The infotainment systems in modern cars are pretty amazing. Now why do we call them infotainment systems? Well info for information, tainment for the entertainment they give us. But they are very different from anything that we have had in the past.

See in the past we had a radio, such as we have here. May have some features built into it, may have some auxiliary things and so on. But it was self-contained. You pulled it out and put a new one in that had the features that you wanted and that was it.

Well that may not work these days. You see, because what we have here, this might look like the unit, but what it actually is is a screen. It’s like a monitor that you would have for your computer or anything else. Controls are down here in a separate module and there are probably other modules located around the car that work into this and supply information to it and give you the ability to control various things.

So, in situations like this, what you may be able to do, you might be able to add some information systems to it, maybe you want to add a backup camera or something like that. That can usually be done. One of the things, if you do have a system where you can change it over, make sure that it is compatible with steering wheel controls, if your car has steering wheel controls. And you have to go through all of these different things.

One thing that you can do on just about any car, and that is upgrade the speakers, which on a lot of these basic systems, that of and by itself will be like an upgrade to the whole system. So you have to do your homework. You probably can do something, but you may not be able to do all that you want without spending a ton of money. And if you have a question or a comment, drop me a line right here at MotorWeek.