2008 Smart Car

 

Scott and his wife were in town looking for some upgrades for their Smart Car.  Scott is a super cool fellow and we hit it off immediately.  We recommended some Kenwood and Hertz equipment for his Smart Car.

Here's what Scott's car looked like inside the installation bay.  I'll bet we could fit about 30 of these things inside our shop, or perhaps 15 with enough space to work on each one, doors and hatch wide open!

Here's a picture of the original dash layout and factory door speakers.  To change the door speakers we removed the outer door skins and did a whole bunch of clearance checking to replace the really shallow, low quality factory speakers with some Hertz DCX165 speakers.

   

The outer skin of the tailgate was removed so that we could install the Kenwood backup camera near the license plate and route cabling properly into the car.

Here's a picture of the final dash layout.  Note the Smart logo that we loaded onto the unit for a startup screen.  Yeeha.  We installed this Kenwood double din DNX7120 model 7" motorized touchscreen unit with built in navigation and Ipod integration.  The backup camera comes up automatically when the gear shifter is placed in reverse.  You can also view the backup camera input while driving forward by pressing and holding one of the Kenwood unit's buttons for a few seconds.  Now Scott has AM/FM/CD/DVD/IPod and Garmin based navigation.  The door speakers and new indash unit make much better sound than the factory setup, and the dash parts and wiring harness adapter made for a complete reversible headunit installation.

Here's one last shot of the car parked in the bay while we worked our magic.  Thanks again Scott!  Scott is such a cool cat that he also did a write up of the installation at our shop with pictures and flattering commentary on one of the Smart Car online forums.  Yowza!

(Porsche, Porsche 911, and 911 are all trademarks of Porsche Cars North America, no affiliation or endorsement is intended)