It went surprisingly well!

Doing anything outside of my own oil changes to our Prius has always been intimidating to me. It’s our only vehicle in the family by choice, so we rely heavily on it. To cause it to have problems by my own actions would be unfortunate to say the least. When the dash was all taken apart I definitely had a few Oh shit, what am I doing moments…, but I just took my time, read the instructions that Crutchfield sent and everything worked perfectly. Even the wizardry of the aftermarket steering wheel control doohickey that allowed me to retain volume, seek, and Siri control worked without any fiddling. And, to top it all off, the install itself came out super clean with none of it looking janky or out of place. (Biggest of the sighs of relief)

All told the installation took about 3.5 hours. With some more confidence I probably could’ve lopped an hour off of that total.

Aside from wanting to do more smallish projects in 2020, I swapped out the unit mainly to add CarPlay and wow what an upgrade that is! I never witnessed how CarPlay worked in earlier iOS versions, but with iOS13.1 its really solid. The sound (and control of the output of sound) is better, the interface is a joy to use, the screen is way more responsive than the factory unit, it’s got all the previous input methods and more! The only thing we lost was the CD player and we literally have never used that in the 6 years we’ve owned this car.

So if you are looking for a little project over the weekend I highly recommend it!