I'm looking to buy a nearly new Fiesta for my wife from a car supermarket. Its unlikely that it will come with the reversing sensors she wants. They normally come as part of an option pack.
How much would it cost to have an aftermarket sensor kit fitted professionally and would they look just as neat as the Ford ones?
I fitted one to my Rover, cost about £15 and it looks and works works just fine. I've read that some people say they have had problems in the wet but I've never had any such issues. Took at most a couple of hours to fit, so I guess that's about what a garage would charge.
I probably could find exactly what I'm looking for somewhere (i.e. Ford Direct) but the price would be up to £2k more than the supermarket prices. I reckon I could get a sensor kit fitted professionally for £200. The car supermarket spec is exactly what we want, apart from the reversing sensors.
Generic sensor kits are cheap and easy enough to fit, depending on accessibility. It's the looking the same as the factory one that might be more difficult - unless Ford do a kit for this.
I'm just about to do this on my wife's car, however I've gone for doing it myself and replacing the stereo and storage space below with a DVD player with inbuilt screen and then putting a camera on the tailgate.
The main difficulties I forsee are finding the handbrake and reversing light switches to connect them in.
I've had a car with a reversing camera and found it far better than sensors. I could position my towball millimetres from the car behind in a supermarket car-park. Better still, I could see my trailer for reversing - normally it's too low and narrow and only becomes visible once it is way off line.
As it is also a DVD player and visible to the driver, it legally must only play DVDs when the vehicle is stationary. I wouldn't be suprised if this became part of the MOT at some point, so it's worth connecting it rather than just grounding it.
The camera will connect to the reversing light wire at the rear of the car, but the DVD player also needs a signal to tell it to switch to the camera feed. It will probably be easier to run a wire from the reversing light switch than to try and access the loom to split out that wire or to run an extra wire from the rear of the car.
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