
In some ways, we’re sort of in a golden age of this sort of crap, and I kind of mean that literally. Well, not the golden part, the crap part, and even that I suppose is metaphorical over literal crap, but I think you see where I’m going. We live in an age of cheap, plentiful options for head units, and those cheap units are, objectively, deeply strange machines, unique and interesting and kind of baffling artifacts of this very specific time and place, and I think they’re worth talking about.
I started thinking about all of this because I was replacing the head unit in my wife’s 2010 Volkswagen Tiguan, which I talked about yesterday regarding the reverse camera issues and my beef with VW’s taillight bulb access. It was positively riveting, you should read it.
Anyway, I was given two demands for this new head unit: it should be able to use Apple CarPlay and have a working backup camera. And, this thing I got satisfied both of those requirements! But it also does so very much more, and I’m pretty certain absolutely none of the other things it does makes any sense whatsoever, which is why I’m so fascinated.
Okay, What Is This Thing?
It’s this unit for sale on Amazon: one of the cheaper head units I found that does CarPlay and is a direct fit replacement for the factory head unit VW supplied way back in the Obama administration. It was about $110. That’s dirt cheap, really.
Installation was easier than I thought it would be, and the new unit is dramatically smaller than the old one, partially because it doesn’t need all of the space or mechanical parts required for the old unit’s CD/DVD player. This frees up a nice little cube of space I can use for smuggling something, like a fat wad of saffron or some black-market eyeballs.
It’s a nice, dark, enclosed space; maybe I can grow hallucinogenic mushrooms in there?
The overall fit of the assembly is great, and looks pretty damn close to stock, so no complaints there. The knobs and buttons feel pretty decent, too.
The unit came with two different wiring harnesses, one with an adapter to connect right into the car’s CAN bus, which made things a lot easier. Strangely, the built-in back-up camera was not part of this harness, and the new unit did not have a connector that would fit the existing camera, as I discussed in that other post.
It did, however, come with its own camera, which uses a standard composite interface, and that was fine, though it annoyingly displays it’s own parking guide lines despite the fact that the head unit superimposes its own parking guides, making a confusing mess, as you can see above, over my face.
And yes, I’ve combed through the preferences and have yet to find a way to turn off either of those guide lines. I guess I got what I paid for.
That said, the use of a regular, bog-standard composite input opens up all kinds of possibilities! Like this:
That’s right! Old-school, 8-bit-era computers tended to use composite video output, so why settle for some boring view of what’s behind you – which is in the past, baby – when you can have real excitement like this:
Remember Pitstop II? Great game. Why not give it a go when you shift into R, for Race?
View this post on Instagram
It doesn’t have to be some old 8-bit Commodore computer, though; any composite signal would work. You could have a DVD player set to repeat, and every time you go into reverse, you’re treated to a random scene from Heartbeeps.
Good times! Sure, this composite-only camera input required me to run a wire all the way from the front of the car to the rear, but whatever, it’s worth it.
What Else Works Great
I’m happy to say that the main raison d’etre for this thing, running CarPlay, works just fine. It connects wirelessly and pretty seamlessly once you do the initial setup. It’s not especially quick, though; every time you start up the car it takes between 30 seconds to maybe(?) a minute before CarPlay starts, and there’s always this odd little dialog box that you have to dismiss:
I especially like the cavalier quality of that “sure” button. It pretty well encapsulates my feelings about being told “have no media file!” Sure. Whatever you say.
But, more importantly, CarPlay just seems to work, and, really, along with a working back-up camera, that’s about all that will be asked of this machine.
But There’s So Much More, And It’s So Weird
Now let’s dig into why I think these devices are so damn weird, and such products of this time and place: they’re incredibly well-featured, but I’ve never really encountered a product that has so much undesired capability.
I get that fundamentally, this machine is basically an Android phone, just in a different sort of presentation. And, as such, it’s basically free to include software that does all sorts of stuff, to the point where it’s so easy to do that questions like “should it do this” or “why the hell would anyone want this” just don’t ever get asked.
That’s the logic that puts a fully functional audio recorder in your head unit:
It works just fine, I tested it out. It saves separate audio files and plays them back and everything. It’s an audio recorder. On your dashboard.
Now, maybe if cell phones that do this – which is pretty damn near all of them – didn’t exist, maybe this would make sense, if you were willing to drag the people you wanted to record into your car. Maybe.
Actually, not maybe. No one wants this. What possible use could this have? If you need to record audio, you have either software on your phone or a dedicated voice recorder. You may have both. I think you can get these audio files off the car with an SD card, but why? It’s so baffling that this is here.
Look, there’s a web browser, too! I guess if you had no phone or computer or tablet or internet-connected fridge or anything like that, maybe you’d choose to browse the web on your dashboard, provided you were close enough to a WiFi network (there’s no cell connection on this head unit, at least not that I saw?). I guess if you don’t want to pollute your phone with porn, you can have the option of watching dirty videos in your car while you sit in your driveway?
There are YouTube apps and dedicated Google apps and picture browsers and a calendar – I guess you could log into your Google account and get some of these things populated? But, again, you have a phone – everyone has a freaking phone – why the hell would you want any of this?
Look, there’s a calculator on this thing. A calculator. You can make your car a 3,000-pound self-propelled calculating device, should you so choose. Was any living modern human being asking for this? At all? I would genuinely love to meet the person out there who was thinking, damn, I wish I could calculate logarithms on the dashboard of my car, like a king, instead of on my phone or computer, like some miserable, filthy animal. Introduce me to that person, and I’ll buy them a beer and multiple tacos, just to spend some time around them.
Look, it does this, too:
What the hell is that? I had to look it up; it seems to be some sort of digital radio standard I’d not been aware of. I bet there are people out there for whom this is important, even if I’m very much not one of them. If that’s you, look, this does that! Hot damn!
It does regular FM radio, too, of course, and it can store files if for some reason (there’s 25 GB of local storage!) you think the best place for all your TurboTax records is on your car’s dashboard; it has its own nav system that’s somehow different than the Google Maps app it already has, there’s that floating robot on the right there that is some kind of AI chatbot thing, and there’s probably even more I didn’t bother to find out about.
And you need none of this.
Everything this does that has any utility at all whatsoever, you’re already doing on your phone. Everything else you’ll never need or want to do. This is an absurd machine.
But at the same time, it’s an incredible machine. It’s cheap, it does the job it needs to do pretty well, and you can pretty much ignore all the superfluous stuff. It’s both incredibly well done and incredibly sloppy, all at once, and I think that right there is the punctum of where we are technologically, especially with cheap electronics like this.
These devices are such a strange combination of overkill and half-assery. For example, the built-in settings and help give some really useful information that you normally don’t seem to get from most electronics, like connector pinouts right there on the screen:
That could be very handy! That’s good information! And then, in the same set of settings, you also get screens like this:
Wait, what? Peptides? Aren’t those chains of amino acids used in the building of proteins? Why does my head unit have those, and why do I get to pick if they’re left or right? What the hell does this mean?
This one, too. “Protocol Vehicle Model Alert Pop-Up Box?” Do I want that closed or open? It may as well be asking me if I want my argyles diurnally oriented or re-swepsonized?
At least half of the entries in the settings are incomprehensible in the same way, thanks to some clumsy mistranslations or similar sloppiness. And then at the same time there are settings that give you a staggering amount of control and deep customization of what this thing can do.
These Cheap Head Units Are A Perfect Metaphor For Our Time And Place
Do you ever get the feeling that, especially when it comes to AI, we’re just kind of letting the technology pull us along and we’re no longer really steering? I kind of feel that way. The pace of innovation is so fast, we’ve given up trying to assess what we’re creating or how it gets used, so now we’re faced with unregulated AI that isn’t taking drudgery away from people, but is instead destroying creative jobs and leaving a wake of malformed slop over every aspect of human culture.
AI has incredible potential to become a multiplier of human achievement, but left unguided, it’s just taking jobs and turning things to crap. These head units feel similar: they’re incredible technical achievements, and can be made to do exactly what you want, but they feel like they were just flung together and every possible feature was thrown at them, whether or not it makes any sense.
There’s no plan here, just a few rough guidelines and the hard edges of economic pressures. They’re almost like organic things that way, not designed but just sort of coarsely bred, with the pressures of the market evolving what these become, like generations of fruit flies.
Yes, it’s got some sloppy UX and is full of vestigial and unwanted crap, but it fits in the hole in the dash just right and does the two things I actually want it to do, all for $110. Does my satisfaction with this make me part of the problem? Definitely.
Do I have a better idea at the moment? Not really. But I’m kind of fascinated by it all.
[Ed note: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link. If you click on that link and buy something on Amazon, we might get a commission. – MH]
I would take issue with a unit that states it supports your specific vehicle yet fails to support the built in reverse camera and passes off camera support with a cheap tape on camera. I’d call BS on that
These Chinese garbage head units always over-advertise compatibility and leave a lot of customers with a paperweight. God forbid your car has a dedicated factory amp, or DSP or any kind of functionality more complex than steering wheel buttons.
We had an Android OS head unit in a Kia Optima about 10 years ago. It also fit perfectly and looked great. While it was cool to play with all the neat and useless programs, the electronics were not well made and it wasn’t very reliable. It only lasted about a year before bricking itself completely and I put the OEM stereo back in. I almost pulled the trigger on another Android OS head unit on the next car but decided to go with a more reputable brand through Crutchfield.
Purchased a carplay unit for my 96 bronco. I liked it because the deminsions were a little larger than a normal single din unit. This made it take the entire hole in the bronco instead of having to use a trim panel. It can be a little flakey at times but for 50 bucks I still consider it a really good deal.
I’m gonna be real—and I’m not begrudging anyone who installs aftermarket CarPlay, do what you want—but I seriously don’t get the obsession with CarPlay. I can do 90% of what CarPlay offers on a good iPhone mount and I’d rather stick with the 13-year-old OEM Volvo infotainment that just works instead of going with some third-party Aliexpress special head unit that might need to be swapped again in another 5-10 years.
Besides, I’ve used CarPlay in rental cars and it either makes my phone incredibly hot if it’s wired or simply loses connection intermittently if it’s not. Call me a boomer, but I’m not sure I see the appeal. To be fair, I usually listen to radio in the car and read the map before leaving the house, so maybe I do just live in the past.
Meanwhile, I refuse to purchase/lease a car without CarPlay. I have an iPhone Pro Max, so the big screen. But the carplay screen is not only significantly larger, it’s also optimized for usage while driving. Control locations, multitasking, automatically popping up the homekit garage door opener button when I get close to home, etc.
Plus it’s nice to be able to just leave your phone in your pocket instead of having to be constantly putting it in and taking it out of the mount. While I’ve never bothered to look it up, I’ve always assumed carplay has minimal battery draw vs directly using the phone, if for no other reason than the screen stays off. Yes I know you could plug in a charging cable, but that’s just another thing to have to deal with.
My TV has wires routed through the wall because I can’t stand the look of hanging wires. In the car, it bothers me even more (and it needs wires to charge), plus the appearance of stuck-on discount bin-looking accessories, and the likelihood of it flying around in corners, so with ACP, I can slide my phone into a slot where it’s hidden and doesn’t move and the car’s larger screen performs the simple operations I would use the phone for. Only time I have issues with heat, it will stop charging, but still work and that’s in the summer when I drive with the windows down instead of using AC.
I’m with you, I find it from pointless to actively annoying. I actually like to listen to old-fashioned radio quite a bit, and I generally prefer a car’s built in music player to doing it through Carplay, so getting in and out of the interface to do that makes it more bother than it’s worth even in cars where the connection is solid. Which is nowhere near enough of them.
I personally will not buy a car without CarPlay or one that I can retrofit. My GX460 has a retrofitted unit with CarPlay that keeps all factory functions, and integrates with the factory Mark Levinson stereo as well. I just retrofitted a double DIN CarPlay unit into my 98 Boxster as well. (Are you listening GM?)
I hate using a phone mount they clutter up my dash, the phone screen is too small, and the cables annoy me. I love just getting into my car my phone stays in my pocket. I also don’t remember the last time I listened to terrestrial radio, must be at least 15 years. Sirius XM app on CarPlay is the bomb.
I have a similar one, it’s a “single din” unit that’s actually 1.25 din tall on the face. I wanted a volume knob and wireless carplay, which it has, but man it is just not very good. It overheats a lot and has to restart after about 30-50 minutes, but it doesn’t seem to be actually correlated to anything that I can tell. It was only $50 and I mostly got it because I was curious about how bad it could possibly be, but I think I’ll be replacing it with a nicer single din unit from sony or pioneer if I end up keeping the car it’s installed in.
“Everything this does that has any utility at all whatsoever, you’re already doing on your phone.” Here is the answer to why GM and Rivian can GTFO with their rejection of AA/CP
Finally! A backup camera for those of us that like to double park.
I love that this exists. So you can make a 2010 car feel more like a 2025 car. But will you be able to make a 2025 car feel like a 2040 in 15 years?
Yes, it has lots of unnecessary features, but at the same time, you can get it an upgrade your car for super cheap. Try doing that in a 2025 model when those all have customized screens with features deeply integrated into the car. Maybe that’s why everyone’s spending so much money on AGI, so it can solve that problem for us in 2040.
I’m torn between getting a cheap single DIN carplay radio from Amazon or a Continental VDO radio with Bluetooth. Cost is similar.
Heartbeeps, the Paul Schrader film?
https://youtube.com/shorts/PQGo9bSod6k?si=QNkiJfMSXaUQMnlD
Wireless connectivity to your phone. What permissions does it ask for? The software package makes me think malware. No serious discussion of what could be in there and how it’s looking at your data and possibly transmitting it to people who shouldn’t have it.
It’s sad, but I guess I kind of assume all my information is being broadcast out into the aether, and I suppose at this point someone is just enjoying those pictures in my hidden folder.
How would it transmit to anything? I’d be worried if it had its own cellular connection, but to my knowledge, it can’t hijack your phone’s service without your explicit permission in the form of activating a hotspot.
If it’s got wifi connectivity (e.g. web access, with or without your phone) it can transmit plenty. That’s how the Internet works.
And what WiFi would it connect to on the highway?
Right, you phone’s mobile hotspot, which you have to activate and set it up for.
Yeah, so this isn’t a thing it can do on it’s own without an internet connection, and as Jason stated it has no cellular service.
Furthermore, it’s Android, which is fairly open, and auditable. Want to know what it’s doing? Tear the back panel off, plug in a TiGard to the JTAG port and dump the firmware from flash to you computer, Then disassemble the code. Ghidra (thanks CIA) has native support for most of these processors out of the box and should got you 90% of the way there without spending more than about $150 on sables and the TiGard.
Back to the original point, without an internet connection, anything it does gather stays local, and will require similar efforts to extract it, or at least unfettered access to the radio and it’s SD card for the agonizingly slow process of trying to extract data from it.
It presumably doesn’t need an app, so there aren’t any permissions. It just uses the standardized connection that wireless carplay/AA uses on any car.
Now if you actually used those janky apps on the headunit itself, those I wouldn’t trust as far as I can throw the car.
Ooh! Peptides! I, too, enjoy cellular peptide cake. With mint frosting.
I have seen these and contemplated replacing the COMAND unit in my CLK with one of these – I just don’t know how compatible it would be w the Harmon Kardon music system or the non-existent Bluetooth module, or the myriad other things it operates such as the clock in the dash….
This is the main thing holding me back on my ’13 Si, the car has just enough tech that removing the factory NAV unit renders the additional add stuff semi functional.
The play is apparently getting a CRV unit of a similar vintage, which offers Car Play from the factory and retains all the native Honda functionality. In the meantime, I just plop my phone on a magsafe charger mount, use the Bluetooth for audio and the phone for Nav.
“damn, I wish I could calculate logarithms on the dashboard of my car.”
Now where do we meet up for beers and tacos?
It is amazing how much tech is just tossed about like free key chains in days yonder. The dang lunar lander computer was in my lifetime.
YES PLEASE
Shoot, I normally pay extra for that.
I am more than a little disappointed that I paid $400 for a Stinger head unit for my jeep when I could have had this.
Don’t get me wrong mines good at what it does, but all it does is run Carplay and a backup camera.
I could have saved 290 bucks and had WHIMSY
Eonon makes an Android head unit specifically for the E39 BMW (and several other models) that matches the style of car. The buttons (it has actual buttons!) are the same as all the other buttons on the dashboard. It’s just awesome to have a 25 year old car with a modern infotainment setup that looks like it came from the manufacturer that way.
true – but the AA/CP interface is complete crap. Which is a bummer because the unit looks really nice.
There are actually multiple manufacturers to choose from for the E39 on Aliexpress. Why so much choice? I’m assuming because someone created the molds for the plastic housing so manufacturers just buy the housing and jam their own electronics inside.
I would never put an Aliexpress unit in my E39 unless I want to fry all my ancient and often NLA modules. And yes, it’s essentially the same unit cloned with different branding. Imagine the quality of capacitors in a $100 head unit.
I want a replacement infotainment system that gets rid of the screens. Give me a 2-line display, a couple knobs, a row of buttons, and a storage pocket and I would be happier than a pig in poop in most cars.
There are only TWO good units for the E39 and none are Eonon. One is Dynavin, which sadly unified their E39 faceplate with that of the E53 so it doesn’t look right anymore (the E53 has a curved dash) and the other is Avin.
I’ve tested Eonons and I always run away in horror. Glitches, poor translations, terrible sound quality, they die suddenly or overheat and enter a reboot loop, installation instructions are terrible, they sometimes don’t work in DSP-equipped E39s and if you need support, good luck with that, nobody will hear you scream.
If you own or plan to own an E39, do yourself a favor and go for an Avin or a Dynavin, especially if you’re in the US you have great dealers. I know for a fact that Jeff at Dynavinnorthamerica.com works directly with the Chinese factory who make Dynavins. He helps them relay feedback, report bugs and request firmware updates, etc.
I don’t know what that little astronaut baby is (on the right side of the screen) but IT NEEDS TO GO.
It looks like one of the variations on the reddit mascot thing.
I say we need more “sure” click buttons instead of “ok”.
For any “terms and conditions” approval that you can accept without having to open and read.
…I get weird vibes from stuff like this, the kind I often get from Dankpods videos. The sheer amount of Quantity Is Job One energy coming out of these cheap nuggets from China just makes me shake my head and think “when is the Economy’s other shoe going to drop?”
That said, hackablity makes it fun, at least. And the funny loud Australian man has more junk to shout at.
I mean, the calculator right there to calculate tank MPG at the gas station, I would use. But I’m also weird.
But does it come with nut mustard?
The fact that YOU CAN DO ALL OF THIS SHIT ON YOUR PHONE ALREADY has really baffled me about the necessity of Carplay/Android Auto in the first place. If you’ve got Bluetooth and a $3 phone mount, what do you really need Carplay for anyway?
Yes, all of my cars are old enough to not have screens.
One of my cars I use a phone mount (no screen) and the other has android auto. Android auto gives you a bigger, more visible screen and usually unlocks more controls (for example my non-android auto car won’t skip songs with the steering wheel controls but the android auto car will).
But to Torch’s point, the only thing I’m using in Android auto are google maps, Spotify, and occasionally the phone app. I don’t need access to 90% of the apps it mirrors to the car screen.
Phone screens are tiny and more difficult to hit when driving than the larger CarPlay buttons.
Oddly (and really, truly bafflingly) it is illegal in many places to use your phone at all while driving though activating everything through your car’s screen is ok.
CarPlay is just a lot more convenient at everything it does than trying to do it all on your phone. That’s it, it’s simple. People that love to mess around with their settings and change their Bluetooth settings/pairings all day won’t get it. iPhones exist because people didn’t want to mess around with all that and have something that works for ~80% of what they need it to do simply.
My phone has a nearly 7In screen – it is more than big enough for even my aging eyes to see just fine. I set the navigation up when I hit the road and vanishingly rarely need to touch the thing while moving. That leaves the car’s screen available for the radio and playing music from media.
I have an iPhone, I absolutely hate the thing. Lovely hardware with idiotic software at a ludicrous price. The “Apple Way”. But I am stuck with it to interface with a medical device.
Why is every post you make so angry about everything?
Because the world has gone stupid and pisses me off, of course.
And Bluetooth is optional too, if you’ve got a cigarette lighter, a FM radio, and one of those Bluetooth-to-FM adapters!
Honestly, a $25 FM adapter and a free magnet phone mount makes my 30-year old car do all the modern-car stuff I would want
One of my cars has entirely adequate factory navigation and I still can’t be bothered. I just use my phone. I find most CarPlay implementations to be actively annoying.
Because I can put my phone in the cubby, or pocket and not have to crowd up my dash with a mount? I replaced my OG radio with a tablet (good) then an Android head unit (better) but now that I have Android Auto on my OEM car screen, it’s the best. Include the steering wheel button to activate assistant (rather than voice, because that is randomly activated) and I can send messages, google facts and open my garage door. I’m not a “jump on the newest thing” kind of guy by any means; but smart switches and Android Auto are two I’d have a hard time giving up
Something about “Have no media file! Sure.” sent me into the giggles.
“Sure” gives the youngs a way to acknowledge the problem without actually having to do anything about it.
632 missed calls?
Yes, they’re stored in the back window (vertical).
Probably like me. Only answers the phone if their in your contacts
Me too, but I have zero in my bubble…
It’s those car warranty people calling to offer an extended warranty on the Pao and Changli.
Oh he should answer that one!