Your emails: Homebrew tips on getting CarPlay in your older car
Cars
[MUSIC]
Hey folks, Brian Cooley here from On Cars.
Got another one of your emails about high tech cars and modern driving.
This one's from Kevin in Belgium, who wants to know what's going on with the future of his older BMW and Apple's latest CarPlay.
How can I upgrade my '05 BMW 530d, which has iDrive, pretty early iDrive, He wants it to have car play but he doesn't want to do any surgery, put in a new, different, or other screen in his dashboard.
This is kind of a thorny one, I'm afraid.
The short answer, Kevin, is you can't.
You can't do it.
Let's take a look at that dashboard of that 05 5 series.
See that layout there.
That is completely proprietary.
There is nothing in there.
That even speaks to heavy surgery where you can put a double D head unit in there, it's just a non-starter.
So instead what you've gotta be able to do the following considerations, first of all BMW now that support carplay and they were a late-comer.
As of November 2016 they announced that they are offering it as a ala carte option just a mound in case on 17 and forward models, as I understand it.
So, nice to have BMW finally supporting Carplay, as opposed to just iDrive, but it's not gonna apply to your car.
Your 05, that's a really early iDrive, there's not gonna be anything retro going on there, I can assure you.
Now here's another way to do it.
On the Android side, they do have a mode called Android Auto Phone Only, where the phone is the car screen, everything happens on the phone.
It's a clever workaround for vehicles that don't have an LCD in the dash Unfortunately, Apple does not support it, that I know of as of right now.
They don't have a phone only mode.
There is apparently a jail break way, to jail break your phone, then add in something called Ignition, that'll apparently give you on phone only CarPlay.
You can consider that So if we are going to homebrew this idea, since there is no really good legitimate satisfying path for it, doubled in or retrofit of eyedrive, let us look at it this way, you wanna swap your phone somewhere where it is in a good solid mount but legal, which means basically not in the windshield in most jurisdictions.
Luckily for you, an '05 5 series does have a PanaVise mount made for it, and I like these mounts.
They're bent metal that are really sturdy.
They **** down into your dash but require no cutting and hacking.
We've got one in the Crown Victoria And it's a really good mount, especially if you add a separately purchased magnet to it.
And then slap a steel plate on the back of your phone case, and that easily just sticks right there, holds really well, and you just snag it when you get out of the car.
Then, also get a good FM Modulator to get your video calls and streaming over to your car.
We did a video on this, a how-to Few months ago you can check out at Cnet on cars.com.
I don't normally recommend specific products, but the one that we used in that particular video really stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Most FM modulators are crap, this one is actually really good.
It will give you a nice audio channel and now we've got the audio and the mount both covered.
That's kind of the best way you can go with a car that is never going to have car play supported in it from BMW or Apple.
