Hardwire a Radar Detector
 
 

 

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Probably should mention this is with an auto dimming mirror. No guarantees, but there you go...

Read fully before actually doing things, wear safety goggles, pull an electrician's license etc etc etc (kidding)...

Step 1: Remove the center console covers.
-Remove cover 1 by prying the bottom edge down. It will swing, then kinda fall off. This is designed to come off, and is described in the Manual somewhere for how to manually close your sunroof or something.
-Remove cover 2 by kinda pulling off. It comes off pretty easy.
-Remove cover 3. There are 2 Torx size 20 screws. Unscrew them (indicated where the arrows are). Then, gently pry it off as well. Note how it went in. There are 4, uh, teeth that will have to go in specific places when you put it back together.


Step 2: The wire harness that has the wires we want is clipped into the white mounting plate. It's a heck of a lot easier to work with if it's detached. So gently squeeze the black prongs together & push it through the hole. Fish it out from the top, towards the mirror mount.


From here on, we get electrical. There are several ways to get to the wires you need. The general idea is that the red wire provides switched (functional only when the car is "ON" or running) & black provides ground. You can cut & solder the wires, or use T-taps (from Radio Shack) to splice into the wires. If you haven't soldered before, I ain't teaching you here. Use T-taps, but read the instructions as I've never used em. Sorry.

Safety first. If you feel you need to disconnect the battery before messing electrically, go for it. Grab a voltmeter & measure across the red & black wires. You should get 15 Volts (I think). Just to check.

The 2 arrows in the picture below point to the unwanted bundle (green, blue & gray) and the desired bundle (red & black).

*Before you go further, please be comfortable with splicing as described above, cause going further may render your $400 hunk of state of the art electronics into a lifeless cat toy*


Step 3: Take the power cord of your radar detector (or whatever else you want to hardwire) and cut the end off & strip the wires to reveal 2 bare wire. Use a wire stripper, or scissors/teeth/fingernails (careful not to strip so much that you get some of the strands of wire).

Step 4: Temporarily attach one of the leads to a bare spot of the red wire, and the other lead to the black wire. How you do this depends on how you splice them together. This is to test if you got them on the right wires. Get power to the car & put the key in the "ON" position. It should fire up. If not, turn off, switch the leads & try again.

Step 5: Once you got them in the right place, permanently splice together. Make sure there are NO bare wires showing anywhere. Wrap with electrical tape if required.

Step 6: Fish the other end of the cord through the roof & down by the far front edge of the roof, or however looks/works best for you depending where you mount the detector.

Step 7: Working backwards, re-assemble everything, so it looks like no one ever went in there & messed around.

Hope this helps.

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This site was last updated 01/29/05