2008 Town & Country

if i was a cop i would be well versed in my states laws on vehicle modifications. as long as folks were nice i would be nice. but the minute they started getting rude and beligerent i would start looking for mods just to teach them some manners. in georgia the law specifically states that a truck cannot be lifted any more than 2" over stock. a cop with an attitude could park 25% of the trucks our hillbilly town on a whim. michael

I forgot all about Alldata, the FSM is $395.00 which I think is just a little over priced!

Yep, I broke a class three hitch last year. A guy pulled up along side of me to say it didn't look right (on the freeway) I touched the brake and boom the trailer hit me. Sucks when the safety changs are hooked to the hitch and the hitch brakes free!

true, also many states now have "distraction laws" intened to apply to cel phones and such but can be used to cover any type of distraction to the driver including unruley passengers.

Ouch!! That had to suck.

I guess the biggest reason I have a negative attitude towards this is due to the can-bus system on the van. All modules are on the bus and info flows freely. I'm just supposing here and have no way to know if this is correct so here goes.....You power up the camera when it's not supposed to have power. It puts this info on the bus. Other modules see this info when nothing is supposed to be there and gets confused (for lack of better word) and do something strange. Take the radio for instance, I don't know if the back-up picture will be displayed when it gets the signal or not. The radio my have to have a bus message from the pcm that the van is in reverse before it'll show the screen. I know, this is all kinda far-fetched but I run into this kind of stuff on occasion when people try to modify the electronics on the newer vehicles to get them to work the way they want them to instead of the way they were designed.

Denny (Don't get me started on lock-up converters or remote starts..)

Luckly I was on concrete so the tung didn't dig in and polevault. Everything went down and under the bumper and I rode it to a stop. Makes me worry about the safety chain setup as they were still connect to the hitch that broke freefrom the uprites.

Actually the camera talks directly to the radio then the radio talks with the bus. The module from

goes between the bus and radio. It works great and I now have an 1 additional audio/video input to the radio (I plan an HD receiver in the near future) one more video input I guess for another camera if I wanted and a video output should I want to drive another screen. Also I get a connection that allows for an aftermarket blue tooth interface. I doubt I'll really use all the features but the technology is cool.

Didn't someone mention isolating the power feed with a diode? ;-)

Yup, like over here in Louisiana, if you hang a CD, necklace, etc. from your mirror, you can get a ticket because it blinds the car in front of you when the sun hits it and bounces back into their eyes.... This moron drove to where I work at and had this necklace with lots of mirrored like squares on it.... "Bling-Bling" just the perfect thing to get a ticket!

Don't those hitches have ratings for how many pounds of towing capicty they're rated for? Or was this hitch so old and rusty that it could no longer hold its rated capacity?

As I interpret the above, there is NO prohibition about modifying a vehicle. All the above states is that the original safety equipment, including lights etc must be in good operating condition. You are reading too much into it.

Doug

Yes - but Denny apparently was assuming that the bus communicated directly with the camera. If that were true (which, from what others are saying, is not), it would be hard to fool the bus into not knowing whether the camera was powered up or not.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

It was a 3500lb class III hitch on a 2003 Chrysler Town & Country and no rust was involved. The square cross tube broke loose from the 1/4 thick vertical pieces.

Doug, i snipped a lot of the other stuff. the key to this code is the sentence i left this time. the "improperly equipped" and "violations of chapter" statements refer you back to the preponderence of codes covering modifications to vehicles. this chapter includes lifts, fog lights, and all kinds of modifictions. i chose not to post the entire chapter, you can google it if you want. if you dig down into all the applicable codes in georgia, many common modifications are illegal. michael