How is a 12 V battery still being at 12.1 V after 10 days of drain by my dashcam a "40% charge"?
I had never seen that table before; very cool. I'm going on a similar trip soon. I will measure again when I get back after not using for 10+ days of not being plugged in and the dashcam drawing down power the whole time.
Charging the 12V Battery
Your vehicle has a high voltage to low
voltage energy transfer feature that keeps
the 12 volt battery charged by the high
voltage battery. If the 12 volt battery level
is low, the high voltage battery transfers
energy to the 12 volt battery when the
vehicle is off.
Rather than starting another thread, I'll just post here how I chose to run the wires.
The MME was by far the easiest car I did this on. For power, I ripped apart the 12V USB power adapter that came with my dashcam and soldered a piece of paper clip, and tapped into the mirror, and tucked the USB adapter in the void behind the sunglasses holder.
For the rear camera cable, I just ran the cable straight back around the headliner. This took me all 2 minutes to run. Have a look at the pictures below. Some of the headliner fasteners are magnetic which makes working on this car a snap. The areas I found the magnetic fasteners are above the sunglasses holder, above the rear seats in the center, around the passenger's side rear seat grab handle, and at the rear by the hatch opening. You simply grab and pull down without much force, and no risk of breaking those fragile plastic fasteners. The only real tricky part was running the rear camera cable through the rubber grommet because it's very tight in there but I managed. The trick is to lubricate the wire and your fish tape (I just used a length of weed whacker string) when pulling.
Gps was not important for me so I never checked.
I am using a Uniden R3. I get a GPS signal intermittently.
Awesome write up.This is a lengthy tutorial with photos showing how I added my dash cam and radar detector to my Mach-E
A few points before we get started:
- While this is not a difficult project, it is not for the faint of heart. Messing with a brand new car could potentially void your warranty or cause more serious problems.
- There are sharp metal edges behind all of the pretty stuff - wear gloves!
- This is my fifth or sixth vehicle doing similar upgrades. The rest were 2 BMW's, an Audi, a Tesla model S, and 2 Subarus. This car was by far the easiest to do but that also could be because I have more experience.
- Never pry plastic panels with a screwdriver. Either use your fingers or a simple plastic pry set similar to this one on Amazon:
- When you do pry these plastic components with your fingers or a pry tool, occasionally the little plastic retaining clips may break. While you can buy these from Ford, AutoZone sells them in bunches of three or four at half the price. I found out the hard way that Tesla was charging large sums of money for clips that I could easily have purchased for a Subaru at less than $.50 a pop.
Obtaining switched and constant 12 V power
The radar detector needs a switched 12 V power supply and the dash cam needs both a switched 12 V supply and a constant 12 V supply to record problems while the car is parked. In previous vehicles, I had no trouble finding both switched and constant power somewhere in the overhead mirror compartment but could only find switched on this car.
I also do not like to overly strain the built-in wires. When possible, I prefer to run new circuits from the fuse box up to the windshield to power both toys. That is what I did in this case. There is a fuse box behind the passenger kick panel. With a little experimentation, I found high capacity circuits of both types. Page 278 of the owners manual will show you how to remove that kick plate.
From page 279 of the owners manual:
While I previously would simply tap into an existing wire, I like my toys to have their own fuses in case something goes wrong. I recently started using these "add a tap" products to make tapping-in easier and safer. The existing fuse gets moved into the bottom slot and a new 2.5 amp fuse goes to my toys.
The physically smaller fuse it is called a Micro 2 and the larger one is called a Micro 3.
Here are the links for the add-a-taps:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082YZWSSY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R8R2T7T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I normally have extra three conductor wire around the house however I had to purchase some for this project. I normally like 20 gauge wire but somehow accidentally bought 22 gauge wire. This is definitely capable of carrying enough power for these two small devices.
Routing Wires
I was able to easily route this wire up towards the mirror housing. First I removed this side panel using a small plastic pry tool. It is held on by six plastic clips:
Next, I carefully pried off the A column cover with the pry tools. There is an airbag in here. Any wires you run must go behind the airbag. I prefer to zip tie them to ensure they do not fall in front of the airbag.
I next removed the cover over the mirror housing. I did this with gentle finger pressure pulling downward to release the 5 clips.
Next, I connected the appropriate switched power to my radar detector, switched and constant to the dash cam plug and both to negative. I prefer to solder all wires and cover with shrink wrap tubing. I also have serious OCD therefore labeled everything however in this picture you cannot read the labels because they are facing away from you. Red is constant, green is switched and the white is my negative.
I almost forgot, speaking about the negative lead, I could not find a good metal anchoring point anywhere in that fuse box. Everything is plastic in there. Therefore, I found a nice piece of steel in that side compartment below the A column. There were two round holes. I took a metal machine screw, washer and nut and fastened the raw white wire directly to that piece of the frame. Again, with the OCD, I used thread locker liquid on the bolt to ensure it never came loose accidentally.
At this point, I connected the red and green leads to the add-a-taps below in the fuse box, plugged everything in, and made sure everything worked as I expected with the car on and off.
Connection to Rear Camera
The next step was to run the video lead to the rear camera. Fortunately, the ceiling liner is not strongly attached to the roof as in the other cars I had to work on. Simply pull down gently using a pry tool to work under the rubber gasket. Going between the front and rear doors around the B column required a little work. Instead of using my fish tape, I took a small diameter wire hanger to thread the wire through. Once the wire hanger is visible on both ends, I simply used electrical tape and pulled it through. Note: I could not pry the B column cover off easily and didn't want to risk breaking anything. Likewise, going to the trunk, the plastic holding the liner in place felt too sturdy and I simply used fish tape to pull the wire all the way into the trunk.
To make the job as neat as possible, I also pried off the plastic cover noted in the photo above. It is held on by six retaining clips. I then mounted the rear camera as high up as possible on the window.
Normally, I would run the wire to the rear camera through the "boot" between the main compartment and the hatch. This is the first car that I was not able to do so. The boot is sufficiently deep under the liner and into the hatch, that no amount of manipulation with fish tape would let me get a string through there. Therefore, I will have that little bit of wire hanging down between the liner and the hatch on the right side but it is not visible when I look in the rearview mirror.
Once that was done, it was simply a matter of putting everything back together. The only difficult part was getting the A column to sit properly. Work slowly. There is a vent built into that column that has to be seated at the base in order for the column to fit properly.
The final result:
Please write with any questions. I am happy to help out anyone trying a similar project.
Jeff
Ok. I moved the dash cam to the side of the mirror/sensor housing instead of below it and the GPS now works fine.
Yes a guy did it, it is somewhere here in the forum he said it was the easiest install he ever did. He said he used a weed wacker string
