04 Saturn Ion aftermarket headunit

A customer of mine (tint....I don't do 12v) wants to throw a headunit into his new to him 04 Ion.

He was told by a stereo shop that the factory headunit has to be relocated and still attached for the stuff to work.

I can't find diddly on google for some odd reason (a first for me). Will he? Does he? How does he? Just pay someone else to do it because it's that hard?

there are some vehicles out there like that, I know honda was one of them in mid/late 90's that you had to do that as you would loose keyless entry/door locks and your dome light was also run through the radio way to do shiat but thats MFG. for ya

I have not done one, but what we used to do on the Hondas was stuff it behind the dash (under) the other new deck and make all of the connections T-Tapping off of the factory harness

hmmmm, interesting.

The vehicle's door chime (and in some cases) the databus runs through the factory head unit. I believe if you loose the head unit on that rig all you loose is the door chime. On the rigs with onstar you will also loose onstar.

There are adaptors available to install rather than keeping the factory head unit.. but they are pretty spendy.

So how would he go about keeping it?

T-taps?

Does it still need power or does the wiring just need to be intact?

darkdan does the ion have onstar . If it does you will lose more than a door chime if it does not have onstar or gm lan then all you have to buy is a wire harness to hook it up . part # bha2102 you can get it at http://www.bestkits.com/default.aspx you can also find the parts at this same website if it has onstar and or gm lan . Im sure they have a dealer locator on the site .

Sweet!

His is a base model so there's no OnStar or anything fancy.

Manual windows and all!

=)

He refused to pay the extra $3000 for a CD player, power windows, and sunroof.

Dan i dont know if you already done this or not but Lan = local area network

what that means is if you take out a radio that is in the network you can cause alot of problems with everything else in the car's electronics.

If it does not have onstar then you will be fine with just the wireing harnes that will hook up to the factory plug in the dash and wire to the aftermarket radio .

No need to keep the factory radio hooked up to make everything work .


If it had onstar you would have to get two diff. wire harness and keep the factory radio. you would have to move it to the trunk and extend the wires all the way back because the factory radio is a double din or a din and a half so it would be too large to tuck in the dash behind the aftermarket radio

yes they have bypass mods for that check ip products for it 631 588 0600