Sat-Nav power in some newer cars

maggy_thatcher

Hi,

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't see it.

I've been looking at buying a new (to me) car, and noticed that a lot of cars lately have opted to put the power socket behind the gear-lever. I recently rented a Fiat Punto like that, and found that I was continually knocking the cable out of the sat-nav as I changed gear!

Cars I've looked at include the Audi A3, the Honda Civic and the aforementioned Punto. I haven't gone as far as taking them all for a test-drive yet, so I don't know how close they'd end up being...I'm mainly relying on pictures.

Should I simply not consider these cars as good cars to have a sat-nav with, or is there an easy way to re-route the cables so as to not knock it every time I change gear?

Suggestions would be much appreciated!

R.O.R

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

Hi,

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't see it.

I've been looking at buying a new (to me) car, and noticed that a lot of cars lately have opted to put the power socket behind the gear-lever. I recently rented a Fiat Punto like that, and found that I was continually knocking the cable out of the sat-nav as I changed gear!

Cars I've looked at include the Audi A3, the Honda Civic and the aforementioned Punto. I haven't gone as far as taking them all for a test-drive yet, so I don't know how close they'd end up being...I'm mainly relying on pictures.

Should I simply not consider these cars as good cars to have a sat-nav with, or is there an easy way to re-route the cables so as to not knock it every time I change gear?

Suggestions would be much appreciated!

If you really like the car, and will be keeping it (and the Sat Nav) for a while, any decent phone kit installer should be able to hard wire a Sat Nav power cable in behind the dash, so it doesn't need plugging in to the lighter socket.

langdang

R.O.R wrote: »

If you really like the car, and will be keeping it (and the Sat Nav) for a while, any decent phone kit installer should be able to hard wire a Sat Nav power cable in behind the dash, so it doesn't need plugging in to the lighter socket.

Yes, this is very easy.
What some guys would do is snip off one end of your sat nav power cable and splice into the cig lighter, or radio etc, power.
What I would suggest is keeping your sat nav cable all in one piece so you can transfer to another car easily ( car on loan, going on hols etc).
Get someone to wire in a second cigarette lighter socket out of site somewhere that you can plug your satnav cable into.

(You can get parts for this for a few yoyos from hongkong or somewhere on ebay, or pay probably about a tenner for parts here, dunno what a fair charge would be for doing the work tho)

JHMEG

The other thing is many modern cars have two or more "cigarette lighter" sockets. Civic for example has two in the centre console and one in the boot.

maggy_thatcher

JHMEG wrote: »

The other thing is many modern cars have two or more "cigarette lighter" sockets. Civic for example has two in the centre console and one in the boot.

The two sockets on the Civic -- are they easily accessible to stick things on the dashboard? Presumably I'm not the only person who has bumped into this issue (or do I just use the gear-stick wrong ?)

colm_mcm

12v power sockets can be bought quite cheaply and hard wired in minutes.