sirish19

Hi, I am new to the forum. I live in Japan and have just traded in my 2010 Cayenne for a 2013 model that I will take delivery on in a few days. The Porsche dealer has given me a 2012 Cayenne S as a loaner until my car is ready. Will post more on my build with pics after I take delivery but in the meantime, I had a question about the backup camera.

In Japan, Porsche takes out the PCM and puts in a Clarion navigation system as standard. My previous car didn't have an OEM backup camera so I added the Clarion camera and the picture quality was great during day and night. What I am finding with the loaner (and hearing repeatedly on this forum) is that the OEM backup camera is very poor quality. In Japan, we often park in pretty tight quarters and it rains a lot here so a high quality camera is really essential.

I am curious to hear if anyone has had experience replacing the OEM camera with something aftermarket. I suspect it would be quite easy to do on my car if I go with the Clarion camera that is compatible with the Navigation system. Any thoughts?

Cheers.

steph280

No experience with the swap, but I'd think you'll loose a lot of configuration capability if you get rid of the PCM, such as setting the clock.

sirish19

Thanks for the reply. Actually, Porsche doesn't deliver any cars in Japan with the PCM so every car comes with an aftermarket navigation system which controls audio, phone (via bluetooth), and navigation. I am sure it has to do with needing to have a Japanese language Navigation.

The biggest downside of not having PCM, as far as I know, is that there is no visual indicator with the front/rear parking assist. With my previous car, there was a small indicator on the dash for front and just above the rear window for back parking assist that gave you a visual indication as to how close an object was. With the current model, they have taken that out altogether so all we get is the audible indication.

With the OEM backup camera, it seems to be built into some rubber housing and I assume that the Clarion camera might not fit in perfectly so just wondering how they might deal with that.

sirish19

Also, sadly, they don't put the clock on the dash on the cars for Japan (even for the 2013 models) but I believe that it can be added with the sports chrono package.

steve_Cayenne

Hmmm ...

I always found the auto industry, and Porsche is NO exception ... totally lagging the mobile phone industry in displays / touch screens, user interface, usability, style paradigms and graphics, supported standards, etc. etc. etc.

In their defence it is not the core of their product, and they need to start designing it 2 years before a new car model is released, and leave it pretty well alone for the 4 or 8 year cycle ... for QA and certification reasons among others. Hence you may be buying 10 year old technology brand new!

Consumer devices can be re-designed every 6 months on the other hand, and very rapidly evolve.

All the rambling being said, first I have heard of basically outsourcing this important part to a "consumer devices" company, and installing them in at Point Of Sale ... do you have any links to the Clarion system, even if in Japanese for 2011+?

I am very curious, if it is a step up, or amateur night! And if it feels like a standalone aftermarket unit, or if they did a deep integration: I.e. Park distance, compass, steering wheel control, trip stuff, buttons match, synched with instruments dial display, etc.

sirish19

While the exact model that they use is Porsche is not consumer available, this is pretty much what they use:

http://www.clarion.com/jp/ja/product...527508368.html

I have not used the PCM system but my guess is that the Clarion is a huge step up. The Navigation, audio, video capabilities are excellent with full touch screen/voice control capabilities. It integrates very well with the rear entertainment system in two zones for HD TV, DVD, or other Aux input (I have a little WD Media player connected with 500 GB HD attached so basically have all of my video library in the car at all times), steering wheel control, etc. It also had a hard drive feature that stores music from every CD you put in the CD player, SD card, etc. It doesn't support all of the integration with the car itself such as syncing with instruments, doesn't have navi screen on the instrument panel, log book, trip,parking assist, etc.

steve_Cayenne

Thanks.

So looks like a step up from the sorely bland "orange & white" Porsche UI, but not quite iPad level refinement and elegance of UX. Too bad some of the functional deep integration points are missing though, vs the OE system.

sirish19

Exactly. Quick update, I did talk to te dealer today and he suggested playing with the color and contrast settings a bit first but thought it would be possible to change to the aftermarket camera if I wanted to. Will keep you posted on how it goes.

hahnmgh63

Interesting, here is the closest N.A. unit that I could find from Clarion, and only $731 from Amazon, makes you think about it a little doesn't it?

http://www.clarion.com/us/en/product...559423434.html

Yukio&958

and the official MSRP is 1,199.99 USD, WTF

steve_Cayenne

And Porsche charges almost US$4K to upgrade from the CDR to the PCM which basically adds:
- Navigation
- USB audio
- A2DP Bluetooth for stereo.
- DVD compatible vs CD drive.
... as far as end-user functionality is concerned.

And they get back the CDR system that was included in the base price!

Ok, I am being half funny here, but if you buy a $99 Garmin, a $30 bluetooth music headsets, and a $50 DVD player ... would you not have all the additional chipsets and parts needed to upgrade the CDR base unit? I can't help but imagine having a "crippled" version, adds so much to the engineering, manufacturing, and configuration complexity that it would be cheaper to just have the PCM standard! And then they still need a 3rd unit for the Japanese market, no doubt because they culturally demand better techno-gadgetry! BTW, I checked the language option on my cayenne, and it did seem to have Japanese as an option on top of Chinese (at least the characters resembled Japanese to me, could be mistaken).

Yukio&958

where did you check for the language option(I havent got my car yet but I did see chinese on my wife's tiguan)

steve_Cayenne

From vague photographic memory:

On instrument panel display, under vehicle settings, display, languages ...

With car set to english, over a dozen languages are listed in english spelling and characters, except for one in Asian looking characters (resembles Japanese), and Chinese is listed in English and switches to Chinese characters if selected.

sirish19

Yes, that is most likely the Japanese setting for the car's basic instrumentation. To add Japanese to all of the audio & video settings, not to mention the navigation itself, they really do need to put in a Japanese specific navigation system. I think it works well except for a few small minor integration issues.

sirish19

I took delivery on the car yesterday so wanted to post a quick pic of the Clarion Navigation system so you guys can see how it fits.

This is actually a newer version than the one I had sent a link to in an earlier post. That was the one that they had in the loaner which was a 2012 Cayenne. Here is the new link (http://www.clarion.com/jp/ja/product...558322757.html). The UI is much cleaner and easy to use. One major problem is that they eliminated the two-zone function so I can no longer separate the audio and video source between the front seat navigation and the rear seat entertainment system. Now I need to figure out a new way to be able to listen to the stereo while the kids watch videos in the back. Thinking just to give them my old iPhone (just ordered the 5) to use as a video source to connect to the entertainment system.