It all started back in the year 2000. The new Prius Hybrid was on the back cover of the white pages phone book and I showed my parents because I knew they were interested in electric vehicles, and if they could have bought an EV they would have, but this was the closest thing in production that was available in Canada at the time. They ordered a white 2001 Prius to replace their white 1991 Plymouth Colt (Mitsubishi) and they love it. They took it on a camping trip across Canada, including mountain bikes, equivalent to an average year of normal driving. There haven't been any problems with it so far, a recall for the original tires and a service bulletin for the hybrid battery to have it's positive terminals re-sealed have been the only signs of trouble with this vehicle.
In 2005 my best friend totalled his
2003 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V in a bad accident that had him in the hospital for quite a while. I helped convice him to get a generation two Prius as a replacement, primarily on the grounds of fuel economy (and gas was only $0.64/l at the time), but also because of the advanced technology. It offers
just enough performance to be a fun car to drive, similar to a v6 off the line, but with the fuel economy in your face it's actually more fun and more of a challenge to play the fuel consumption game and see how low you can get it. The great thing about a Prius is that even if you completely ignore the extra info and drive like a moron, you'll still be using way less gas than any ordinary vehicle driven that way. It didn't take long though, as usual, to get tired of the stock stereo, even this one, the premium JBL 9-speaker package with a 6 disc in-dash CD changer, really didn't sound all that great compared to previous installs we had done. Time for upgrades!
We started with just the speakers, unplugging the center speaker made it sound a little better, then we got a used pair of Rockford Fosgate 6.5 inch woofers and tweeters, supposedly $900 new, for $200. We installed them, but the stock JBL amplifier just wasn't powerful enough to drive them at anywhere near the sound level from the stock speakers. The next step was to install proper amplifiers, and while we're at it put a subwoofer in as well.
This took a bit of planning because we also wanted to install a computer as well, so space was left available for it on the board in the rear compartment. This setup worked quite well, the audio from the JBL amplifier was sent through a line-level converter and fed into an active crossover where low and high pass outputs are fed to the subwoofer amplifier and the front speaker amplifier. The new speakers were making some strange harmonic buzzing sounds when certain notes were played and seemed to lack mid-bass response, so we removed them and put the stock speakers back in which were not as sharp sounding, but still pretty decent. After a while it was time to tackle the computer install, the most important piece being the LCD touchscreen. In
previous installs we had used the classic Xenarc model with the stock small desk stand, but there was no place suitable for such an installation in the Prius, so the newly introduced Xenarc standard car stereo sized fold-out screen was ordered. There is an extra compartment under the stock stereo of the Prius that can fit a normal stereo, so we figured that the screen would fit without a problem. Nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems, it took a lot of fussing to get the screen in properly, and we had to cut some dash plastic to make it fit, plus it has to stick out quite a lot so that the screen is in the correct position when it's open, so the cover for the compartment had to be removed as well. Fortunately it didn't look too bad, it's visible when put away, but doesn't stand out too much, the more stock it looks when parked, the better.
Connecting the computer was the next consideration, we had planned on putting the computer in the rear compartment, but this would have required long extension cables for the screen and the heat may have been a problem in the enclosed compartment, so since the wires from the screen reached under the driver's seat by going down the floor channel we decided to install the computer there. For this install we decided to go with a 12v PSU instead of a 120v inverter and normal PSU, primarily for space considerations but also the 12v PSU allows for automated power on and off based on the state of the car. We used the same computer motherboard, an HP Celeron 666 that we had been using in the Sentra, it ran all the software fine and could play MPEG4 video files and was reliable even when hot. It was a fairly compact motherboard for being a normal ATX board, but ITX boards are much smaller and we knew that this board would be a temporary situation until a better board could be bought, so we mounted it to some fiber board so it would stay wedged under the seat. With the seat all the way back the computer can't be seen.
(...to be continued...)
