Before we get to the bike mounting part, I first wanted to correct one minor problem with buying an older vehicle. Specifically, the lack of a radio that can do Apple CarPlay. My Tiguan has CarPlay and after a few years of using it, both on long trips, and for day to day driving around, I can’t imagine having a car without it. Thankfully, there are lots of aftermarket stereos available that can do CarPlay and so it was a matter of picking one from crutchfield.com and then bugging my buddy Mike W. to help me get it installed. He made the mistake of sharing all of his car stereo installation prowess on social media, so of course I had to take advantage of his knowledge (and of course, it was fun to hang out again after so long).

I choose a Boss BV800ACP deck and headed over to Mike’s for an evening of learning how to connect a wiring harness. I was expecting a lot of soldering, however Mike had just picked up these neat solder connection tubes that you slip over one end of the wire, connect the wires and then slide the tube over the connection. You then heat it up with a heat gun and it both melts the solder onto the wires and secures the tube by heat-shrinking over it. Needless to say, these little gizmo’s saved us a ton of time and headache, and before we knew it the harness was ready. We brought it over to the car and tested it out (before fitting) and sure enough it worked.

The next step was to slightly modify the brackets inside the dash to accommodate a double DIN size deck. Using a tinsnips Mike was able to quickly remove the unneeded sections and the deck slid in to place. After a few fitting sessions we were ready to put everything together. It took some finagling of brackets but eventually everything snapped in to place.

We cleaned up and I thanked Mike again and headed home. The CarPlay interface worked exactly like it was supposed to, except for one minor issue. For some reason when making phone calls using CarPlay, the person on the other end of the line can hear themselves. However, if I use the Bluetooth interface, they can’t. There’s something weird going on with this, and it’s very frustrating. I’ve tried moving the microphone but it still has the issue. Crutchfield has been great through this and they did their best to see if there were firmware updates or other fixes that might work. However, I might need to take them up on their 60 day exchange policy. Thankfully a lot of the fitting work is already done, and just re-wiring a new harness should be simple.

In the meantime, until I decide to make the exchange, it’s been great having a full featured deck in the van. We took a trip last weekend and it worked perfectly for listening to music or navigating. Just like CarPlay should work.

Next up, I promise, I’ll talk about the bike mounting system.